alt Hacker NewsIt's too bad we fell so hard for centralization. In an alternate universe, messaging on the Internet could have been:
1. Alice's device has a publicly routable IP address with a domain name like alice.home.her.isp
2. Bob's device is has same qualities, using: bob.mobile.his.isp
Then Alice can just open her chat app up, add [email protected] and off they go. I mean we had UNIX's "talk" for how long but instead of evolving/securing/fixing it, we blew it! And now we have all these companies 1. coming up with their own incompatible protocols and 2. inserting their stupid centralized servers as intermediaries. And now every chat message we send over the Internet has to be received and re-sent through a handful of amoral corporations.
Replies
>In an alternate universe, messaging on the Internet could have been:
I don't think so, and I think the very reason is because the people who opt for these decentralized solutions never really sit down and try and design a product, they just want decentralization for the sake of decentralization. For them decentralization is the product. Your alternate universe evaporates when you ask the question "what happens if Alice's device is offline?".
If you squint, the exact system you are describing is e-mail, and that has become effectively centralized, and it happened long before we had tech mega corps.
Decentralized cooperation and associated protocols is a lot harder than just inserting messages into a MySQL database and then displaying those messages.
If people spent half the time they do wishing for decentralized messaging working on the actual problems with it, we would have decentralized messaging.
Have a look at Keet, it’s a p2p IM app, works on mobile and desktop, behind NAT and all. To be honest it’s not even the only app in this game.
It just seems like nobody cares about these things until the frog already boiled.
> now every chat message
"It hurts when I do that."
"Don't do that."
Big question is how to put sgt.cia.gov or mayor.fbi.gov in the middle between alice.home.her.isp and bob.mobile.his.isp.
That is why centralised messengers are pushed hard.
And this is not to protect society from harm, as many would assume.
Why is this any better? It doesn't solve any of the identity and end-to-end encryption problems centralized messengers do; it just changes the underlying connectivity model, which is the least interesting part of the system.