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Comment by quaintdev | Hacker News Reader

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quaintdev

Examples of what can be built on Locutus include:

- Decentralized email (with a gateway to legacy email via the @freenet.org domain)

- Decentralized microblogging (think Twitter or Facebook)

- Instant Messaging (Whatsapp, Signal)

- Online Store (Amazon)

- Discussion (Reddit, HN)

- Video discovery (Youtube, TikTok)

- Search (Google, Bing)

Bluesky is just a decentralised social media.

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It is my understanding that the at protocol has the building blocks for alot of these use cases as well. So while yes bluesky the app is just a micro blogging social media, the protocol should be able to do the rest.

...email is already decentralized, though.

Email is federated no? Can't really email you if gmail bans you or goes under, or your domain is taken down somehow. But maybe with a decentralized email it's possible to email pubkeys directly.

gmail email is centralized. hosting your own email server would make it decentralized? I am not sure what makes things "federated".

Because if you host your own email server, the email address has a domain or possibly IP address to point at your server. But getting domains, or getting IP addresses are both centralized.

If you gave your email address to someone, you cannot change it on their devices. Your domain registrar with DNS for the domain case, or your ISP for the IP case, can stop email deliveries to you or redirect them somewhere else.

With a decentralized email, people email "you". Not "your username" on Google's service, or your username on a domain you rent from others, and not your username on an IP you rent from a centralized authority.

How do you prove your you-ness without some sort of centralized authority in this case? Or, alternatively, how do I know how to send an email to only you?

I think they mean from a user perspective. As a user I can create an account with a provider(be it google or myself), but I can't migrate that account without leaving a forwarding address at the original address.

The alternative would be storing the user data on a distributed data structure(like a pki network or distributed hash table) so that it's not tied to a single provider.

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