42 ms·

P2P messaging apps have a hard time with group messages because you have to have someone online to relay messages at all times. Group chats really have to have

• codyb 8y ago
  What would the storage requirements be for a blockchain like that? It seems to me extravagant... and also would there be all the concensus algorithms? So I'd send a message and wait X amount of time for the network to achieve concensus that I had posted the message? I can see the value in the distributed part certainly but if the storage requirements are very large due to a large volume of messages (I'd imagine any solution which caught on could quickly outpace the number of transactions on something like the ethereum or btc network), wouldn't it necessarily just end up centralized? It's an interesting idea though.
• munchbunny 8y ago
  There are plenty of non-blockchain approaches to persistence as well which also fall under either the "distributed" or "p2p" labels. The part I'm having a hard time with is that blockchain's specific strength relative to other distributed approaches is the ledger. That's not really the crux of the decentralized messaging problem. Unless you need the immutable ledger, other approaches solve identity, privacy, and persistence aspects of messaging just as well or better without the overhead that blockchain approaches introduce.
• tya99 8y ago
  > P2P messaging apps have a hard time with group messages Well https://tox.chat https://tox.chat and https://ring.cx https://ring.cx (now Jami) can do just that as well as https://briarproject.org https://briarproject.org. So these do exist. Such a thing was also being proposed for Ricochet https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet/issues/54 https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet/issues/54
  • Sargos 8y ago
    That's neat. Thanks.