@icon_of_computational_sin > Three months later I return and check my P2P Email. Where exactly were the messages I was sent stored all this time? Yeah...
On #NNCP? On the nearest node on the route from the source to you, insofar as the expiration settings for messages haven't deleted them.

Presuming friendly peers as you'd assume from a friend-to-friend setup? That expiration could just be set to never.

As for chrome it's very easy: Don't use it. Cheers 🎉

@eater @noracodes There's also #AsynchronousCommunication like #NNCP, which makes no assumption of adequacy & fitness of infrastructure (such assumptions are often wrong).

But also some #meshnet projects like #Gnunet do actually (optionally) handle the lower layers of the networking stack (short of physical itself).

So many of those blogs about #GPG being bad make this weird mistake of going "but there are no good reasons to encrypt messages or files as standalone units, use encrypted chat/synchronous transfer like magic-wormhole", completely ignoring that #AsynchronousCommunication is a use-case that absolutely should be supported.

So that leaves you with #age or #NNCP (among others), though many of those articles fail to mention either of them.

Why do people assume reliable low-latency connectivity?

> See, because you need an always-on computer in order to really reliably use #decentralized social media
Bruh. #Usenet, #Fidonet and #UUCP (#UUCPnet) beg to differ (no reason you couldn't use #NNCP for Usenet now if #NNTP isn't your thing).

So do #SSB and #retroshare.

That criticism is pretty much specific to #ActivityPub as commonly implemented.

The #Fediverse is more than just ActivityPub and will outlive it.

@aprilfollies @pluralistic If you're actually interested in #sneakernet and #AsynchronousCommunication, you might find #NNCP interesting.

It's a renewed #UUCP essentially, with modern encryption & first-class support for portable storage as a transport (https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/Comparison.html).

@pooserville Not really, the comparison to email was only ever a comparison.

Email never actually had this issue in a way that mattered until the idiotic tendency for assuming constant low-latency TCP-friendly connections fully set-in.

You can still send email over #floppies, #Fidonet, #UUCP and #NNCP just fine, by the way.

And you completely ignored my second post, which suggested several ways by which the design could've avoided reimplementing #SMTP but for social media.

@ernie This point extends perfectly well to the Free Software / #FLOSS community also.

I work on what I find fun and interesting. I have no illusion that #NNCP, #Gopher, #Yggdrasil, and such are suddenly going to become popular. But wow are they FUN to work with, and useful too. I blog for the same reason. I've written several books with major publishers, about topics I enjoy, but still, I find that writing about what I want, when I want, without a deadline is more fulfilling.

@navi @bartavi #Email has a much better defined retry behavior in SMTP.

(Protocols dependent on successful low-latency TCP connections essentially don't qualify as supporting #AsynchronousCommunication, https://www.complete.org/asynchronous-communication/, email as commonly used does as noted there)

It is also simply not dependent on #SMTP in the first place, you can use #UUCP, #NNCP, #fidonet or a thumb drive (or floppy) with a spool just as well for it.

#ActivityPub as defined by the standard lacks that flexibility.

@babouille @ariadne You need not have multiple device IDs?

Even without any special steps, your devices will achieve eventual consistency on next lookup (unless something dies, but that'd be why I want message-centric gossip distributed & p2p systems to catch on).

The only aspect that requires synchronization would be whatever configuration decides what you want to keep, delete, follow, etc and your own sent messages.

That could be handled by some messaging scheme over #Syncthing or #NNCP.

@mint @roboneko @i2p @torproject @z3r0fox So new keys would also need extensions to the protocol for sharing.

Starts to be quite a few. It's weird to make a federation protocol in this day & age and not consider peering difficulties and inability to communicate directly (fuck, #Usenet does it better via #UUCP & #NNCP).

China isn't the only regime with a hard-on for censorship and utter disregard for the sanctity of networks after all. That should have been part of the design considerations.

@aurynn s/Signal/NNCP on I2P/

#NNCP #I2P

@profoundlynerdy @delta In terms of names, I don't have a survey. I have a couple dozen or so using my quux.org public relay. For what, I don't know, because #NNCP is encrypted. Personally, my biggest use case is airgapped backups, where it processes thousands of hourly zfs sends a week for me. My page at https://www.complete.org/ideas-for-nncp-projects/ may help you get started.

I think NNCP is particularly strong for #offline scenarios... 1/

@0xDEADBEEF @helge I haven't dug too far into #NNCP, but I suspect the "message type" is just text with a path.

Think of it this way:

user@some.tld is a path (via DNS lookup) to a specific user on a given system located within a given TLD.

Similarly:

alt.os.linux.gentoo

That is also a path, think /var/spool/news/alt/os/linux/gentoo/[thread name and time of first post].

Store and forward networks, like #Usenet, set their own maximum message limits. A binary would be MIME econded text, etc.

@profoundlynerdy @dalias @blakereid Currently, as far as I know, there is a single implementation (and it seems to be implementation-defined).

#NNCP (https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/, it has a few mirrors) is essentially a modernization of #UUCP with a few added features (https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/Comparison.html).

There's someone running a blog (https://www.complete.org/nncp/) with articles on various experiments they've done with it, which incidentally includes running an #NNTP gateway (https://www.complete.org/usenet-over-nncp/).

@ajroach42 Isn't that #NNCP?

@mkj @cks

It is a #DebianPolicy violation for building packages to download arbitrary things from the network, so that will have to be disabled during package builds, at least...

#GoLang itself seems to have a decent history of #ReproducibleBuilds for versions 1.20 and 1.19, at least:

https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/history/golang-1.20.html

https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/history/golang-1.19.html

The one package off the top of my head built with golang, #nncp also seems to have a good history of building reproducibly:

https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/history/nncp.html

I just realized a lot of my favorite software is hard to describe. #orgmode: an outliner, but also a highly-integrated task manager and markup language. #NNCP, an asynchronous message passer -- and thing that can use USB drives as a network. #gitannex, a file location tracker and syncer that does a ton. #dar, an improvement on tar, that can be FUSE-mounted, sliced and diced, compressed and encrypted in different ways. #emacs, a live-modifiable mail reader & enhanced vim (with evil-mode) 🙂

Some of my favorite features in Debian 12 are ones I helped package, and are now easy to install everywhere:

A simple, encrypted, auto-meshing network, suitable as a VPN or as part of a global mesh: #Yggdrasil Thanks to this, my family's laptops can talk to each other from wherever they are with no hassle; coffee shop, home, work, etc.

An asynchronous, encrypted, onion-routed, delay-tolerant tool: #NNCP Thanks to this, my backups and archive can be easily airgapped

@Elizafox Yes. Retro-computing enthusiasts are.

For modern stuff one uses #NNCP instead.

@dalias @astraleureka @xarvos @faoluin @ariadne It's funny that newer protocols tend to deal with asymmetric/diverse link methods (phone, sneakernet, internet, etc), some necessitating first-class support for #AsynchronousCommunication, so badly.

#Usenet, #UUCP and #Fidonet (#email is an outlier that can be carried by all of those and #SMTP too) all dealt with that much better. Of recent projects, only #NNCP and #SSB (and a few more niche ones) appear to have given any real thought to that.