logoalt Hacker News

athrowaway3z • yesterday at 10:23 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

I think you're both missing the forest for the trees. P2P connectivity is about as solved as it will get, and the last % will stay unsolved.

The final goal for decentralization is something like: no central party should become the irreplaceable master over data, community, feeds, moderation, UI and identity.

We already know the minimum pieces needed to avoid that kind of centralization: hashed, linked, signed records(/packets), so their validity and causal order don't depend on whatever connection carried them or whatever physical server received them.

Once we have that, apps 'transcend' the connection layer, and the parties that control identity, community, feeds, moderation, etc become signing keys that can operate from anywhere.

The real problem for a decentralized internet, or "local-first apps", is that writing applications at this layer, or writing the library that lets you write them, is hard and nobody has solved it.

IIRC Iroh tried this early on, then pivoted to the p2p socket library it is today.

I'm not sure where the Delft stack sits with its ambitions atm.