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This came up on the forum and someone raised a good point - would direct connections require the sender and receiver to be online at the same time? I feel like
by faitswulff 6y ago
This came up on the forum and someone raised a good point - would direct connections require the sender and receiver to be online at the same time? I feel like the architecture has to be more clever than just a WebRTC connection between clients.
- Scoundreller 6y ago> would direct connections require the sender and receiver to be online at the same time? Could always use 'indirect' connections to store-and-forward, and only relying on the central server when absolutely necessary. You do risk some lost messages when you underestimate failures, but the same thing applies to any central store-and-forward facility. Early Kazaa depended on some nodes becoming supernodes. Supposedly initial Skype was decentralized like this (particular to get around NATs), until it became exclusively client-server.
- swirepe 6y agoThere was a really good YouTube lecture about how signal works, and it addresses phones being offline. Unfortunately there's been a ton of low-quality videos on Signal released in the past few days, and it's taking me a while to find it.
- loughnane 6y agoMight be the one from computerphile
- upofadown 6y agoThe Signal protocol can deal with offline messaging, but it requires a server to do it. That is because of how the forward secrecy works. Presumably the amount of traffic would be fairly negligible for what would just be keying information.