> Tox is a fully distributed (not federated) p2p system Ah, see, you lost me there already. I'm sure it's clever and well made and all the rest of it, but full

> Tox is a fully distributed (not federated) p2p system Ah, see, you lost me there already. I'm sure it's clever and well made and all the rest of it, but fully distributed systems either almost never work, are very difficult to get setup and use properly, or end up just not being fully distributed systems (eg. early Skype and it's "supernodes" or whatever it called them, aka "servers", or Tor [which I love] and it's directory authorities which admittedly are elected, but even so are effectively just "servers", or Bittorrent which has either trackers, aka "servers", or hard-coded DHT bootstrap nodes, aka also "servers"). Distributed systems sound great in theory, but in the real world I just never think they're worth the effort, or you have to compromise them and add some centralized element anyways, at which point you might as well just use a federated system so that people who don't want to deal with all that can use a third party server and people who do want their own specially contained distributed node can just run their own server and client.