I agree that's a possibility, but I'd rather the chance some of those accounts get linked than give my data to Google.
The reason I did that wasn't privacy in the first place, so any privacy benefits are a bonus.
I did it so I can easily block spam from a business, easily 'unsubscribe' to any list without jumping through hoops, and can also see which businesses are not playing nice by sharing my data.
I have both my own non-identifiable domain which I use for email - and a domain of my own name which I picked up when the original owner let it expire. I had to bid to get it from a broker who squatted it but it didn't cost much.
My namesake was a famous (in some circles) wealthy person and I did start getting his emails. Quite a lot initially, and I replied to let the senders know.
That was probably twenty years ago and I'm still regularly invited to galleries for viewings as he obviously collected art. I gave up trying to get off those gallery mailing lists and now just bin them.
p2p does not necessarily imply the limitation you describe.
I don't know how Quiet uses IPFS but a truly decentralised storage system such as the design of Safe Network can hold data locally (eg using CRDTs) and/or in a decentralised, always accessible p2p network of nodes.
Chunking and redundancy ensures data is always available without the need to centralise.
I get this is a popular view, and justifiably so. The project is not a get rich scheme for the founder, you will see that if you look at how it was created and the structures that support it (which include a Scottish Charity that owns the company MaidSafe which is building the first version, but then aims to remove itself from control in favour of decentralised development funded by the network itself).
And there is good reason why they chose an ICO over alternatives. You don't say what you favour, but what this project has achieved by this route is complete independence to deliver according to fundamental principles.
They have no VC investment, nobody has control who is not aligned with the goal to create a fully autonomous, decentralised network and the "fundamentals" of Safe Network which you can read up on if you want. So the project continues to aim at a hard target regardless of many opportunities to get rich along the way.
It was I think the first ICO, so if getting rich was the aim it could have happened many times by now.
As things stand it is a shame that people are turned off from even looking into this project because of that association. Once it emerges I think the value it provides rather than captures will change minds.
https://SafeNetwork.tech is thoroughly p2p and doesn't reveal IP addresses because it's designed from the ground up to be decentralised, anonymous and censorship resistant.
Yes folks, take a look at git-bug, Michael has done a brilliant job of adding issues and comments into your git repos, and for a pre v1 project it works really well already, and you can import from / to github, gitlab and JIRA.
git-bug is a pleasure to use so I'm attempting to get it running in the browser using wasm, to create a decentralised github on p2p storage. I'm targeting Safe Network but the same approach could be used on anything with a storage backend, from NextCloud to IPFS, even [cough] AWS.
After thinking about this for a couple of years while helping the Safe Network (a decentralisation project worth getting to know) I began my own effort to decentralise github based on Safe, just last Sunday!
Even before Friday's censorship, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of support and offers to help I received in mastodon. People there are aware, skilled and ready.
BTW I've got ideas on how to handle the issue/comment spam and other problems rightly highlighted by @cjbprime in his reply to the OP. But first I have to get git-bug (really worth of support too) compiled to WASM and running in the browser.
Mateo, I'm very interested in primo and look forward to putting it to work once it is open source. So very pleased that you are heading that way! I'd like to sign up to the forum without using github (as I'm allergic to anything leaking data, esp to corporations / Microsoft).
I realise it may be needed for some primo features, but is there any chance we can use email to auth with primo's Discourse?
I'll be building test sites and deploying to SAFE Network as soon as I can. Svelte is my favourite so again I'm please that you've chosen to use it to build primo. Good luck.
1. This is a fair point right now but it is only temporary. There's a SAFE Network App which will be the key to the network, providing a single point of contact, installing other things, seeing up a vault if you want to farm, create a wallet, updates etc. Most people will just download that and go from there.
2. Is also a reasonable point to make, but the nature of the goals here means it has to do a lot more than just sit on top of the existing protocols. It's a secure, decentralised, autonomous network/platform, which needs to be built from the ground up in order to solve the many problems we have with the existing web.
I'm not sure what you mean by monolithic. The ideas are new and can take a while to grasp but it's worth it.
3. The community have had long discussions about this so many will agree with you. But the best response I've heard to this point was from Tim Berners-Lee when he and David Irvine were at the Decentralised Web Summit in 2018. Someone said something similar to your point 3 to David and Tim jumped in and answered that it wasn't necessary by saying: and what was the killer app when I invented the web? Or something along those lines.
I'm not dismissing your point and many of us aren trying to come up with ideas for such killer apps.
Personally I suspect we already have some - take a look at the SAFE fundamentals for example. But it may well be something nobody anticipated. It's fun thinking them up though :-)
Maidsafe don't market aggressively, it's not their way so I think you are mistaken. They did attend a could of bitcoin type conferences in person in the early days but I very much doubt they paid anyone to promote their coin.
IMO they are an outstanding team both technically and ethically. In fact it was the latter that got me interested in the project in 2014 and my impression then has been confirmed many times since.
There will be pros and cons in access speed. I expect some latency compared to a CDN that is caching close to the client, but not necessarily significant.
And some things may even be faster because chunks are served from random locations meaning a server is not a bottleneck. So it's a bit like having a CDN for free.
This should work particularly well for large files because chunks will be delivered in parallel by lots of different vaults in different locations, along different routes.
Also, there will be opportunistic caching of popular chunks along the route to the client. So data that is suddenly in demand will be cached rather than overloading the vaults holding the chunks - so u have automatic DDoS protection.
Because of that any site will scale automatically to meet demand without cost or extra server side infrastructure. Some really attractive bonuses there for anyone from a lone developer to a large scale commercial operation.
The actual performance will I think be better for some use cases, worse for others but we won't know the details for a bit yet.
I'm a developer interested in putting decentralised apps on the SAFE Network so have done some testing of the early APIs and tried deploying simple websites on the test networks, porting apps from the Solid project, RemoteStorage etc.
I tried different frameworks to see how easily they could be used, how they would perform, and help others get started.
For example I had excellent results with my first use of ReactStatic (see https://dweb.happybeing.com) but I was very impressed when I tried Svelte for the first time because it's a really nice framework and very fast.
But any web framework should work well for many kinds of app, but I'm smitten by Svelte so will build using that for the time being.
You will be able to use pretty much any language or platform though because language bindings are being made available for the SAFE API and are I understand fairly easy to create yourself if the one you want hasn't been created yet.
The reason I did that wasn't privacy in the first place, so any privacy benefits are a bonus.
I did it so I can easily block spam from a business, easily 'unsubscribe' to any list without jumping through hoops, and can also see which businesses are not playing nice by sharing my data.