@joepie91 @Natanox @freundTech @delroth as you say, offline message are a huge challenge but we've dug into how that might work and believe it's solvable

@joepie91 @Natanox @freundTech @delroth one way or another there will for sure be usability reduction though, in part because one of the most effective mitigations of timing attacks is large delays

@ireneista @Natanox@chaos.social @freundTech@chaos.social This notably also introduces all of the other complexities of P2P design, in particular how difficult it is to build something that remains interoperable and possible to adapt over time, and isn't constantly at risk of feature-freezing because of its P2P nature. Because if it feature-freezes, it will never be used for anything except highly specialized cases.

I'm not saying that work is not worth doing, but it's several orders of magnitude more complex and unexplored than "make your protocol not leak metadata" would imply, and that is likely also the answer as to why people aren't doing it - we barely have infrastructure to fund a run-of-the-mill protocol project on proven technology as it is.

So this really shouldn't be a conversation about metadata at all, in my opinion, it should be a conversation about sustainable structures for community infrastructure. That's the dependency that will likely need to be resolved before this can actually be pulled off successfully.

And that, ironically, requires a good-enough platform to communicate on. I would say that Matrix doesn't really meet the "good enough" criterium, but that "metadata-preserving" is an expectation that lies too far in the other direction.

@joepie91 @Natanox @freundTech absolutely. we have an architecture sketched out that we believe achieves all this without being a monolith, but it's not written up well enough to make public at this time.

@joepie91 @Natanox @freundTech our intent is that we will publish it before we implement it, so that it can be meaningfully changed in response to public feedback, we're just not there yet.

@joepie91 @Natanox @freundTech and like for the record, when the tech in question is about speech, is about sustaining the ability to have a society built on the free exchange of ideas in the face of large power structures that would prefer otherwise, it can't afford to depend on money because money is a tool of control

@joepie91 @Natanox @freundTech it needs to be an anarchist collective, in the long run, because if it's anything else there will eventually be legislation requiring it to impose censorship and surveillance

@joepie91 @Natanox @freundTech we understand fully how saying that comes off as advocating for the impossible, but we take an engineering mindset with this sort of thing: we start by describing the constraints of the problem, then figure out how to solve them. this is a long-term constraint, though not an immediate one.

@ireneista @Natanox@chaos.social @freundTech@chaos.social I mean "funding" in a very general sense here - whether that is by literally paying people for their work or otherwise making sure that they don't starve. Most people cannot afford to spend large amounts of time working on this stuff because they need to maintain an income too.

You need *some* kind of answer to this if you want to make complex research projects possible (to the point that you can expect others to work on them, that is), otherwise you'll just end up with a group of well-off white dudes in tech.

@joepie91 @Natanox @freundTech yes - donated time and mutual aid are conceptually "funding", though we try to avoid using that term for it because we think it leads to confusion. we very much agree that keeping people alive and comfortable enough to do this work is key, no matter what.