A Decentralized World
summary
Centralized services fail in disasters and repression—Telegram suffers a large DDoS in Hong Kong, 196 Internet shutdowns occur in 2018, and Egypt 2011 inspires an ad‑hoc messenger. A self‑replicating app called qaul.net (started 2012) builds captive‑portal Wi‑Fi meshes and worked in dozens of communities but hits limits: seven‑year C code, rooted phones required, and deprecated Wi‑Fi modes. Current engineering effort rewrites it as qaul.net rewrite in Rust, replaces routing with delay‑tolerant vector routing, leverages Freifunk mesh and Wi‑Fi‑Direct/Bluetooth mesh, targets an Android alpha by December with 16 months funding.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction and speaker background
- 1:12Talk overview and content warning
- 5:23Vulnerability of centralized infrastructure
- 16:44Centralized services and their risks
- 22:43Exploration of problem space summary
- 23:06Introduction to FRA foam project
- 31:24Call met project introduction
- 39:15Challenges and future of Call met
- 47:00Call met roadmap and next steps
- 48:47Conclusion and call to action
