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Comment by comeonseriously | Hacker News Reader

Assign everyone an IP V6, there's plenty. Then treat that as our internet phone number. Define a chat protocol that contains the very basics and everyone has to support that. Want to send a chat, you have their IP V6. Exchange using QR code. No server necessary for the basics. If a text fails sending device can keep trying or just give up.

This takes chat away from any single service.

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This approach ignores all the aspects that made whatsapp / chat services popular in the first place. A short list:

  - Contact Discovery
  - Group chats
  - History / Log
  - Shared message order
  - Communication beyond text (emojis / reactions / inline images) 
  - Ability to receive messages while offline 
  - No need for technical skills

These aren't trivial features, they are prerequisites for any replacement, decentralized or otherwise. Just because we as developers like / tolerate things like IRC doesn't mean the rest of the world will accept it.

Everything you list could be supported at the client level with a decentralized IP6 level protocol without a need for a centralized server middleman.

Sounds great! Let me know when you’ve built it so I can try it out :)

Unfortunately, IPv6 addresses have to be assigned by someone, and they typically change when moving around/changing provider. And you have to go trough the firewall...

I prefer something you can generate yourself, like encryption keys. That's the approach taken by yggdrasil (and cjdns before): generate an encryption key, map the public part to an IP address (there's almost enough bits in v6). Plus, it can easily be end-to-end encrypted.

Another plus is that you can generate as many as desired.

As for the protocol, Matrix is experimenting a bit with going p2p.

https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

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