[staltz]

Rooms are decentralized. It's not following the end-to-end principle, because rooms are intermediaries, but there can be many rooms, they are fungible, and they are not hard coded anywhere. It's possible to build similar functionality on a DHT, but it has a couple of downsides:

1. The bootstrapping servers for DHTs are legitimately centralized and hard-coded servers 2. On a DHT you leak your IP address to many other peers, with rooms you leak your IP address only to the room administrator. (This is supposing without an anonymization layer, which would have some non-negligible overhead) 3. Connecting to DHT peers is not as reliable and consistently functioning as a static IP address, considering all sorts of network situations, specially mobile data plans

That said, I don't have anything against DHTs, and in fact I might improve how Manyverse uses DHTs. I just think it's important that users know the drawbacks of each approach, and then users can choose whichever approach fits their needs best. This is why Manyverse focuses on multiple connectivity modes: LAN, Bluetooth, Pubs, Rooms, DHTs. I think the more of these we have, the more resilient the network will be. So my argument isn't for rooms instead of DHTs, my argument is that adding rooms is good to fill in a gap in choices for connectivity.