I’ve always been impressed with the idea of bittorrent. Would that work for messages, instead of files? Does this exist already?
People have tried over the years, but it’s easy to.get lost in the sauce with the crypto and then you’re babbling about Byzantine generals and stuff
Sounds like you’re looking for nostr? Last time I checked there was nothing but cryptocurrency spam.
you are literally in it. that’s what federation is supposed to be.
It’s not as distributed as it should be imo. I do love the fediverse tho.
how could it be further distributed?
We are still gathering on servers, which are all susceptible to political action.
Why is it not and what do you think it “should” be?
Something without servers.
P2p mesh?
You’re in it! each ‘peer’ is a Lemmy instance. The only reason everyone doesn’t have their own instance for themselves is that it’s too complicated for the average person to setup easily, but I have seen it done before.
This would be more of a use case for blockchain, any site(/user) wishing to mirror the social media would participate in the chain. A post on one site would get pushed into the chain and show up on every mirror.
Media would likely have to be links outside of the blockchain since it isn’t usually very good at storing large datasets (it would make it difficult to mirror over time as it grew), so if you wanted a full mirror you would probably have your site fetching media as soon as it is posted and mirroring it yourself.
Or media might be a good spot to integrate with your bittorrent idea. Blockchain handles the distributed state of the site (communities/post text+metadata), and any submitted media is added to the post as bittorrent hashes. I don’t know how scalable bittorrent clients are though it might take considerable overhead to seed millions of pictures/videos.
Check out Reticulum. It’s a full-blown decentralised network stack, so you can chat with someone not even using the Internet and instead employing a LoRa radio or a HaLow modem (but you can use both at the name time!). Every user is a client and a server at the same time, kind of like bittorrent, but actually decentralised on o much deeper level.
