The reason that P2P Matrix (arewep2pyet.com) exists is precisely to provide a 1st class P2P mode to Matrix - it's not just for awesome reliability and network resilience, but for easier onboarding; killing off public-service homeservers like matrix.org; etc. The onboarding and identity piece is covered by MSC4014 (which just got implemented in Dendrite.)
However, you're totally right that our main focus is on the federated use case, because that's where everyone is today, and its own fair share of Hard Problems (e.g. reliable decentralised E2EE, byzantine-fault-tolerant conversation replication, decentralised ACLs, lazy-loaded conversation state) before we chuck P2P into the mix too.
The P2P Matrix project is currently focusing mainly on MSC4014 (i.e. pseudo-IDs, account portability, multihomed accounts) which benefits both P2P and normal Matrix... although I'm hoping that we'll get back to Pinecone & actual P2P work eventually (especially if someone explicitly funds it).
Meanwhile, it's super cool to see the progress on Quiet and OrbitDB. It's come a long way since Orbit launched at the 2016 Decentralised Web Summit, and I'm glad to see the tech is still progressing. FWIW, We did the first versions of P2P Matrix on top of libp2p (but then switched to Yggdrasil and then Pinecone in order to work with a monolithic stack, for better or worse). Might be interesting to figure out how the projects could interop in future :)
This is all great news, and it's really cool to get an update on the state of P2P Matrix from its creators deep in a thread like this. HN is amazing.
Re: interop, the easiest way to interop would be if Matrix solves all these problems for us before we get anywhere close! Then we can be a P2P Matrix client or just use Matrix :)
But I bet either way it will be possible to make robust transformation layers between different eventually consistent protocols. This is similar to one of the hard problems: interop between multiple versions of a single decentralized application. If we solve that it might generalize if we can bridge the network layers too?
And yes, there is indeed a really long list of hard problems to solve. I really really hope one of us, or one of the other similarly motivated projects, is able to solve them all and deliver the whole package!!!
I'm a Matrix enthusiast, run my own homeserver and I've been playing around with Quiet today.
It has nowhere near the features of Matrix at this point, but it is useable and I'm having fun with it, and I really look forward to see progress on both projects. :)
However, you're totally right that our main focus is on the federated use case, because that's where everyone is today, and its own fair share of Hard Problems (e.g. reliable decentralised E2EE, byzantine-fault-tolerant conversation replication, decentralised ACLs, lazy-loaded conversation state) before we chuck P2P into the mix too.
The P2P Matrix project is currently focusing mainly on MSC4014 (i.e. pseudo-IDs, account portability, multihomed accounts) which benefits both P2P and normal Matrix... although I'm hoping that we'll get back to Pinecone & actual P2P work eventually (especially if someone explicitly funds it).
Meanwhile, it's super cool to see the progress on Quiet and OrbitDB. It's come a long way since Orbit launched at the 2016 Decentralised Web Summit, and I'm glad to see the tech is still progressing. FWIW, We did the first versions of P2P Matrix on top of libp2p (but then switched to Yggdrasil and then Pinecone in order to work with a monolithic stack, for better or worse). Might be interesting to figure out how the projects could interop in future :)