alt Hacker NewsGlad 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.
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> 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 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/
Building exactly this; in Mikoto Platforms, "Spaces" can be located on any physical node, and DMs are E2EE routed through multiple nodes