Most of the problems in the current internet landscape is caused by the cost of centralized servers. What problems are stopping us from running the fediverse on a peer to peer torrent based network? I would assume latency, but couldn’t that be solved by larger pre caching in clients? Of course interaction and authentication should be handled centrally, but media sharing which is the largest strain on servers could be eased by clients sending media between each other. What am I missing? Torrenting seems to be such an elegant solution.
Better question: how come we aren’t all using XMPP for chat instead of the current mess we have? Why can’t we just bring back XMPP with encryption? I don’t get people, all for federation and shit but when it comes to messages everyone suddenly forget that XMPP is the original and truly open messaging solution. You can message anyone by email no matter what’s or where’s their server. Pretty much like lemmy, true interoperability.
Currently, attempts at bringing back XMPP has been horrible. Some instances have different plugins, which often break things. Some have e2ee some don’t. XMPP is great but the current attempts are bad. Matrix is good enough for now.
I believe the worst part of XMPP isn’t the instances but the lack of a decent cross platform client that actually supports everything and has a decent UI. For eg. iOS clients are all shit. Without decent clients and push notifications people won’t be using XMPP ever.
Questionable…
The iOS clients have gotten miles better in recent years. It’s still far from perfect, but I’m grateful for the improvements.
What’s the best one in your opinion?
Siskin, but it doesn’t do push with omemo perfectly. Monal does that better.
Great, I used Monal a long time ago and it was buggy maybe I’ll try it again.
I stopped using monal in favour of Siskin, but I think it’s gotten a lot better recently too. My problem was monal started sending notifications for every message in every chat room at some point so I uninstalled it. I assume this has been resolved.
I feel the same way about RSS feeds. It’s a technology meant to keep up with updates on nearly anything across the internet. Even social media sites. It’s been available for ages. But no one is pushing for sites to provide them. 🤷♂️
That’s why I use FreshRSS.
SMTP is federation too. But certain megacorp basically fenced off huge chunk of users.
Yes, that’s exactly by point. SMTP is federation, you can setup your own server and have interoperability with others and have 100% of its features working right, so you aren’t locked in to those megacorps. Chat applications should use XMPP to get the same for chat/video.