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Congrats on release, but the title is incorrect, word 'decentralized' should be removed.

XMPP, like email, is not a 'decentralized' protocol, but a federated one. If you and your chat partners use the same server, it would be as centralized as WhatsApp or Signal.



Federated protocols are decentralized, though; there's no central point of control. This graphic has been done to death at this point but it's relevant here: https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/c...


Baran drew this pic almost 80 years ago. Since then, 'Decentralized' has become an umbrella term for both decentralized and distributed networks, and 'Federated' is currently a commonly accepted name for Email/XMPP type of networks. [1]

This makes sense, because Baran was describing a communication network, like later ethernet, where nodes were interchangeable, wherever in XMPP the nodes are not interchangeable: if you have an account on xmpp.org server, you can't connect to xmpp.jp server and receive your messages. Thus, such networks required a special more narrow name to define it.

[1] https://networkcultures.org/unlikeus/resources/articles/what...


> Congrats on release, but the title is incorrect, word 'decentralized' should be removed.

It is decentralized in theory (no one server controls the network), but 'federated' is the correct word to use here.

When I saw the title I was assuming this was some cool new sort of client that created and managed a bunch of logins/identities as one on various XMPP servers and used something like OMEMO for key management on top of that 'layer'.

Tox is a better example of a 'decentralized' protocol.


I think you are confusing terms here, what you mean is distributed, which is only a subset of decentralized. Federated is also decentralized. See for example https://medium.com/distributed-economy/what-is-the-differenc...

Beside that, Dino does support peer-to-peer file transfers using Jingle.


We'll take 'decentralized' out of the title above, so hopefully people can discuss the project itself and not debate definitions.




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