Who may enter the network
Quasar Messenger is a closed network for registered users. Guests and anonymous nodes cannot access peer discovery, relays, delivery or shard storage.
A person's identity is their account at www.quasargen.com. Every device creates its key locally, registers the public part with the account and enters the Mesh with a Quasar-signed credential. The private key is not uploaded to the website and is not derived from the account password.
www-prod stores accounts, device associations, public keys, revocations and access rights, but not plaintext, private keys or complete conversation history. During a temporary website outage, previously trusted devices may continue operating until their credentials expire; new login and device enrolment require the trust authority.
How it works when both people are online
- The devices establish a direct, secured connection.
- The message or file goes straight to the recipient.
- History is kept only on the devices of the people in the conversation.
- The server helps find the other person and bring the devices together, but never receives plain text.
When the recipient is offline
A conversation should not depend on whose computer happens to be switched on. So the message does not wait on a server — it spreads across the network:
- The message is encrypted on the sender's device.
- The encrypted data is split into fragments.
- Redundancy is added, so the message can be reassembled even when some nodes disappear.
- The fragments are temporarily distributed among network participants.
- When the recipient appears, the client collects fragments from the nearest available nodes.
- The message is reassembled and decrypted only on the recipient's device.
- The network fragments are marked ready to be replaced by newer data.
The wording matters here. We say “no central storage of private correspondence”, not “nothing is stored anywhere”: fragments do exist, they are encrypted and temporary, and claiming otherwise would be untrue.
Storage contributed by participants
By default each client offers the network up to 200 MB of temporary encrypted storage. Anyone who wants to can raise it — to 500 MB, to a gigabyte, or more.
As the number of active devices grows, so do the network's raw capacity and ability to transfer data. Safe usable capacity is lower than the sum of quotas: some nodes are offline, while redundancy and repair need reserve space. The network therefore accounts separately for physical, currently available and safely usable capacity.
A node holding a fragment:
- does not know its contents;
- has no decryption key;
- does not know the whole message;
- may hold only one of the redundant parts;
- automatically replaces delivered and expired fragments.
Private chats and public rooms are different things
Private chats
- end-to-end encryption;
- a direct connection while the other person is online;
- network delivery while they are not;
- history lives with the participants;
- the server stores no plain text.
Public rooms
- a separate protocol and its own policy;
- signed blocks of history;
- distributed storage;
- owner and moderator rights;
- removal of posts through signed moderation events;
- blocking of participants and devices;
- the current state of the room applied on the client side.
This is architecture under study, and we say so plainly: distributed storage, guaranteed deletion of every copy and full moderation are physically in conflict with one another. Presenting the unsolved as solved is the worst thing one can do on a question about privacy.
Voice and video
Two different modes, and they must not be confused.
Live calls — a direct secured stream with the lowest latency we can manage. When a direct connection cannot be established, Quasar's own relay network is used.
Voice and video messages — recordings that are encrypted and travel through the same distributed mechanism as messages and files.
A live conversation is never carried through distributed storage: it is a different kind of thing. The network helps deliver a recording; it does not replace a connection.