Oddbean

i hope not and it doesnt seem likely given all of their statements and history of open source to keep that small bit of code closed paolo(bitfinex) in a very recent podcast said its very easy to build the ui and he expects many many other keet uis

Keet as a few things to improve before it is really ready for prime-time. There's currently no way to leave a room once you have joined. Pretty sure that has been the case since the update that allowed logging into the same profile from all your devices, but it broke something about being able to leave a room. There's no way to have sub-rooms. For instance, if I wanted to set up a room for my church that had one room for organizing events, one for posting hymns for the upcoming service, one for prayer requests, and one for just general discussion, I would need to set them up as completely separate and unrelated rooms mixed in with the list of all the other rooms I am in. Given the main competitors are Telegram and Discord, this is a must-have feature, in my opinion. In small rooms of only a few people, sharing media can be rough. I will send an image to my buddy, and when he opens up the app to look at it, it won't load because I am already offline doing something else. So he will send me a message "I can't see what you sent." And then I have to go online while he still has his app open for it to show up. There's not really a way around this, since Keet doesn't use any servers in-between our devices. Yet, this is not what "mainstream" will expect as their UX without something warning them the first time they share a media file, explaining why this is the case. I would also like to see a version of Keet that can be hosted on an always online device, so room participants can act as a "relay" for media sent by participants using mobile devices that don't keep the room open when they aren't actively using the app.

100% agreed to all your points. Onwards and upwards good feedback will only get the app better. But man is peer to peer incredible. Similar UX challenges like the always on with sharing media we see with Lightning. There could potentially be cool workarounds like sending some sort of data to all devices in a room that wakes up the phone for 30 seconds or so once someone enters a room (therefore enabling the media to be shown). I’m confident meat UX work around a will be put out

Yep, I think all these things are solvable, and I am incredibly bullish on pear runtime in general, as well as Keet in particular, even if it never gains the user base of something like Telegram or Discord.

Why do all the recent excellent p2p products seem to have an allergy to servers? I have multiple devices, one of which may be an always-on "server". This is a valid peer, and a much more useful one than other categories of edge device which are often offline or have bandwidth and battery constraints. Once we agree that an always-on, hardwired device is obviously useful, and that individuals should own these wonderful personal servers, we can start to use these terrifically useful things to personally serve our own edge clients. And since we now all have always-on personal servers, why not just peer those together instead of our edge devices (which we already saw are flaky).... What a better pattern! A network of peer to peer rock-solid personal servers, providing private client experiences to our silly edge devices. Sometimes the peer to peer crowd gets a little too high on its own supply wrt what a "peer" is...

Yeah, I think the "ideal" in P2P is for each peer to be equal to all other peers. I believe they wanted Keet in particular to be as accessible as possible for those who don't have a personal server at home, and maybe aren't interested in having one. That comes with some trade-offs, though, as I mentioned above concerning media sharing. I am personally quite willing to run a server to host a Keet room that is always online for everyone else in the room, but then we are really starting to muddy the definition of what P2P means. I suppose the difference is that anyone who is a participant in the room can do the same, so there isn't one central server that everyone has to rely on.

keet(holepunch) will be releasing an app for 'servers' very soon, its called a 'blind media mirror' and it will basically seed and backup all your content but completely encrypted ie blind to itself

A personal server as the single device that does the peering (with the personal servers of others) and heavy lifting computation, and serves a thin client to multiple edge devices. Rather than all my edge devices each being considered a separate peer to peer agent. If I'm understanding you correctly, you're mostly talking about a personal server as a content mirror, not as my single identity source and "backend" processing machine.

you are describing federation which i have absolutely no idea why anyone would want that now i feel you have preconceived ideas about problems with p2p that are not valid but why dont you say what they are so we can discuss and even better do it in the pear community room in keet, link on the profile page, so the p2p experts can have a piece