Comment by dingdingdang

11 years ago

Would be really interesting if one could program a secure way for the individually hosted servers to hook up with each other and verify the correctness of one another while at the same time keeping the messages secure (I guess bitcoins come to mind here..). Up until something like this happens I guess centralized social networks are going to rule the roost since the value of networks is almost always in their reach/size.

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dingdingdang

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coldtea  11 years ago

>Up until something like this happens I guess centralized social networks are going to rule the roost since the value of networks is almost always in their reach/size.

This is a group chat. It's value is in being restricted in reach and/or size to the group (team, startup, enterprise) deploying a version of it.

  • SwellJoe  11 years ago

    There's no benefit to it only being able to reach some small group of people. There is benefit in being able to include only a small group of people in a particular conversation, but that does not require no interoperability, only a concept of groups and permissions and access controls. In fact, it is completely orthogonal to the lack of interop.

    • coldtea  11 years ago

      >There's no benefit to it only being able to reach some small group of people.

      If something can just be locked to only talk inside the intranet/VPN it's better from something that can talk to arbitrary people the world over and is only configured not to via its own groups and permissions inside.

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zeveb  11 years ago

> Would be really interesting if one could program a secure way for the individually hosted servers to hook up with each other and verify the correctness of one another while at the same time keeping the messages secure (I guess bitcoins come to mind here..).

You don't need a blockchain for that! Looking at the docs, it looks like Zulip messages are visible to servers anyway; that means that there's no need to encrypt the messages to hide them from the servers.

Now, supporting end-to-end encryption for chat would be pretty cool, but it's not going to happen in a browser client (since browser clients are currently completely at the mercy of servers, and will be so for the foreseeable future).