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it's not great for mobile, which is by far the main use case these days. a huge battery drain unless something major has changed since the last time i checked i

it's not great for mobile, which is by far the main use case these days. a huge battery drain unless something major has changed since the last time i checked in on it.

snvzz 8y ago
Well, decentralized makes the whole push thing nontrivial. Not that I understand IM on mobile. I'd rather use email.
- nyolfen 8y ago
  yeah, i don't disagree, i realize it's difficult to engineer around. but it's a pretty big mark against it in terms of wide adoption.
- arendtio 8y ago
  The decentralization aspect is not the problem. XMPP for example is also decentralized but has quite good mobile support. The problem with tox seems to be that it is peer-to-peer. So the servers are missing which could buffer all those events for the clients.
  - namibj 8y ago
    There is nothing against you taking toxcore and adding a push wrapper+app UI to it. Seems like you could make at least the app side of it non-free, if you'd wish to do so.
  - snvzz 8y ago
    >The decentralization aspect is not the problem. XMPP for example is also decentralized but has quite good mobile support. XMPP is federated. Having servers make things easier. Tox is full p2p, there's no servers.
    - erk__ 8y ago
      Is that not more a difference between distributed and decentralized then, such as git is a distributed system even though it needs a central server in most use cases.
      - snvzz 8y ago
        Federated is like email. There's foo.com and a bar.org email servers, users at foo.com can talk with users at bar.org just fine. XMPP works that way. Distributed means there seriously aren't any servers. Addresses in tox are just public keys, and they're in a global namespace. The network is a distributed hash table formed by peers (the "clients"). There's no central point of failure.
      - arendtio 8y ago
        Here is my shot at defining various terms in this context: - Centralized: Centralized networks have one central point which controls the network. That doesn't have to be a single server sometimes it is just that there is just one company controlling the network (e.g. WhatsApp). - Decentralized: Is the opposite of 'centralized' meaning there is more than one central point. So all following types are 'decentralized'. - Distributed: In general terms, it means that the network is (more or less evenly) distributed upon all participants. All participants have the same role and responsibility. There are various kinds of distributed networks. Git for example stores a full copy of all information in every node. Distributed Hash Tables use a different approach where every node is responsible for one explicit part of the information to store. - Peer-to-peer (p2p): Is one form of a distributed network, which works (in general) without servers. So all the participants connect directly to each another (Tox). - Federated: Is sometimes called a 'distributed network of centralized networks'. Two popular examples are e-mail and XMPP. All participant use their own centralized server, but that server cooperates with other servers to transfer messages across the network. Sometimes their implementations make a distinction between client-to-server and server-to-server protocols. In general, the more centralized a network is, the easier it is to control. This can be good when it comes to spam, but also bad when it comes to censorship.

it's not great for mobile, which is by far the main use case these days. a huge battery drain unless something major has changed since the last time i checked in on it.

snvzz 8y ago

Well, decentralized makes the whole push thing nontrivial. Not that I understand IM on mobile. I'd rather use email.

nyolfen 8y ago
yeah, i don't disagree, i realize it's difficult to engineer around. but it's a pretty big mark against it in terms of wide adoption.
arendtio 8y ago
The decentralization aspect is not the problem. XMPP for example is also decentralized but has quite good mobile support. The problem with tox seems to be that it is peer-to-peer. So the servers are missing which could buffer all those events for the clients.
- namibj 8y ago
  There is nothing against you taking toxcore and adding a push wrapper+app UI to it. Seems like you could make at least the app side of it non-free, if you'd wish to do so.
- snvzz 8y ago
  >The decentralization aspect is not the problem. XMPP for example is also decentralized but has quite good mobile support. XMPP is federated. Having servers make things easier. Tox is full p2p, there's no servers.
  - erk__ 8y ago
    Is that not more a difference between distributed and decentralized then, such as git is a distributed system even though it needs a central server in most use cases.
    - snvzz 8y ago
      Federated is like email. There's foo.com and a bar.org email servers, users at foo.com can talk with users at bar.org just fine. XMPP works that way. Distributed means there seriously aren't any servers. Addresses in tox are just public keys, and they're in a global namespace. The network is a distributed hash table formed by peers (the "clients"). There's no central point of failure.
    - arendtio 8y ago
      Here is my shot at defining various terms in this context: - Centralized: Centralized networks have one central point which controls the network. That doesn't have to be a single server sometimes it is just that there is just one company controlling the network (e.g. WhatsApp). - Decentralized: Is the opposite of 'centralized' meaning there is more than one central point. So all following types are 'decentralized'. - Distributed: In general terms, it means that the network is (more or less evenly) distributed upon all participants. All participants have the same role and responsibility. There are various kinds of distributed networks. Git for example stores a full copy of all information in every node. Distributed Hash Tables use a different approach where every node is responsible for one explicit part of the information to store. - Peer-to-peer (p2p): Is one form of a distributed network, which works (in general) without servers. So all the participants connect directly to each another (Tox). - Federated: Is sometimes called a 'distributed network of centralized networks'. Two popular examples are e-mail and XMPP. All participant use their own centralized server, but that server cooperates with other servers to transfer messages across the network. Sometimes their implementations make a distinction between client-to-server and server-to-server protocols. In general, the more centralized a network is, the easier it is to control. This can be good when it comes to spam, but also bad when it comes to censorship.