Re: The messenger service is ready to use

[carlo von lynX]

On Sat, Mar 06, 2021 at 06:55:21PM +0100, TheJackiMonster wrote:
> Files will most likely be shared through the FS submodule of GNUnet.
> They get encrypted and the key for decryption gets shared through the
> messenger service. That's quite similar to the implementation of
> Threema except this is fully decentralized.

Super inefficient for small pieces of data I would assume,
and introducing so much latency that in the end it feels
slower than using the web. When simple things arrive in-band
you can display them immediately. I'd rather use FS for
things >1M.

> So file formats and similar are not really an issue which needs to
> addressed via a text based format for messages.

It's one of the few things that is *still* annoying with
modern messengers such as Telegram: you get to see a
blurred preview that was somehow embedded into JSON
and then depending on the condition of your network
you may have to wait seconds or minutes until the
actual content materialises on the screen. That's what
you get when you introduce OOB-fetching transactions
just because your message format can't handle data
natively.

> Yes, this makes sense. The problems I see with compatibility to
> Telegram are that Telegram is very different in its concepts.

True, so it would need some mapping and cheating…

> For example Telegram requires personal information to create an
> account. The messenger service doesn't require anything (no name, no
> mail address, no phone number) except that you have direct or indirect
> access to a peer running GNUnet. ^^'

Which brings about the disadvantage of having to "add" each
person interactively before being able to even start. Would
be ok if there was no unfair competition, but messengers
are unfair competition.

> Also you can't mix end-to-end encrypted messages with transport-only-
> encrypted messages in Telegram (or at least the interface would require
> major changes to handle that).

But in our case it would simply be an extra E2E on top of
CADET's Axolotl… pretty unnecessary.


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