I'm curious what the motivation is for the protocol being decentralized?
Being serverless is cool and all, but what makes it worth all the extra complexity and effort?
To me the future of decentralized group chats is focused on what's missing from platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram and WeChat:
- Verifiable Sender and Conversation Privacy
- Censorship Resistance / Permission-less operation
- User ownership of their own messaging (no application lock-in)
- Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL) protections
While maintaining a similar feature set:
- Efficient scalable groups
- Recovery from compromised/stolen devices
- Accessible UX for non-technical users
All design work is managing trade offs, however this approach appears to make some serious concessions:
Sender & Social Graph Privacy: Queries in a DHT (like Kademlia) bind the requested key to the requester's IP/Node ID. This would allow the network to be able to reconstruct the social graph, and unmask group membership by associating who is querying for who.
Compromise Recovery: Users are unable to rotate their own keys without the creator being online. In the event a device/account is compromised, a user has no mechanism to stop attackers from posting messages on their behalf.
Additionally with the group size limits, lack of forward secrecy/post compromise security -
My question is, what makes this particular path worth it?
Being serverless is cool and all, but what makes it worth all the extra complexity and effort?
To me the future of decentralized group chats is focused on what's missing from platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram and WeChat: - Verifiable Sender and Conversation Privacy - Censorship Resistance / Permission-less operation - User ownership of their own messaging (no application lock-in) - Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL) protections
While maintaining a similar feature set: - Efficient scalable groups - Recovery from compromised/stolen devices - Accessible UX for non-technical users
All design work is managing trade offs, however this approach appears to make some serious concessions:
Sender & Social Graph Privacy: Queries in a DHT (like Kademlia) bind the requested key to the requester's IP/Node ID. This would allow the network to be able to reconstruct the social graph, and unmask group membership by associating who is querying for who.
Compromise Recovery: Users are unable to rotate their own keys without the creator being online. In the event a device/account is compromised, a user has no mechanism to stop attackers from posting messages on their behalf.
Additionally with the group size limits, lack of forward secrecy/post compromise security -
My question is, what makes this particular path worth it?