Commercialiation of communication is an interesting way of putting it. I agree that the attempts at decentralisation are so-so but I do think it's critical tha

Commercialiation of communication is an interesting way of putting it. I agree that the attempts at decentralisation are so-so but I do think it's critical that the low-level pieces are done properly. Once they're deployed, every wart and bottleneck becomes magnified. It's easy to have a 'move fast and break things' mentality for a centralised service because there's an army of people with access to everything so they can peer in, monitor and fix breakages. Not quite the same for a decentralised system. Another way of thinking about the network side is that we already have many of them. Address books, emails, services etc all of which contain different subsets. If we can recreate the existing services with a resilient, decentralised alternatives then that can form the bedrock on which to build further things. FWIW, I'm working with others on an open source stack that can do this [1]. We're starting with the core services of mail, contacts and calendars (to replace iCloud), but the stack itself is very flexible and built using Mirage [2]. [1] http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/ http://nymote.org/blog/2013/introducing-nymote/ [2] http://www.openmirage.org/wiki/overview-of-mirage http://www.openmirage.org/wiki/overview-of-mirage