It's amazing how P2P basically doesn't exist anywhere. Open source got taken over completely by federated/self hosted, or Blockchain.

Commerical stuff is all cloud based, for some reason (Even surveillance doesn't explain it, you can put telemetry in proprietary P2P apps)

We have really good long range Bluetooth and LoRa and yet there is not one decent affordable alternative to decades old analog FRS after all this time.

It's like devs want everything to fall apart the moment the internet goes down.

check out hyperswarm/holepunch: https://docs.holepunch.to/

or urbit: https://urbit.org

They have some pretty impressive tech, but they're not ready to use polished apps on all platforms like BitTorrent and SyncThing are.

Plus it seems like urbit has a lot of stuff tied to Ethereum and anything using those features might have some issues if you don't have access to the internet.

this is true, these p2p apps do assume internet access lol

I blame NAT.

I got online around 1994, behind a corporate firewall through my Dad’s work and it took me ages to work out why no one could reach my web server I was running on that machine, despite getting all the DNS setup right.

I think that’s when the penny dropped that the internet isn’t necessarily open; not everyone can reach everyone else.

NAT always meant there was something (fiddly port forwards, or broken UPnP) in the way of a user publishing stuff from their own machines.

You always had to have a web host - to rely on someone else’s computers - to publish your message. And so it continues.

Bittorrent was the only P2P system that solved all the thorny NAT issues in a satisfactory way.

NAT might have been what started it all, but PKI and DNS are the problem now I think.

Nobody wants to self host an insecure thing, but security t requires self signed certs(A hassle, often not even supported well, nobody else can see it unless they go through the cert installing hassle either), or a domain name and let's encrypt(Manual work that costs money).

What I suspect we should have done is just collapsed TLS and IP into the same protocol, and put the certs hash right onto the IP, so that as long as DNS gives you the right address, you're secure.

Then all you have to do is make DNS run over that same secured IP, and DNS will never give you a bad IP, and as soon as you buy a domain, you get security without having to think about it at all on the application side, besides giving yourself a new key in your IP periodically or when it gets compromised.

Yggdrasil has it right, but they have to use almost the whole 128 bits, and rely on mesh routing, there's not really a way to fit traditional IPv6 routing AND good security in just 16 bytes.

Also, routers with bad UPnP implementations did not help. Now you can't rely on all non-technical users having it enabled because people don't trust it.

There are digital voice and message modes in the amateur radio space. I've used dstar myself, yaesu fusion is common, P25 and DMR are also a thing.

I've been tempted for a while to pick up one of these Unihertz Atom XL's with DMR and analog FM transceivers built in.

https://www.amazon.com/Unihertz-Smallest-Walkie-Talkie-Smart...

Unfortunately, many of these are proprietary protocols that are hindered by patents.

The other legal problem is that any p2p communication system is very quickly taken over by the sharing of copyrighted content, and then by stuff like child porn. This is, for example, what happened recently with Firefox Send.

For any p2p system, law enforcement go after the creators of the system, because that's the only entity they can go after besides those who actually commit the crimes.

However, if one builds a federated system with moderation tools built in, then law enforcement go after the ones running "bad" instances rather than the system builders.

There's (kind of) a way around that, if you don't build sharing things to the public in an anonymous way into your system.

SyncThing and Jami are fine because they don't provide publishing tools the way BitTorrent does, just personal use and private group tools.

There's still lots of unexplored potential that has nothing to do with publishing, but most P2P devs seem to be most interesting in trying to get rid of all centralization entirely and build a whole new internet.

I don't follow Mozilla news, but it looks like FF Send claims they closed because people were using it to ship malware.

I used it (Xtreme version) to chat with my now-wife during my university graduation ceremony, as I sat on the stand and she sat in the upper level audience seating.

It worked really well, and the chats managed to get me so distracted that I got into the diploma line twice.

This and many other memories have me wishing I could use it emulated somehow. It would be so funny to set it up on her laptop and send a chat.

Thanks Cybiko!

There is a Cybiko emulator out there! Obviously it can't talk to nearby Cybikos but it's still fun to play old games and mess around with the apps

Thanks, I'll look again. I found one about a year ago but had issues running it in Wine probably.

There is also an emulator that runs in a web browser. https://www.reddit.com/r/cybiko/comments/z79f2p/cybiko_emula...