[zanny]

Its not really about the design. At some point you have to recognize the physical impossibilities of p2p models - primarily availability. The reason why Matrix is more popular than Tox or why we haven't seen any remotely successful p2p social network while projects like Mastodon took off is because there is simply no way to make the UX of the scenario where you want to send a message to X, who is offline, and before they come online you go offline and the message is never sent.

The way Tox does it (and any network trying to work around this problem) is to locally cache messages en masse as close to the destitination as you can get. But as you can imagine that makes the bandwidth and power requirements of maintaining the network too streinuous to be competitive with a federated option that simply works when the always-on server is available or doesn't when its offline.

[some-username]

"Physical impossibilities of p2p models" - Although there might be structural limitations, I think they're not too strong. Just because we currently do not have a major p2p network doesn't mean that it's not possible. I think it's very possible to have something like this (even for availability). You just need to have a good design/mechanism.

But there's the problem (why we didn't see something like this yet): No one puts many resources into the design of p2p-stuff. The competing, central solutions get tons of resources from big companies that try to make money with it. There is no company that tries to build something p2p because with giving away the control, they give away the possibility to make money out of it.

A working example of offline storage would be bitmessage (although I think It won't scale). A much more interesting development would be lake: https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8974-practical_mix_network_desig...