I’m personally more interested in P2P protocols than federated, so that’s the stuff I build in my spare time.
So instead of something like Lemmy or Matrix, I’d have something like BitTorrent or Tor, so nodes just add capacity instead of hosting specific content. You could configure your node(s) to pin specific content (e.g. for backups or latency), but your data would also be distributed to other peoples’ computers.
This provides data redundancy, permanency of the service (no centralization whatsoever), and ease of scaling (every client could store and seed data), but comes with complexity. I think it’s workable though.
Matrix is probably something worth looking at, at least from an intellectual standpoint, for you.
It uses shared message state and a DAG, plus some fancy perfect forward secrecy (using Signal’s Double Ratchet algorithm), which is at least interesting.
There’s also Tox (chat/protocol) if you want totally distributed chat.
Personally, I really like distributed models from a theoretical standpoint; but for end-user applications they pose very difficult constraints, we live in a world with ⪅50% publicly routed IP for one, they fundamentally require immense data replication, latency in peer-finding, bandwidth constraints, and ultimately sub-par UX. I thought IPFS with a way to pay nodes to pin content was a really neat idea, but hasn’t caught on, for example. Not to discourage you, if you think it’s workable then have at it, but I think it at least explains the current state of things.
I’m personally more interested in P2P protocols than federated, so that’s the stuff I build in my spare time.
So instead of something like Lemmy or Matrix, I’d have something like BitTorrent or Tor, so nodes just add capacity instead of hosting specific content. You could configure your node(s) to pin specific content (e.g. for backups or latency), but your data would also be distributed to other peoples’ computers.
This provides data redundancy, permanency of the service (no centralization whatsoever), and ease of scaling (every client could store and seed data), but comes with complexity. I think it’s workable though.
Matrix is probably something worth looking at, at least from an intellectual standpoint, for you. It uses shared message state and a DAG, plus some fancy perfect forward secrecy (using Signal’s Double Ratchet algorithm), which is at least interesting. There’s also Tox (chat/protocol) if you want totally distributed chat.
Personally, I really like distributed models from a theoretical standpoint; but for end-user applications they pose very difficult constraints, we live in a world with ⪅50% publicly routed IP for one, they fundamentally require immense data replication, latency in peer-finding, bandwidth constraints, and ultimately sub-par UX. I thought IPFS with a way to pay nodes to pin content was a really neat idea, but hasn’t caught on, for example. Not to discourage you, if you think it’s workable then have at it, but I think it at least explains the current state of things.