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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

Actually this gets me thinking: what about making a signaling server for webrtc chats using IMAP ? This way we got a truely decentralised chat system.

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Email can be decentralized because of DNS as its underlying routing "protocol". To reach somebodies emailserver, you need to know the MX record of its domainname (which is part of the emailaddress). Maybe we can build a decentralized chat system based on this same principle, by using TXT records for example.

> Maybe we can build a decentralized chat system based on this same principle

This is how Matrix works, but using SRV records:

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse#setting-up-federation

I've tried Matrix, and I feel it has potential, but right now the standard homeserver is slow and a bit of a memory hog. There are some on-going projects to develop other implementations, but they are far from complete, and not usable. I'm also a bit miffed why they didn't just choose the standard "user@domain" format for user identifiers.

Long ago I knew someone who effectively used email as a chat system: the delivery latency was low enough for local email that you could just put the message in the Subject and reply immediately. This did indeed rely on IMAP IDLE.

Unfortunately message delivery latency has gone up a lot these days. It might be saner to ask, "can we deliver mail over MQTT?" instead.

As someone who is fascinated by decentralized social networks, I always come back to email as the ultimate solution to that problem.

You missunderstand, the goal is not to use email for the messages, the goal would be to use IMAP to signals users to each others, THEN switch to webrtc to chat.

I'm not alone in writing a proof of concept "Forum" which was just a view on a private NNTP server.

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