Chat

Send text and images. Discuss with various people in decentralized chat rooms (like IRC). Express your emotions with the rich smiley set. Use distant chat to securely chat with friends-of-friends.

**Mail

Send encrypted messages to other members of the network. Retroshare securely stores messages on friends’ nodes to deliver messages while you’re offline.

**File sharing

Share files with your friends or with the whole network. Use the search to find files. Retroshare uses swarming similar to BitTorrent, to accelerate transfers. This makes it possible to share large files. Your privacy and anonymity is guaranteed beyond direct friends with anonymous tunnels.

**Forums

You can read and write forum posts offline. This is perfect while you’re on the go. When you have an Internet connection, Retroshare will automatically sync forums with your friends. Decentralized forums are censorship resistant by design.

**Boards

Share your favorite pictures or links. See which pictures or links others like. Vote and discuss them using the built-in commenting system.

**Channels

Channels allow you to publish your files. You may subscribe to channels and automatically download the latest files; comment on files and spread them to your friends.

**Protect your IP with Tor/I2P

Retroshare can optionally be used over the Tor and I2P networks. Doing so, even friend nodes cannot see your IP, which allows to safely and anonymously connect to unknown people.

While it is always possible to configure a normal Retroshare node to also use Tor, we provide specific builds that embed and manage Tor automatically, to ease things up. This is an excellent way to safely try the software while connecting to untrusted users.

Voice and Video (Experimental Prototype)

Make free and secure calls with the VoIP plugin. Catch up face to face with a video call.