It's too bad we fell so hard for centralization. In an alternate universe, messaging on the Internet could have been:
1. Alice's device has a publicly routable IP address with a domain name like alice.home.her.isp
2. Bob's device is has same qualities, using: bob.mobile.his.isp
Then Alice can just open her chat app up, add bob@bob.mobile.his.isp and off they go. I mean we had UNIX's "talk" for how long but instead of evolving/securing/fixing it, we blew it! And now we have all these companies 1. coming up with their own incompatible protocols and 2. inserting their stupid centralized servers as intermediaries. And now every chat message we send over the Internet has to be received and re-sent through a handful of amoral corporations.
Why is this any better? It doesn't solve any of the identity and end-to-end encryption problems centralized messengers do; it just changes the underlying connectivity model, which is the least interesting part of the system.
>In an alternate universe, messaging on the Internet could have been:
I don't think so, and I think the very reason is because the people who opt for these decentralized solutions never really sit down and try and design a product, they just want decentralization for the sake of decentralization. For them decentralization is the product. Your alternate universe evaporates when you ask the question "what happens if Alice's device is offline?".
If you squint, the exact system you are describing is e-mail, and that has become effectively centralized, and it happened long before we had tech mega corps.
The issue with email is that too little is specified, and is instead just left up to providers and clients.
This specification vacuum forces centralization because the only way to build essential usability features is to own both the mail server and the mail client.
If email had evolved to move with the times such that basic QoL features were part of the spec rather than proprietary extensions, then it could have stayed decenteralized.
Contrast with what happened on the web. Yes it's imperfect but there is a standard that evolves to move with the times and there are multiple implementations of that standard.
Decentralized cooperation and associated protocols is a lot harder than just inserting messages into a MySQL database and then displaying those messages.
If people spent half the time they do wishing for decentralized messaging working on the actual problems with it, we would have decentralized messaging.
If people spent 5 minutes googling decentralized alternatives to stuff they would realize they don’t need to build anything, just pick something and use.
1. Alice's device has a publicly routable IP address with a domain name like alice.home.her.isp
2. Bob's device is has same qualities, using: bob.mobile.his.isp
Then Alice can just open her chat app up, add bob@bob.mobile.his.isp and off they go. I mean we had UNIX's "talk" for how long but instead of evolving/securing/fixing it, we blew it! And now we have all these companies 1. coming up with their own incompatible protocols and 2. inserting their stupid centralized servers as intermediaries. And now every chat message we send over the Internet has to be received and re-sent through a handful of amoral corporations.