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@kawaiipunk@sunbeam.city · activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

As someone who was heavily involved in P2P space, it is really hard to make P2P protocols and clients with decent UX especially on mobile. There's a whole host of challenges around discovery, network traversal, replication and connectivity that are real puzzles.

Yes it is ultimately the resiliency we need going forwards but it is really hard to do. It's worth playing with Secure Scuttlebutt, DAT/hypercore, Briar and others (even Bitorrent) to experience what the current state of the tech is.

One thing I would like to learn more about is whether there can be a Fedi server that's so lightweight that it can run in the client making it easily P2P. Doing that on mobile (especially iOS) sounds incredibly challenging.

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Tod Robbins

@todrobbins@social.coop replied · activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

@kawaiipunk remind me are you already familiar with #Cabal (current site: https://cabal.chat/) and the new Cable protocol (new site coming soon: https://cabal-new-website.cblgh.org/specs.html)?

specs.html | cabal

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KawaiiPunk

@kawaiipunk@sunbeam.city replied · activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

@todrobbins yes! cblgh is a friend from SSB

With all due respect to that project, it's a tiny team of volunteers

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KawaiiPunk

@kawaiipunk@sunbeam.city replied · activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

Just to give one example.

Briar is a P2P messaging app that is focussed on security.

Currently to send and receive a message, both parties must be online. If you send a message when your contact is offline then go offline, the other party won't receive the message.

The standard user expectation is instant messaging. As soon as you are online yourself, you receive all the messages that have been sent to you.

To address this, the Briar project created Mailbox which is an encrypted relay that it designed to be installed on a spare phone and run 24/7.

With that requirement as the the current viable solution to that problem, you've probably already lost 99% of your potential users accustomed to WhatsApp style convenience.

How do you solve that problem? Like I said, hard problems!

Oh and it also only runs Android because iOS doesn't allow for that type of app. Oh and there's no mechanism for discovery beyond swapping your keys (in person or online).

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KawaiiPunk

@kawaiipunk@sunbeam.city replied · activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

Great project and team btw. Not knocking them. But without serious investment of time and/or money plus strategy, these hard problems don't get solved.

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KawaiiPunk

@kawaiipunk@sunbeam.city replied · activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

I think people missed a key detail from Moxie's controversial Congress talk and it nothing to do with centralised/decentralised paradigm.

He said and I'm massively paraphrasing here "it takes roomfuls of people and lots and lots of paid hours to make competitive software"

I'm afraid that is resolutely true. That's the material conditions for making software that has millions of users. Folks will have to stretch really hard to find examples that aren't the case.

That's the reality of what we're dealing with. You put enough time, money and talent in to work on low level stuff and then the UX and then all the organisational stuff and marketing you will get something usable by the masses.

If you're not organising in this way, that's also fine. Underground hobbyist punky shit is also amazing and worth putting time into but let's not ignore the material conditions need for privacy preserving tech to be competitive with big corporations. The numbers talk

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KawaiiPunk

@kawaiipunk@sunbeam.city replied · activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

It's so important for us, the punky hacker counterculture to investigate new means of organising.

Personally I think this public sector funding open source thing has a lot of potential. All the EU funding etc.

Tor Project came about via state funding (much as we may detest the U.S. state).

Some projects to looks at right now that I'm interested in are La Suite Docs Numerique (Google Docs alternative funded by German and French government) and Local Gov Drupal (a coop of tech coops and municipal councils) which are both funded by public sector.

Is there a way we can leverage similar modes of production.

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KawaiiPunk

@kawaiipunk@sunbeam.city replied · activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

It's potentially not very anarchist of me to say we should rely on the capitalist state for money. That's probably the biggest critique of this approach and it's warranted but I think the risk is worth the reward right now to turbo charge certain areas of technology such E2EE and P2P libre tech.

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KawaiiPunk

@kawaiipunk@sunbeam.city replied · activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

Total sidenote but I'd love to learn more about whether it's possible for @delta to be run as Tor Onion service

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