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Comment by betaby | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately looks like P2P messengers are not available/not existent nowadays. Especially on mobile. All we have phone tied centralized apps.

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This seems like an apropos place to shill my own p2p instant messaging protocol implemented in Rust: https://github.com/zacstewart/comm

The readme doesn't do it justice. It's actually very functional if I bothered to document how to use it, and I have a working GTK-based frontend that works well too.

tl;dr: Its network architecture is loosely based on the BitTorrent DHT. Each node forwards a message as closely as it can to the intended recipient, who upon receiving it issues an ack back to the network.

Yet to be done is providing some mechanism for "proving" your identity, integrating libsignal for encrypting messages, and much more.

I'm trying to get it to show HN-tier so that I can solicit help working on it.

You need to document it better. Right now this just looks like a side project that is forgotten.

Nothing against you, but good documentation is necessary for acknowledgement and adoption.

Basic thing is that these messengers do not have persistent connections. They instead register with a notification service that then wakes up the relevant app when a new message comes in.

This is why the likes of MSN Messenger didn't survive the transition to mobile, because they were built around persistent connections.

Is something wrong with tox? It is a p2p messenger that works on smartphones.

Homebrew crypto written by 4chan. No offline messages. Drains a gigabyte of data and battery overnight thanks to P2P.

> Homebrew crypto written by 4chan.

Where did you get that from? Tox uses libsodium. [0]

[0] https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/blob/master/docs/updat...

There is more to building a secure end-to-end messaging protocol than dropping in libsodium and calling it a day. See issues like https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426.

There is a lot more. But Tox is hardly "homebrew crypto" from "4chan" hackers.

Though, even the issue you've linked show the thought that the tox team have been putting into their protocol. (A stolen private key is game over, as in most situations. KCI is hard, let's rework.)

Don't know. Never heard about it till today. Looks like this https://itunes.apple.com/app/apple-store/id933117605?mt=8 is the only IOS implementation

Blockchain-based social media and messengers are already in the development phase. It will take a few more years, but I think some of them can become mainstream.

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