Interoperability without sacrificing privacy: Matrix and the DMA

Re:Interoperability without sacrificing privacy: Matrix and ... by paxys on Friday March 25, 2022 @06:06PM (#30807462)

> potentially allowing people to have zero accounts, and just having a private key file on their device (or synched between multiple devices) and a display name of their choosing

Isn't that what an "account" ultimately is? You need a way to tell the server – "route all messages to and from me using this identifier". That ID can be a display name, or a phone number (like WhatsApp), or email or whatever else. And the server has to persist that ID on their end and associate it with your current session.

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Re:Interoperability without sacrificing privacy: Matrix and ... by dane-pgp on Friday March 25, 2022 @06:29PM (#30807615)

Yes, but I think I was imagining a world without servers.

For example, you could update your IP address (for people to contact you at) by sending a signed message to a global DHT, or, for more privacy, put the address of your current rendezvous server in the DHT instead. The rendezvous server would be responsible for forwarding incoming connections to you, which you could refuse based on the public key of the initiator.

If the rendezvous server only stores a lookup between your public key and IP address, perhaps only in memory, for a few hours, before you switch to a different rendezvous server, that doesn't feel like having an "account" on a server.

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