Decentralize Messaging • Hacker News Board

Re: Decentralize Messaging

#101

Post by masukomi » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 12:50 PM UTC

bergstromm466 wrote: post #88

ElFitz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really worried about the total amount of data each user will end up lugging around though. Also, append only => no deletes, correct?

Yes, no deletes. Since there is no company in the middle, the GDPR rules don't apply to this P2P network, so it isn't an issue legally (in Europe). This is something that will probably take some puzzling to get to a sustainable mechanism. The strategy I've heard talked about most often is to append metadata that marks it as 'deleted', so when things populate or 'gossip' further, it won't show up in the user interface…

It should be noted that while you can't delete / edit messages you _can_ delete blobs (binary attachments). They'll come back if you load a post that references them, but that's where the majority of size comes from and it is manageable.

Also, how much you download is related to how many people you follow, and text doesn't take up a ton of space.

Re: Decentralize Messaging

#102

Post by ElFitz » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 10:15 AM UTC

masukomi wrote: post #101

bergstromm466 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, no deletes. Since there is no company in the middle, the GDPR rules don't apply to this P2P network, so it isn't an issue legally (in Europe). This is something that will probably take some puzzling to get to a sustainable mechanism. The strategy I've heard talked about most often is to append metadata that marks it as 'deleted', so when things populate or 'gossip' further, it won't show up in the user interface…

It should be noted that while you can't delete / edit messages you _can_ delete blobs (binary attachments). They'll come back if you load a post that references them, but that's where the majority of size comes from and it is manageable. Also, how much you download is related to how many people you follow, and text doesn't take up a ton of space.

Sure. But where do the blobs "come from" when they "come back". Since it's fully P2P, someone has to keep them around.

As for text not taking up a ton of space. Sure. Except it's text with it's metadata, and possibly text generated by a few hundred people.

A friend and I managed to exchange ~24k messages on Slack over the last 3 years (~4k each / year); using it like some kind of "private twitter" where we would just post anything that might be of interest to the other.

What would it be like if I follow 300 or 1000 people doing the same, over Secure Scuttlebutt?

- At 1 byte per character (from what I've gathered, Unicode characters actually take up 1 to 4 bytes) - 140 characters / message (because Twitter proved it's usually enough) - messages' metadata (50 bytes?) - 4.000 messages / user / year - following 300 people

We'd get... 228MB / year?

That's actually way less than I expected!

Re: Decentralize Messaging

#103

Post by ElFitz » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 10:16 AM UTC

bergstromm466 wrote: post #88

ElFitz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really worried about the total amount of data each user will end up lugging around though. Also, append only => no deletes, correct?

Yes, no deletes. Since there is no company in the middle, the GDPR rules don't apply to this P2P network, so it isn't an issue legally (in Europe). This is something that will probably take some puzzling to get to a sustainable mechanism. The strategy I've heard talked about most often is to append metadata that marks it as 'deleted', so when things populate or 'gossip' further, it won't show up in the user interface…

That's pretty much how event sourcing deals with deletion.

I wasn't even worrying about the legality of it. Simply that you end up lugging those messages around on your devices.

And better be careful about what you post, because there's no taking it back.