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Comment by stevewodil | Hacker News Reader

What happens when one peer doesn't have internet access for a moment and a snapchat is delivered at that moment? How do you build "retries" into a decentralized infrastructure? If no server is storing the content, couldn't someone fill up my phone storage simply by sending me videos repeatedly? The infrastructure forces my phone to instantly download the content, because no one is paying for storage of it before it gets routed to me right?

These are genuine questions because I don't understand everything either

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Have the receiving phone send an acknowledgement message back and if the sender's phone doesn't get one after a few seconds, show a "{name} failed to receive your message. Maybe they're offline." dialog. Allow the sender to try again later.

I like this idea and the features being brainstormed in the thread a lot

It wouldn't make sense for your phone to be part of a P2P network. It's only connected to your radio tower, and not really anything else.

Also, you could define a maximum file limit size, and at that point your phone would be considered backed up, and then if no other route is found, the transfer is cancelled after a certain timeout.

Well, these days a lot of phones are part of P2P networks such as BitTorrent, so that's not a blocker.

I’ve been thinking about a Pi Zero W w LoRa acting as a wifi bridge between the smartphone and the Pi and the Pi uses LoRa for the P2P portion.

>It wouldn't make sense for your phone to be part of a P2P network. It's only connected to your radio tower, and not really anything else.

That is only a software bug.

>How do you build "retries" into a decentralized infrastructure?

Heartbeat pings to contact list, cached at senders end until recipient is ready and offer aliased nodes as a feature so multiple devices can act as a RAID array for an identity, both at senders end and recipients.

> What happens when one peer doesn't have internet access for a moment and a snapchat is delivered at that moment?

The video will be on the sender's device until the recipient confirms that they have received a 100%. So this prevents a phone storage clogging situation.

> The infrastructure forces my phone to instantly download the content, because no one is paying for storage of it before it gets routed to me right?

Yeah, that would be accurate. There could be intermediaries that charge low prices to cache snaps for you so you didn't have to download it ASAP, but that would negate the ephemeral nature built into Snapchat)

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