Request for software: Messenger
2021-05-18 Permalink
Is there a messenger that satisfies these criteria (or can somebody already make one)?
- Open protocol.
- Distributed P2P with E2E encryption.
- Identity is own public key.
- Arbitrary MIME messages of unlimited size.
- Real-time video and audio if the other peer is online.
- Support multiple devices (sharing identity and syncing).
- Group chat.
- No unrelated hyped bloat (e.g. blockchains).
If/when there is one, can we all start using it, please?
All popular platforms out-there fail on, at least, four of the eight items. This includes Facebook, Signal, Telegram, Twitter or WhatsApp.
Surprisingly, IRC and SMTP are better fits than the aforementioned platforms.
Closest call so far: Tox, with a score of 7/8. Unfortunately it doesn't support syncing between multiple devices. Also would be better if their IDs were shorter.
Nice to haves
Offline delivery: P2P usually requires both peers to be online to exchange messages. A possible solution is to allow the user to temporarily store short messages within the distributed network. A trust-based system can be used where friends-of-friends can cache the messages for offline delivery.
Swarm delivery: in order for group chats to be scalable, the participants in the group would need to form a "swarm" similar to that of other P2P file sharing networks.
Social: let users broadcast messages to any interested subscriber ("tweeting"). Let users reply to those posts. Automatically discover 3rd party replies to messages.