Post #1229774

2026-04-10 20:21 UTC

@bms48 @KathyReid I'm going to have to disagree. We're not talking about world domination, we're talking about scalable independent networks that see slow, steady growth over time. Tor is a good example here, but that has never felt scalable (trading usability for security). But even with those issues, it still has a fairly decent user base. Plenty of other examples over there, but most layer on top of IPv4/6.

Replies (2)

@bms48@mastodon.social 2026-04-10 20:23

@Andres4NY @KathyReid Incremental cellular deployment of something else is fine and is/has arguably already happened with stuff like WireGuard based VPN providers being popular. But they all depend on overlays. You still need to have a substrate to build on, even if you layer decentralized addressing/routing mechanisms on top.

Open ##1229775
@bms48@mastodon.social 2026-04-10 20:25

@Andres4NY @KathyReid Tor isn't ideal for a lot of reasons, but it's probably the best we have in comparison to e.g. I2P or Freenet which are closer to the NDN philosophy. Tor could benefit from incremental refinements like perhaps using QUIC, but QUIC's kryptonite is suboptimal server-side dataplane (it is hard to accelerate unless you go to eBPF/XDP unlike Tor which uses TLS over TCP still)

Open ##1229778