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Could SimpleX be P2P ?
(lemmy.ml)
Community of SimpleX Chat users โ managed by the team.
SimpleX Chat is the first chat platform that is 100% private by design โ it has no user identifiers of any kind and no access to your connections graph โ it's a more private design than any alternative we know of.
Please ask any questions and make feature suggestions. Your ideas and criticism are very welcome!
https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat
Depends a bit on what you mean by p2p.
If you mean it as anyone can run their own server - this is already possible. But since message inboxes are one way you can really only control how the server for the messages your are receiving. The messages you send go to wherever the destination says they should go.
If by P2P you mean fully decentralized with no distinction between clients and servers then the discussion is a bit longer, but right now no, and for practical reasons probably not. Let me elaborate a bit.
First the protocol assumes a client, that is your messaging app, delivers the message to a server which is identified by a hostname/ip (you ability to deliver depends on this server being up and working).
For practical reasons the server is a separate entity, just like in email delivery protocols, because
Now, in practice nothing prevents your client and server from being the same machine, but if the previous two points are not true you will have a bad experience receiving your messages. Specially since most clients are on mobile phones, these two points will likely not be true.
Another thing we could do to get it to be fully distributed would be to run simplex on top of other p2p protocol - anything w/ a DHT that can expose ports to the Internet (Tor, GNUNet, etc). But this has one downside - the client app would need to recognize new types of inbox addresses and connect accordingly.
You could probably achieve this with Tor and some .onion host setup. But then anyone that wanted to deliver to you would need an equivalent setup.
Apologies, I tend to nerd on about distributed systems.
You souldn't apologie. We should thank you for nerding and give to those interested, valuable information !