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Do decentralized protocols scale well? Is there one that scales better than others? Is the better solution to have a POSSE model signed cryptographically? Idea

Do decentralized protocols scale well? Is there one that scales better than others? Is the better solution to have a POSSE model signed cryptographically? Ideally a decentralized protocol that gets better - not worse as more people join would be more likely to succeed (like bittorrent)

oliwarner 7y ago
What scale do you need? Yeah, I'm "friends" with hundreds of people on Facebook but how many do I really care about?
- buboard 7y ago
  i dont mean this scale, but able to support quick syndication in a network of billions of users. more practically, how much will it cost to run e.g. a Matrix synapse server to support a community of a few thousands (the size of a typical small website community). Since chat is really deadweight and typically unmonetizable, if this cost is too high it will not get traction
  - oliwarner 7y ago
    Well what I'm talking about is peer-to-peer. Literally my devices asking my friends devices for messages, updates and content. I "add" you to my friends. I send you something like a v-card: A blob of metadata saying who I am and what my devices are (with certificates). You get a notification, you see this information and you get to decide there and then what access (if any) I get. This information gets sent to all your devices and you send me back a list of devices and their certificates. You post an update. It gets sent to all your devices. My device does a round-robin attempt on your devices for updates. It sees new stuff, downloads and spawns a notification (if applicable). I'd imagine there'd be ways to make push notifications happen too (ie for chat). That scales well with a sensibly sized pool of people. "But I'm an Insta-model with 2 million subs and a business!" ... then make one of your devices a real server in a real datacentre. That's the good thing here, with multiple devices, you can throw as much or little as you like at this. People at the low end still get first-class service up to a point, for just their data. So people like Facebook and Google can stay in business but only as federated endpoints to this system, charging to provide delegated access.
    - buboard 7y ago
      that would be a great model

oliwarner 7y ago

What scale do you need? Yeah, I'm "friends" with hundreds of people on Facebook but how many do I really care about?

buboard 7y ago
i dont mean this scale, but able to support quick syndication in a network of billions of users. more practically, how much will it cost to run e.g. a Matrix synapse server to support a community of a few thousands (the size of a typical small website community). Since chat is really deadweight and typically unmonetizable, if this cost is too high it will not get traction
- oliwarner 7y ago
  Well what I'm talking about is peer-to-peer. Literally my devices asking my friends devices for messages, updates and content. I "add" you to my friends. I send you something like a v-card: A blob of metadata saying who I am and what my devices are (with certificates). You get a notification, you see this information and you get to decide there and then what access (if any) I get. This information gets sent to all your devices and you send me back a list of devices and their certificates. You post an update. It gets sent to all your devices. My device does a round-robin attempt on your devices for updates. It sees new stuff, downloads and spawns a notification (if applicable). I'd imagine there'd be ways to make push notifications happen too (ie for chat). That scales well with a sensibly sized pool of people. "But I'm an Insta-model with 2 million subs and a business!" ... then make one of your devices a real server in a real datacentre. That's the good thing here, with multiple devices, you can throw as much or little as you like at this. People at the low end still get first-class service up to a point, for just their data. So people like Facebook and Google can stay in business but only as federated endpoints to this system, charging to provide delegated access.
  - buboard 7y ago
    that would be a great model