What's the use case? I'm assuming one is trying to send a message to someone far away so it seems like the alternatives wouldn't necessarily help.

A bunch of countries turn off the internet at the first sign of protests, hell sometimes they just turn it off to stop "a bunch of college kids from cheating during test week"

Coming to a country near you soon

Right but Bluetooth and local Wi-Fi are very short range so it doesn't actually solve that problem

It does if you consider that everyone can act as a relay.

This is also how apple airtags can be find anywhere there's an iphone users nearby.

I haven't studied the protocol but that seems like it has some...obvious routing issues.

Airtags have a totally different architecture than what this protocol is describing, I think.

> I haven't studied the protocol but that seems like it has some...obvious routing issues.

Yes indeed. I don't understand how the peer-to-peer relaying can possibly scale without some directed routing algorithm.

If my phone running Briar is literally handing off every as-yet-undelivered message to every other phone running Briar, we're going to pretty quickly become overwhelmed.

It'll have all the routing issues of a Wi-Fi mesh network, except at a vast scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network#Briar

> It does if you consider that everyone can act as a relay.

Let's think this through. Imagine civil war breaks out in Australia, and communications infrastructure is destroyed or shut off. I'm in Sydney and want to transmit a message to a friend in Perth.

How exactly is "everyone acts as a relay" going to work? In particular, how is it going to scale when everyone in the country is trying to do the same things?

> This is also how apple airtags can be find anywhere there's an iphone users nearby.

This is incorrect. Airtags (and the Google version) communicate with nearby Internet-connected devices, via Bluetooth and NFC I think. Those nearby Internet-connected devices send the airtag's location to a server.

Nothing about this would work without the Internet.

> Airtags (and the Google version) communicate with nearby Internet-connected devices, via Bluetooth and NFC I think

Yes, exactly (BLE, UWB, NFC).

First, Airtags only have a coin-cell battery. It is not remotely viable for them to be doing any sort of serious "communicating" because the battery would die in seconds.

Second, making the Airtag effectively a dumb device means you gain the various security and privacy benefits, and means everything needed to make the magic happen can be transmitted in a single BLE/UWB/NFC packet (bringing us back to the battery life aspect already mentioned).

30,000ft view of how it works: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sece994d0126/...

Yeah, I think current tech assumes a server relay. However imo, and if I were to imagine a solution, in this case I think a message would need a ttl, say 24 hours. In a local mesh/hive everyone would store a copy of the undelivered messages. When people move between hives they would sync these undelivered messages where ttl didn't expire. With perhaps a storage limit of say 1k undelivered messages. Undelivered means a destination user that didn't show in a hive. Wdyt?

> With perhaps a storage limit of say 1k undelivered messages.

If you want this to scale you'd need a scheme to deal with limited cache per device. Something like having each device assign a random priority to each message it has in transit. That way everyone culls a different set when things fill up.

> would need a ttl, say 24 hours

Probably better off scaling priority by age. That way you deliver if at all possible, until it eventually falls out of cache. Some people will be able to dedicate much more storage than others.

I do think this approach would be fairly tractable within "hives" where most of the members have few-hop connections to all of the others, most of the time. The trouble is that there would be so many unpredictable cases:

- Regular travelers between cities (e.g. flight attendants) might be the only reliable links between those hives. Travel patterns change, war breaks out, etc and the hive suddenly splits into two (or more). - A lot of people probably move around too much, and too unpredictable, to participate in a hive that's stable on scales necessary to maintain a TTL of <24h and a reasonable amount of cache for storing others’ undelivered messages.

Maybe I'm being too pessimistic here… I do think it'd be fascinating and instructive to try to build and use a hive/mesh messaging system like this at scale.

The Galapagos Island "post office" is an interesting real world example of serverless/decentralized message delivery: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/galapagos-...

Basically, if you visit the Galapagos and you're so inclined… you leave a letter for someone else, and you sift through the letters that have been left there, and try to find one or two that you could conceivably hand-deliver when you return home.

The latency is 100~1000x longer than "normal" snail mail. This is basically with one "hive" constructed around tourists and researchers in an unusual location. But it basically works.

Other phones with Briar installed can carry your (encrypted) messages, as in a game of whisper. This works best if enough people between you and the recipient had Briar installed ... but most people don't.

But I see how this feature could be very helpful if a state shuts down internet connectivity or during war or a natural catastrophe. The nifty thing is that the app can be shared from one device to another, so you are not dependent on having the app in advance of an emergency.

