Richard Stallman had a dream where you control your computing. And XMPP is the closest social network in line with Richard Stallman’s vision of the internet. This instant message protocol, allows for you to easily host your own server, it’s fast and efficient, and has lots of different open source clients to choose from. Additionally, by making it extensible, it allows for anyone to build upon it to get their own desired features. This article goes over some of the basics of XMPP: https://simplifiedprivacy.com/xmpp-decentralized-signal-get-your-own-social-network/
Note: There are no affiliate links or sales text in this educational article discussing open source. Let’s discuss the technology and not attack the author.
The thing that frustrates me in all these discussions is that everybody is missing the bigger picture. The problem isn’t Facebook, Reddit or Twitter, the core problem is the Internet itself, DNS, HTTPS and all that stuff that other stuff that stops working when you are stuck behind a NAT with a dynamic IP, as all regular users are. The modern Internet does not work for P2P communication.
That is the problem that needs attacking. Nothing else matters. Figure out how to find a person/account on the net and establish a data connection to them. Solve that and you chat with
netcat, no need for fancy apps. Don’t solve it and you’ll just get a crap load of garbage apps that all will fail sooner or later. For example all my XMPP addresses are no longer working sinceuser@hostis a stupid way to handle identities whenuseris not the one controllinghostand owninghostcosts money.PS: There are some projects around like
libp2por IPFS that try to solve it, but nothing of that has gained bigger traction from what I understand. Freenet also just got a complete restart from scratch, though no idea what state of usable that is in.Wouldn’t IPv6 solve this? Give each device a static address and you have the state of the internet before NAT became necessary
No it won’t resolve the HTTPS and DNS centralized issues.
Yes, somewhat. The problem is places still suck at adopting it, especially phone carriers, and most people are primarily connected via their phones and a lot of people even use that infrastructure as a replacement for broadband as well.
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It might be because I live in the UK.
The internet I use is permanently stuck in “use phone carrier as backup” mode and we don’t have ipv6 because of that.
Data for me also seems stuck in ipv4.
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No, not really, at least not by itself. IPv6 only makes NAT a tiny little easier/unnecessary, as every computer has a routeable IP address. However, many routers will block incoming connections by default, so you still have to go to your router config and fiddle, just as with NAT. IPv6 also doesn’t help with DNS, a routeable address by itself is meaningless when there is no means to find out what address the other guy has. IPv6 are dynamic and change all the time, even more frequently than IPv4.
VeilID might be something you find interesting. It’s designed to solve exactly this problem by enabling most nodes to NATsmash with help for p2p stuff, and also provides a general and very strong privacy framework including torlike routing .
It was only unveiled at defcon this year though so the team behind it (Cult Of The Dead Cow) are trying to put docs in place ;p
Its completely written in rust, easily embeddable, has good content locality and is probably the cleanest, most performant, and most easily integrated into projects architecture for stuff like this that I’ve seen, as a programmer who’s into this space and familiar with things like i2p, tor, etc. I really hope this one takes off, and the quality of it means I really think it could (at least once they throw the docs together ;p)