No worries, I’m merely confident that the tradeoffs necessary to employ a blockchain aren’t worth the supposed benefits thereof.

What if we don’t want global usernames? What if we’re entirely satisfied with global user IDs in a DHT?

Seems inefficient, couldn’t the same thing be accomplished using local DBs rather than the world’s most inefficient ledger?

Oh heck, that sounds promising. 😺

The TOR network is indeed the most widely-used implementation of onion routing, but it isn’t the only example.

My go-to reference is Retroshare, an open-source app that implements onion routing on top of an encrypted friend-to-friend network:

http://retroshare.cc/

You only connect to your trusted friends, but by passing messages along the Kevin Bacon chain it’s still possible to reach practically anyone on the network. Retroshare’s built-in services include email, instant messaging, traditional web forums, microblogging, and Reddit-style karma-ranked forums/linkboards, and third party plugins include voice and video chat. It’s desktop-only, but I think it demonstrates that serverless social networks are possible.

Depends on the usage.

“Social Networks” can be a reference to the various social media services available online, but they can also be an reference to the collection of social connections one has offline.

Ah, that’s my bad. Didn’t bother learning who the CEO was. XD

Fixed my post, thanks!

Say you want to send a letter to a friend of a friend, but you don’t know their address so you can’t send it direct.

Instead, you can package your letter inside a second letter to your mutual friend, asking them to finish filling out the mailing label for you so your message will reach the intended recipient.

They call it “Onion Routing” because the message can be wrapped in multiple layers of these routing requests, with each recipient stripping off the layer addressed to them and forwarding the remainder on to the next connection in the chain.

Using this protocol, so-called “Friend to Friend” networks can still enable communication between non-friends so long as a “5 degrees of Kevin Bacon”-style connection exists between you and whoever you’re trying to reach.

She’s right, but centralized services like BlueSky won’t be it.

Social networks don’t need servers playing middlemen, friend-to-friend networks with onion routing to pass messages to friends-of-friends would more accurately reflect the structure of real-world social networks.