41–50 of 178 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may not be satisfactory in terms of performance though. Decentralization comes with its own baggage.
Current decentralized DNS projects have many problems that revolve almost entirely around UX, but performance isn't really one of them. Especially given in an environment like this it'd be used mostly to get the initial connection, performance probably wouldn't be too big a problem.
I think someone needs to look into the onboarding process. My experience so far: 1: Clicked on "Try Now". 2: Was greeted with a blob of text. Spotted "The easiest way to try Matrix is to use the Riot Web ...". 3: Clicked on "Riot Web" because that is a link. 4: Got transferred to a different website with a lot of buttons on it. 5: Clicked on the green "Get started button" 6: Got transferred to another page with a bun…
I've been nerding out a bit playing with Matrix/Riot and Urbit - there's a lot of exciting stuff happening in this space.
If you like what Matrix is doing consider paying $10/month for your own server via Modular.im (https://modular.im/). It supports the Matrix devs and you get your own high performance federated server to use on the network.
Their automation makes it extremely easy to spin up your host so you don't have to manage anything yourself. The default server they run has a lot of traffic so having your own is a better experience, and it helps further decentralize the network (and you control your own server).
I'm excited to try out p2p, thanks Arathorn for being so responsive in the comments on HN.
After Keybase sold out users to Zoom my friend in China and I switched to Matrix/Riot. While the default Matrix server is blocked there if he doesn't use a VPN we can still communicate on others (for now).
One question for Arathorn re:
> "Hooking up E2E Encryption APIs in Dendrite (not that it buys us much in a pure P2P world)"
Doesn't this still matter if the internet traffic itself is tapped? If I'm understanding this correctly we'll still want E2E for things like deep packet inspection in China (or bulk collection by western governments).
Just a few days ago, we had this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23358863 complaining about SQLite not being available in browsers and now we see an actual application using SQLite in a browser :D
Would p2p mobile Matrix drain my battery super fast?
Original comment below but I decided instead to go for the following: I am extremely proud of what work is being done online today to secure communications. While we have companies telemetrying our native stacks[1], web browsers[2], and messaging platforms[3], we also have people working on software that doesn't do those things and still tries to empower the user to get what they need done without being a double agen…
3rd party identifiers like phone numbers and email addresses can be registered and discovered via centralized service. At least for phone numbers it's not really possible decentralized.
Original comment below but I decided instead to go for the following: I am extremely proud of what work is being done online today to secure communications. While we have companies telemetrying our native stacks[1], web browsers[2], and messaging platforms[3], we also have people working on software that doesn't do those things and still tries to empower the user to get what they need done without being a double agen…
Although I think it's still a long way to usable and interoperable p2p, matrix does support voice+video chat (in 1:1 chats p2p with signaling via matrix; otherwise via jitsi meet integration). 3rd party identifiers like phone numbers and email addresses can be registered and discovered via centralized service. At least for phone numbers it's not really possible decentralized.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I am failing to get my idea through. I am thinking more in the sense of having IPFS as a way to increase redundancy of nodes that might be able to serve some media. Yes, discovery is not an issue for matrix. But p2p matrix on its own is not able to say "oh, your contact is sending you a message that contains a 10GB file, let me see if I can find other nodes that have this file already and get it from the swar…
Yes, possibly this could be an optimisation; although then you get to worry about leaking information about your group's contents to the world - anything you send, other clients in your group will ask random servers on the internet for, by a globally identifiable hash. In the best case, this just leaks my friends' meme sharing habits - in the worst case, this announces to the world "I am in a group sharing materials…
However, this is something that can be fixed on IPFS itself, and I believe it is even in their roadmap: the idea of adding "friend peers". Your IPFS node could ask for sensitive files to this privileged list of nodes only.
So, your client can have a simple logic: if you have e2e encrypted message with IPFS-linked media, ask only the group member peers about the contents of the file. Messages that are not e2e (or marked as non-sensitive) can be asked to the global IPFS swarm.
I somehow managed to convince 4 of my friends to use Riot and it's been great. We were originally using Group Me.
My friends are not tech savvy and couldn't care less about software freedom or privacy, but I was able to convince them to switch by luring them with the fact that they could post unlimited size videos. It's actually the easiest way to share high quality videos between Android and iOS users.
The only thing that annoys me is when you release updates to the default configuration file and I have to manually resolve the differences in the middle of an APT upgrade. That's not a big deal though.