Glad to see more of these efforts. But here's what it will really take to decentralize social media and E2EE messengers:
We need something like Discord, except each server is an actual self-hosted server like a Minecraft server. DMs between two users should be handled by a mutual server. Account credentials should be handled by a Nostr-like protocol, which also gives you global tweeting capabilities as a bonus.
Run the whole thing on Yggdrasil Network or something similar so that it's not tied down to IPv4v6 and DNS and all existing hardware infra, but can still take advantage of them. And add reciprocal inter-server onion routing to make it difficult to geolocate servers. Also take a page from SoftEther VPN's book and wrap all traffic in HTTPS and perform automatic NAT traversal, so that people can host servers from behind ISP firewalls.
Anything short of that and we lose to big tech and govs in the long run. But once we've achieved the above, the decentralized web can truly take off: we will get WiFi routers running open-source firmware to make a mesh network to act as alternative physical layer infra for the new web. We can still take advantage of the existing Internet's bandwidth as long as there's an unblockable path to send a little bit of data to discover and coordinate nodes.
> Anything short of that and we lose to big tech and govs in the long run.
This is not a software issue, it doesn't matter how good the tech is, the masses will always aggregate to big tech networks because decentralized networks will never have billion dollar marketing budgets.
I don't think that's true. If there really was a good enough open-source Discord alternative, many would already switched. A big part of the problem is there isn't one. Matrix, Stoat, Telegram, etc are all missing something. That's why new ones are being built.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46949564
Non big tech solutions don't need billion dollar's worth of marketing. In fact I don't recall ever seeing an ad for tiktok and yet it is humongous.
Non big tech solutions need solid UI and UX that does not assume your average user can balance a binary tree, know what is a private key and how to safely back it up (other comments brought up this exact issue) or even knows what a "static website" means. Non big tech solutions need to give non technical users (read: the overwhelming majority of humanity) a good onboarding experience that does not involve learning ten new jargons and acronyms. Non big tech solutions need to know they have a limited strangeness budget [1] and should only spend it on places it matters. Non big tech solutions need to start actually cater to the unwashed masses before being befuddled by them choosing to stay on mark zuckerberg's platforms instead.
[1] https://steveklabnik.com/writing/the-language-strangeness-bu...
> In fact I don't recall ever seeing an ad for tiktok and yet it is humongous
Then maybe you're not the target audience, or you're just not noticing the ads, because TikTok is particularly notable for their aggressive marketing efforts during their growth phase.
> Non big tech solutions need solid UI and UX that does not assume your average user can balance a binary tree
Non big tech platforms don't need anything. They can never compete with billion dollar budgets and they shouldn't set that as a goal. Everyone enjoys a well designed UX, but billion dollar marketing budgets will always eclipse the alternatives.
> In fact I don't recall ever seeing an ad for tiktok and yet it is humongous.
For the first years of its existence I only new tiktok because they were advertising everywhere.
I guess I’d rather have something approaching bittorrent, edonkey/kad, ipfs, blockchain, webarchives.
You have named networks that are federated together, and people can publish to the networks they are invited to or sign up for. The networks survive even with individual servers go down. Data is cached all over at the edges.
Your version is just way too susceptible to rot, unless you see that as a feature. I see it as most of the good content falling into the ether sooner rather than later.
Also can use people viewing the pages as hosts https://gabe.durazo.us/tech/ephemeral-p2p-project/
If we decentralize messenging and social media, all of those protocols you mentioned will survive.
I’m not specifically saying to use those protocols as much as the philosophy of hashes pointing to blocks that are redundantly spread far and wide.
Minecraft servers are a poor metaphor for what ideal decentralized social media should look like. They are the opposite of robust.
The problem with distributed storage is they place too high of a requirement on edge nodes, which people have to host, and they synchronize too slowly for real time messenging. If I upload a 1GB video to my server's chat, that storage load should not be replicated on many other nodes. Who pays for that disk space? The federated model is a lot more robust in this regard.
As far as archiving is concerned, many archiving orgs will pop up if their discussion servers and public facing websites can't be traced or easily shutdown. The protocol itself can't archive things, but it protects the people doing the archiving work and gives a place for websites like Annas Archive to live without relying on IP and DNS. The idea is to amass enough uncensorable social power so that such efforts can't be banned or shutdown, then you can use existing protocols like BitTorrent all you want.
That is being done today at https://geogram.radio
Each device (cellphone/laptop) is a server. They connect to preferred server stations that are used for discovering other peers. There are things like common chat rooms on the station servers but personal messages are completely p2p using webrtc.
There are other apps there, for example to host own websites or blogs and other things you'd expect from modern usage. Mesh is done today using cheap ESP32 devices (3 euros each).
It is a work in progress, the main point is that it can exchange data even outside the internet and use radio connections.
Nice project. P2P is not the way to go for DMs though. Both users and servers have to stay anonymous if we want to defeat surveillance and censorship long-term.
Ideally, nobody except a single server node of your choice (which is probably the one you self-host) is able to match your Nostr identity to your real IP address. Instead, IP-like-identifiers (like in Yggdrasil Network) should replace IP addresses when interfacing with other nodes. Server hosts would not share their traditional IP when inviting new people to connect to it, only their IP-like-identifier. The invited person can pick/host their own trusted server node as well, and that trusted server would relay that user's connection to your server, which they don't trust. Everyone has a trusted server that represents them.
The trusted server and the untrusted server should not have eachother's IPs during this relay process, either. Instead, the data should be bounced through some other server first, who may bounce it again, and again. The actual underlying path the data travels between the two servers which represent the two users should involve many onion-routed bounces that is not fully known to any server or user. The only situation where a device needs to know another device's IP is when two server nodes establish a reciprocal routing agreement and exchange IPs over an encrypted tunnel ("if I bounce X amount of traffic for you, you will bounce X amount of traffic for me in the future", it's a bandwidth transaction). Such negotiations should be made by querying random addresses or established manually (early on, when the network is small and sparse). This is where offline meshes can help. An ESP32 mesh doesn't have nearly enough capacity to handle all the messages and multimedia flying around, but they can be an alternative pathway to negotiate routing agreements. When the network is dense enough, it will be difficult to pin down your IP, even for state-level actors. And they certainly won't be able to surveil many people at once because even honeypotting one would be incredibly expensive.
Also consider encapsulating all of the Internet-routed traffic in HTTPS using only port 443 (like this: https://www.softether.org/1-features/1._Ultimate_Powerful_VP...). It needs to blend in with traditional web traffic so that no infra operator can identify/block/throttle it.
Also make sure to stay anonymous while developing this so you can't be sued or prosecuted.
just found this curated list of self-hosted discord alternatives.
https://github.com/Vigno04/discord-selfhosted-alternatives
unfortunately though i think self-hosting is one of the problems. one of the features of discord is how easy it is to create your own server.
from that list i am checking out commet now, which seems to promise a better experience on top of matrix. that would at least solve the self-hosting issue, as i'll be able to use it on any existing matrix server. matrix has the technical features needed to work like discord, but not the interface.
Building exactly this; in Mikoto Platforms, "Spaces" can be located on any physical node, and DMs are E2EE routed through multiple nodes