Pre Microsoft Skype was malware-grade good. I still remember sysadmins imploding in impotent rage as it near effortlessly evaded their firewalling attempts.
I think it's only the WWW that went from wickedly good to sour and evil. The P2P world is just as good as it used to be, just not as force-fed and loud as the unhinged hellscape that is Web 2.0. If you look, you will probably find whatever you're looking for with just a DHT link.
Well that and people seem to really enjoy (or at least feel compelled to use) social networks.
Social networks tend to be pretty difficult in p2p systems since the amount of traffic usually scales exponentially with network size (as posts get published to followers and shared over and over by the users of the network), which you’d want to maximize
Say I have 100 followers and each of them have 100 followers.
Then say I make a post and all of my followers repost it.
That’s an explosion of updates that need to be sent around for 101 interactions.
These major social media platforms handle millions of interactions per second with accounts that have millions of followers and posts that get hundreds of thousands of reposts.
When there’s a centralized system, it’s easier to make sure everyone gets all their posts. Very little need to propagate every single update across every node in your whole network. From a user standpoint it’s seamless as well
It’s nothing unsolvable, but it’s much harder than a centralized social media platform while providing no visible benefit for the average, non technical, user.
I think that NAT is a major reason why P2P and self hosting failed to take off in any significant way. I think that the internet would have been a wildly different place were IPv6 widespread in the early '00s.
I wonder why NAT hole punching techniques never took off much with P2P, it seems like with enough work getting around NAT most of the time would be possible.
Good, reliable ways to do hole punching were not available until relatively late (STUN, ICE) and were somewhat finicky for a long time, especially on crappy routers.
Also, multiple levels of nat are unfortunately common and make STUN unreliable
In your car you have an expectation of privacy. Public transport is by definition a public space and thus has no expectation of privacy. Whole different ruleset applies. Anyone can monitor you on a bus. Without your consent too.
A couple days after that United Health CEO was assasinated they has video of the suspect from a deluge of sources and none of them were from busses or cars.
Nearly every business has cameras. More and more residential homes have porch cameras pointed at the street. Even if your vehicle isn't monitoring you, it has a license plate hanging off the back so it can be easily identified. We're all being tracked by our phones, and everybody else's phone will be used against you should you be caught acting weird in pubic. There are records of me in more databases than what's even knowable, the plot is so lost. We're back to being naked all the time, except now without the privilege of knowing who is looking at you.
I felt like people rallying against surveillance and tracking were beating a dead horse 20 years ago and I feel even more that way today.
in practice, in a car your motions are tracked and stored forever (you, today, already inplemented) by both automated license plate readers, the car’s phone home gps, and typically the phone in your pocket. In a bus, if you pay with a card its tracked where you got on, and they can run facial recognition after the fact, but its at least not greppable
Possibly the point is that an individual can not be as easily tracked by first identifying the bus, however most cars are registered to their owners. Nowadays most buses and public transport are full of CCTV though so same problem really.
Nah, power forces you to operate in a different paradigm as does absolute power to an absolute degree. It's a known psychological factor, called "professional deformation" or even "occupational psychosis".
Telegram and Signal having hundreds of millions of "regular person" users since then says different. It doesn't seem apparent because in the past decade Big Tech has dropped any pretensions around caring about privacy other than for themselves. In the past 5 years, they've deepened their role in the natsec apparatus as well.
