@wizardyuuka
it seems cool, but there's a mess of little things

whoever takes care of the wikipedia article has lots of fun:

> As of June 2023, according to the sources used to populate the table below, there was only one actively maintained desktop client[31] in existence, authored by a presumably Russian developer.[32]
> According to their Stack Overflow and Gitlab accounts,[33][34] they were at some point an employee of a Russian company which supplied CCTV hardware and traffic cameras to various police departments around the Russia.[35][36]

also from there:

> During the first two years of its life, the project's business and monetary side was handled by Tox Foundation, a California-registered corporation.[19] On July 6, 2015 an issue was open on the project's GitHub, where a third party stated[20] that Tox Foundation's sole board member, Sean Qureshi, used an amount of money in thousands of US dollars to pay for their college tuition,[21] with those funds coming from Tox Foundation's participation in Google Summer of Code.

there's been a prominent crypto issue deemed "Key Compromise Impersonation” (KCI) noted since 2017 and apparently getting fixed now, for eurobux no less:

https://blog.tox.chat/2023/03/redesign-of-toxs-cryptographic-handshake/
> He applied for funding at NLnet foundation and their NGI Assure fund to continue his work on Tox and to be able to implement a production-ready Noise-based handshake for toxcore. Fortunately, this application was successful [5]. NGI Assure is made possible with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme (https://ngi.eu/).

if you do wanna try tox, you will note that the long time flagship client is marked archived on github: https://github.com/qTox/qTox

for android clients, there's a vomit-inducing one with features and a great one with no features to pick from. the protocol seems to shit the bed if you connect from two locations, so in either case these are of questionable use.

I've yet to inspect the landscape on desktop, I bet the unmaintained clients are useful anyway. So far it seems like a good auxilary way to connect with people, since it *can* do audio, video, chat, all over p2p so can't ever die.

I'll probably never get a person to use this thing, anyone reading tox me if you care: E2C9882607464184835EC51A4AFEF5362403D73658F94E4E2D7A78086E5A9617FE7D892DEA4C