I haven't done any real freenet hacking (yet), so please forgive me if
this idea has no merit. It is also based on freenet getting updates working,
and therefore possibly premature.
It seems that the functionality of instant messaging systems (irc,icq,aol,ms)
really consists of two mostly orthongonal parts: managing state, and routing.
It further seems that freenet could do an admirable job implementing the state
management, which would then share the advantages of freenet itself.
A "channel" is really just a list of members and some administration settings,
which could represented using freenet with:
1. a document containing: admin info, and a link to...
2. an ssk containing: member documents
3. member documents contain: the public key and routing address of a member,
and the address of the their freenet node
Someone may "join" the channel if they have the key which allows adding
entries to the ssk. All traffic to the channel may also be (symmetric)
encrypted with that key. "open" channels may have the key included in their
admin document. "closed" channels can be by invitation only, or can run a
bot which will divulge the key when certain conditions are met.
AFAICT, the only necessary change to freenet would be to allow updates to be
sent immediately to particular nodes. We want any changes to the state
document and the membership ssk to be sent to the node associated with each
entry in the ssk.
This system does make it impossible to "ban" someone without creating an
entirely new membership ssk.
Incidentally, this system would not be limitted to a particular messaging
application. It could even be used for smtp mailing lists.
(I know that this doesn't even touch what many people might consider
the most important piece of state: the handle, or nickname.
That is because I think that a flat global namespace is stupid for
identifying people. see http://world.std.com/~cme/html/web.html.
besides, public key hashes solve this problem perfectly. If there is a
desire for it, you could always implement channel local nicknames.)
Plausible?
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