That's not exactly true, usually people are already working on distributed systems, and use the failure of centralized systems as an opportunity to point them out.

I personally would greatly fear a decentralized system like Skype, for many reasons.

"Greatly fear" seems hyperbolic. What do you find fearsome about a decentralized Skype?

would do more harm here than good

Such as? I think the adoption of Jabber for IM has worked quite well so far. If Facebook goes down, I don't have to worry about my Google Chat not working.

What problems do you foresee in terms of decentralizing audio/video along with instant messaging?

We already have a distributed voip platform. "distributed" in the same way as email is at least. Just set up a sip server with appropriate SRV records in the DNS. I'm not sure what Tor has to do with anything.

And as michaelchisari said, we already have distributed IM via the magic of XMPP federation.

Sorry you missed some steps there:

- Just set up a sip server with appropriate SRV records in the DNS.

- Discover that you also need A records (that now collides with webserver on your domain), because not every client supports SRV. (and some also need NAPTR)

- Discover that half of the phones are not compatible with your server out of the box.

- Discover that to support vendor A you need to enable X and to support vendor B you need to disable X.

- Discover that you cannot call users on network xyz.com because you're not authorized to.

XMPP, email, etc. are nice and well defined (yes, even email with all its problems) compared to SIP. SIP works ok-ish within one limited domain and one set of (clients-servers). It does not work between unrelated people. Additionally big internet telephony "supporters" like Cisco will do a lot to make sure your phone works correctly only with their gateway and almost nothing else (voip non-supporters like MS will do the same).

Yeah. I also didn't supply server setup instructions and service configuration examples. Sorry.

We do have a distributed voip network. But yes, it does need work to improve it. Skypes simplicity is what makes it so popular.

What I was trying to say is that currently - no, we do not have any sane working solution. It's not about setting up and configuration. It simply doesn't work as advertised. It's not distributed (unfortunately) and half of the industry works very hard to prevent it from being distributed (although I wouldn't attribute it to malice).

XMPP/jingle is in a much better position to be the distributed answer. SIP is not.

Ok, I was simply addressing this nonsensical comment:

"I personally would greatly fear a decentralized system like Skype, for many reasons. Peer-to-peer anything comes with its own truckload of problems, and would do more harm here than good (as with the DNS)."

Thank you for mentioning Jingle. I was not aware of its existence.

But spreading FUD about decentralized/p2p systems is OK, right?