Post #1240775

2025-10-27 11:18 UTC

@Mer__edith With respect Meredith, i’m talking about decentralized protocols and their capability to not depend so heavily on the service providers you’re arguing for. Tor Project has shown how possible it is (i used to work there, and it’s spelled Tor not TOR). I listened to Moxie’s aversions to decentralization for years. That’s what I keep seeing now, with posts like these. I also understand the value of huge cloud providers, I’ve worked for many companies who use them, and have worked for them, and I understand why you depend on them and how important that is to a high quality service. Thank you for all that you all do. But what conversations does Signal Foundation actually have on the topics of resiliency through decentralization? How much money could you save by allowing the community to take on aspects of the network? How much resiliency and trust could be gained, without losing performance?

Replies (5)

@tris@chaos.social 2025-10-27 11:20

@yawnbox @Mer__edith There's @cwtch which uses Tor for routing. All good except... it's P2P xD

Open ##1240777
@davep@infosec.exchange 2025-10-27 12:05

@yawnbox @Mer__edith Tor is basically a glorified network protocol (albeit very smart) so having it distributed by design is less of an issue. I agree that making Signal more robust through decentralisation would be great, but this sort of thing gets more difficult the higher up the stack you go, especially when it wasn't part of the core design principles.

Open ##1240790
@linrui@mathstodon.xyz 2025-10-27 12:34

@yawnbox@disobey.net @Mer__edith@mastodon.world The problem is that social software and instant messaging are heavily state-dependent—which Tor is not, and its state management and persistence issues are much smaller.

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@fellmoon@bsd.network 2025-10-27 12:50

@yawnbox@disobey.net @Mer__edith@mastodon.world I think moxie made a pretty clear point on his view of decentralized vs centralized with his ccc-talk a few years ago. That aside, Tor may be able to provide in terms of uptime, but latency? If I'd be in signals boots I would not build on a network run by people on all kinds of hosting with no sufficient ability to have some kind of guarantee on the QoS aspect.

Open ##3001732
@Andromxda@infosec.space 2025-10-27 15:01

@yawnbox@disobey.net Moxie is opposed to federation because he tried it out and saw how terribly it failed. Decentralized protocols are unreliable. Just look at Matrix, it's buggy as hell. Even Mastodon (ActivityPub) constantly has several federation issues, but it's not as bad because no one really depends on it. Social media isn't as critical as instant messengers. There's a reason why no decentralized messenger has taken off.

Open ##3001733