Re: Decentralized reliable instant messaging?

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

On Tue 30 Aug 2016 at 09:05:36 (-0400), Stefan Monnier wrote:
> [...] Are you saying [TOX] doesn't have reliable
> message delivery?  If so, that'd be a deal breaker for me.

On Wed 31 Aug 2016 at 09:44:01 (-0400), Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > It's better that your message Not arrive instead of being disclose! and
> > This is the philosophy behind True P2P IM systems.
> 
> Oh, I don't need 100% absolutely guaranteed delivery.
> 
> Just some reasonable expectation that messages won't be silently dropped
> on the floor in fairly normal circumstances.

Not knowing what the application is, it's difficult to do more than
throw a few suggestions into the ring (and have them shot down, to mix
metaphors).

I've seen things mentioned that I'd never heard of, like Astrachat,
AMQP, Protonmail, to mention but three. So it might be time to
weigh things up with a summary of what you've learned, and perhaps
to rank them on scales of reliability, centralisation, security, etc.

You appear to have enough requirements perhaps to think about using
two parallel systems in combination, as I suggested in
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2016/08/msg00604.html
(which only addressed the online/offline problem).

> >> Stefan "shocked that anyone would want to design or use an
> >> unreliable messaging system"

There are plenty of precendents: scratching on walls, tossing bottles
into the ocean, exporting golden records. Obviously EMI were convinced
that those records would be retrieved by someone within 100 years and
pirated, as they refused permission to export "Here Comes the Sun"
from the solar system.

Cheers,
David.