Comment by falien | Hacker News Reader

Comment by falien | Hacker News Reader

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(not associated in any way with tent.io)

1. Just because it is allowed by the protocol doesn't mean any given client needs to pay any attention. Just like email, I can filter out any messages from people not in my contacts. I may choose not to and instead run each one of those messages through a spam filter. In this respect it really seems no different than email. Individual clients/servers can choose to be as strict as they like (but servers are servers, and they are sitting on the internet, so spammers can see them and send messages that will be ignored if they like).

2. Since connections with most of your contacts are theoretically maintained so you can push out new data, updating is more akin to propagating a new ip through the DNS system than using a redirect. Yes a DNS server can misbehave, but that can only screw up a network of well behaved servers for so long.

1. People learned (grudgingly) to use spam filters with their email because they had an existing service which had achieved large-scale network effect in a spam-free environment. A new service which develops a spam problem before it achieves critical mass is much more likely to be abandoned.

There must be some reason we haven't seen successful new decentralized service protocols on the Internet since the early '90s. I don't know of a more obvious one.

You can see the issues with StatusNet and spam:

https://www.google.com/search?q=statusnet+spam

2. The problem is that contact names propagate outward from the master state where a push will update them. For instance, they get written down on business cards. They also get cached, imprudently but inevitably, in forms that are still digital but don't update properly.

Imagine a protocol that you could use to update your email address this way, and you'll see the problem. In theory, you could design a special SMTP message that would cause all clients to update their address books. In reality this would scale quite poorly and be quite unreliable, leading people to avoid it, leading it to be even more unreliable, etc. Of course, your chances are much better with a bright, shiny new protocol... but still.

RE 2. I agree since some servers that you are trying to push your new address may already have changed theirs. What happens then? Do my friends inform me? What if that unreachable server is not connected to my friends in any way?

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