Support for free (decentralised) net, e.g. tor/freenet/hyphanet

Feature requests
1

Thank you for making such a marvelous software available for the world!

Are you willing to accept and/or provide support for alternative, privacy oriented networks, such as tor, or hyphanet?

Benefits

  1. The benefit would be that it it would enable people to truly self-host their data.
  2. New users do not run into the “we host your stuff-private”-paywall when they want to try your software.
  3. This may open the app up to people who do not have enough periodic funds to rent virtual servers with access to consistent compute & storage.
  4. This may open the app up to users that not want to register somewhere before trying your software.

Drawbacks

  1. People oblivious to the consequences may get warnings from their environment for using Tor/some alternative net.
  2. It may be less easy to fund development endeavors if the software does not inherently rely on cloud vendors selling things.
  3. People may underestimate how challenging it is to realize 99.9999x % uptime, as many have gotten used to as a standard, and hence experience more set-backs than anticipated.

Your opinion on this topic would be greatly valued.

A list of potential candidates, if interest is grand could be:

  • Tor
  • Hyphanet
  • I2P (Invisible Internet Project)
  • Yggdrasil
  • GNUnet
  • ZeroNet
  • IPFS (InterPlanetary File System)
  • Nym
  • RetroShare
  • BitDust
2 Likes
2

Thank you for your suggestion!

Yes, we plan to support overlay networks. For example, for inter-network traffic between email servers. We have also successfully conducted experiments on encapsulating ActivityPub traffic in Yggdrasil. It is unlikely to be Tor due to its strong association with criminal activity.

Possible future use cases:

  1. Inter-server interaction. Mail from alice@alice.org to bob@bob.org will go through the ygg tunnel. This will prevent a person from observing in the middle. We wanted to do the same with ActivityPub, but it is strongly tied to httpS.
  2. Access to a closed perimeter. A mode in which SP services only go out to the ygg network, and an ygg client will need to be installed for access. This will likely be Nebula.

i2p is slow, but it may be sufficient for SMTP/ActivityPub traffic.

However, overlay networks are not a top priority right now. Automated resource management and disk encryption are more important.