I’ve always been impressed with the idea of bittorrent. Would that work for messages, instead of files? Does this exist already?

          • ☂️-@lemmy.ml
            1·
            20 days ago

            same as any foss project. not unlike those, new ones can always be created.

            it is natural that reactionary individuals and states will eventually control a good chunk of them, since that’s the hegemonic ideology.

            if you know of a better, even more decentralized way to have a public forum, i would love to try it out.

  • myszka@lemmy.ml
    4·
    20 days ago

    Check out Reticulum. It’s a full-blown decentralised network stack, so you can chat with someone not even using the Internet and instead employing a LoRa radio or a HaLow modem (but you can use both at the name time!). Every user is a client and a server at the same time, kind of like bittorrent, but actually decentralised on o much deeper level.

  • QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    20 days ago

    You’re in it! each ‘peer’ is a Lemmy instance. The only reason everyone doesn’t have their own instance for themselves is that it’s too complicated for the average person to setup easily, but I have seen it done before.

  • Fluffy Kitty Cat@slrpnk.netEnglish
    2·
    19 days ago

    People have tried over the years, but it’s easy to.get lost in the sauce with the crypto and then you’re babbling about Byzantine generals and stuff

  • Arkhive@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    20 days ago

    Isn’t a “more correct” description of BitTorrent that each client is also a server? I’m not sure exactly how the protocol is written, but I assume each connection acts like a client-server one depending on the direction of data flow. With that in mind the fediverse is distributed social media. There’s nothing stopping you from spinning up an instance on say, your phone, making an account on it and federating with the other instances you like. Now your phone is both client and server, just like in BitTorrent. This setup would even match the functionality of only seeding when on. If you turn off your instance it would go offline and any non-federated data would not hit the web until you booted it back up, aka started seeding again. Defederating would act like removing a torrent from your list. Multiple users per server is where I think the analogy begins to break. Not sure what the BitTorrent equivalent would be.

    Edit: Maybe SoulSeek is a better parallel??