What is RetroShare? and Why another Peer to Peer Network?

RetroShare is the next generation sharing network, which provides:

  • A Private Peer to Peer Network which allows you to share information with only the people you want to.
  • Reliable Identification and Authentication of your friends.
  • Plus an Introduction Scheme which connects you to the friends of your friends, and facilitates network growth.
  • Encrypted Communication, ensuring all shared information is known only to you and your peers.
  • A Communication Platform which can potentially support services such as Secure Email, File Sharing, Video or Voice over IP and Messaging
  • A Decentralised Social Sharing Network designed **For the People**
    with no dependancies on any corporate system or central servers.

The problem with existing filesharing networks is that you have no control over who you share information with. I don't want to share with the whole wide world, but I would love to share stuff with my friends. But this is not easy to do, safely and securely, over the Internet.


Current filesharing systems also suffer from bad quality of downloadable information. Often the filenames do not correspond to what you actualy get. You are getting (potentially random) information from a collection of random people. I want to share good information with, and only with, the people I trust.


RetroShare is my solution to these problems: A simple filesharing program which connects you and your friends together for safe and secure sharing.


I have put months of work into transforming RetroShare from a random idea, into a working system. It is now time to share this program, and the ideas behind, with the world...


Dr Bob, 06/01/06



Retroshare Status

Retroshare development is still active, with ever growing numbers of developers and users. At this point (April 2009) we've had over 50,000 downloads, and are soon to release version v0.4.13.

This is no longer the retroshare home page. The responsibility for running that has been handed over to other members of the retroshare development team and the site is now hosted by sourceforge.net:

Retroshare Pictorial Overview