Ideally, everyone should have this installed as an insurance :)

> Other phones with Briar installed can carry your (encrypted) messages

Sounds like an excellent target for DoS

DoS by local users on local networks? This is that thing where you solve the cryptography problem with the $5 wrench but only slightly different, right?

I haven't looked at the implementation. I was making an off the cuff comment to see if anyone had more information, but yes, ultimately I assume that you could mute an unwanted node with brute force? Or just move further away from it?

I was thinking more you flood the "mail bag" of the "message carrier" and assume the implementation has a LRU eviction policy on said "mail bag".

Someone not participating in briar or the DoS can use fing (android app) or a signal strength meter (handheld, I have 2, personally) to direction find and triangulate the person sending the traffic. Hence $5 lead pipe.

and by "someone" i mean "any android cellphone"

> This works best if enough people between you and the recipient had [...] installed ... but most people don't.

Which is why it would be nice if operating systems already included such functionality

This is not true, unless you are all in one big fourm or you have a chain of shared blogs. I think they are woried about metadata privacy or people using this to do a DoS.

It is very much in the bingo cards that internet gets shut off in America as an extension of strong-arm policies.

You mean the substrate of our entire economic engine? I think that's a bit dramatic.

It is a bit dramatic.

On the other hand, imagine it’s 2015 and someone tells you that in ten years, we could have an administration starting trade wars with Canada and Europe, talking of withdrawing from NATO and establishing a military base in Hungary, hacking away at the administrative state with an extralegal, roving band of 19 year old code monkeys… I know that I would have dismissed the idea.

These days, I don’t feel much certainty that anything is too far.

What, like free trade?

Parent didn't say all the internet at once, it could just be a matter of telling telecoms to block connections within certain geofences when protests start to flare up, Egypt 2011 style.

Could even bring down 4G services while whitelisting POS terminals, keep the Starbuckses up and running.

I dunno why you're getting downvoted so much.

This sort of thing seemed unthinkable a decade ago, or even in the first Trump admin, but definitely doesn't now.

Other similarly-inclined regimes like Modi in India have proven the effectiveness of targeted Internet shutdowns.

I've really been trying to get Signal to get some decentralization[0] but unfortunately I pissed off some mods. I do understand their reasoning for staying away from full decentralization, both Moxie and Meredith have made good arguments. But I think this is something where there's a really good middle ground. Where both parties highly benefit.

Users get a lot of added utility, "fun", and not to mention a huge upgrade in privacy and security (under local settings), while Signal gets to reduce a lot of data transfer over the network. There's a lot of use cases for local message and file sharing (see thread) and if the goal is to capture as little data as possible about the users, well let's not capture any network traffic when users are in close proximity, right? It's got to be a lot harder to pick up signals that only are available within a local proximity than signals traveling across the internet. The option of expanding to a mesh network can be implemented later[1] but I don't understand how an idea like this doesn't further the stated goals.

The big problem with things like Briar is that you can't install it after the internet has been turned off AND it is already unpopular. But if an existing app with an existing userbase implements even some meshing then this benefits all those users when an event like that happens. Not to mention there's clear utility in day-to-day life.

[0] https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-airdrop/37402

[1] I think a mesh network maintains the constraints both Moxie and Meredith have discussed, concerns about ensuring servers are up to data. But then again I'm not sure why that can't be resolved in the same way it is already done where if you let Signal fall too far behind in updates then it will no longer communicate with the servers.

> The big problem with things like Briar is that you can't install it after the internet has been turned off AND it is already unpopular

Sideloading an .apk is supported in all Android versions, right? Even without internet access? Is something more needed to install Briar?

Sure, but this doesn't really scale very well. Distributing those APKs without internet access is pretty hard.

you can distribute it via the same mechanism which distributes your messages

Briar already has this built in via the "Share this app offline" feature. It starts a wifi hotspot from which people can download the apk.

Also Fdroid has support for local distribution and discovery for offline scenarios.

Firechat did meshed WiFi during 2014 Hong Kong protests

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/29/firechat-messa...

China went to hard mode to kill the app.

Secure Scuttlebutt can do similarly. A wandering node can ferry messages to another cluster of nodes; it's used by sailboats where someone visits shore to run errands and exchanges messages as they go.

Do you know of any documentation to get SSB bootstrapped? I tried several times, but I hit a wall of not being able to find any active communities, plus there were old-style, technically obsolete communities and new-style communities, and half the available documentation referred to each, so it was impossible to figure out what to do.

Nope, same issue myself.

I find it fascinating to read about, but it seems to have a steep and very slippery social hill to climb before the technical parts of the network do anything.

I'm fairly certain there is not a working implementation of ssb in it's original form anymore.

But yes, it had local wifi sync.