It would be great to create a torrent like protocol for chat. People would host for their own circle of friends with some central hosting option for non technicals.
I think a self-hosting option for IM that's better than XMPP could be nice... that said, not sure if something like torrent would be good. I gave a lot of thought to something similar for emails, and the biggest issue came down to, it would be difficult to do something anonymous, distributed, and resistant to flooding/poison pill attacks.
Torrents themselves work against this, because you have known hash values as part of seeding... with email and messaging, you wouldn't have one-off advanced knowledge, and if anyone can send anyone a message, you'd be open to a flood of messages from what seems to be randos. There's some of this from scammers on Telegram and other social media, but it would be much worse.
A federated system that's otherwise tethered to a domain/email or similar would at least allow for self-management and/or block listing techniques to work better in practice.
> There's some of this from scammers on Telegram and other social media, but it would be much worse
I get about one scam message per week on Telegram. And the annoying thing with Telegram is that it’s a paid feature to be able to make it so that only your contacts can send you messages.
Additionally, in order to block and report the sender, I first have to open the message, which sends a read receipt to the sender. Which in turn, if the scammers are smart, is something that they make note of automatically.
So one can presume that every time I open a scam message to block and report the sender, as I do, I am also giving the scammers confirmation that this number is actively in use and my number will keep being included in lists of numbers that they and others send scam messages to.
