If I send you a Signal message, my phone contacts signal to get a route (meaning an IP) where your phone is
Instead of contacting signal to get this route, to have a distributed collection of machines, that will provide you this information.
Signal scenario:
endpoint 1 does not know IP of endpoint 2, so it asks signal server, the only server which has this information. If it comes to a situation that signal server thinks your claim for election fraud is "baseless and Joe Biden is president elect", it decides to not return you IP for any queries you fire at it. You are blocked, because all routing is controlled by the central server.
Relay scenario:
any interested person sets up a "relay server", containing a subset (small) of whatever IP addresses it knows. Any endpoint, when it wishes to send or receive message, it registers with some (atleast 1) "relay server". When endpoint 1 wants to send message to endpoint 2, it asks the relay server for the IP. If the relay server knows it, it will return the IP, if not, it will know of whatever relay servers it knows of, to find out who knows the IP. This query crawls the "relay server" network and finds the IP of endpoint 2. It is cached and returned to the endpoint 1.
Now if the relay server you connect to, or register your IP with, thinks that your claims of fake news is "dangerous rhetoric" and blocks you off, you just register to a different "relay server". Not just this you are free to put up your own relay servers whenever you want.
This would solve the problem of a single reptile eyed robotic CEO of social media blocking your entire outreach.
The other problem is of anonymity.
Along with returning the IP address of end point 2, the structure can be enhanced so that it not just returns the IP address, but also relays the message through the same path it found the IP address recursively encrypting and decrypting it at each hop. This will give you a strong anonymity.
The 1st scenario, I understand, is what IRC (Internet Relay Chat) did.
The 2nd scenario, I understand, is what TOR does.
We combine the two and we get a medium for social media / data sharing, that neither can be brought down by the whim of one single person, nor the data pathway be easily traced or tracked. It can be, but it will take as much effort as it does in case of TOR.
None of this is new. it is a combination of routing and encryption principles, but the current architecture of software / apps is not built this way. They are built using the most basic "star topology" (endpoing 1 has to get the IP of endpoint 2 by going to servers controlled by a single authority)
Instead of contacting signal to get this route, to have a distributed collection of machines, that will provide you this information.
Signal scenario: endpoint 1 does not know IP of endpoint 2, so it asks signal server, the only server which has this information. If it comes to a situation that signal server thinks your claim for election fraud is "baseless and Joe Biden is president elect", it decides to not return you IP for any queries you fire at it. You are blocked, because all routing is controlled by the central server.
Relay scenario: any interested person sets up a "relay server", containing a subset (small) of whatever IP addresses it knows. Any endpoint, when it wishes to send or receive message, it registers with some (atleast 1) "relay server". When endpoint 1 wants to send message to endpoint 2, it asks the relay server for the IP. If the relay server knows it, it will return the IP, if not, it will know of whatever relay servers it knows of, to find out who knows the IP. This query crawls the "relay server" network and finds the IP of endpoint 2. It is cached and returned to the endpoint 1.
Now if the relay server you connect to, or register your IP with, thinks that your claims of fake news is "dangerous rhetoric" and blocks you off, you just register to a different "relay server". Not just this you are free to put up your own relay servers whenever you want.
This would solve the problem of a single reptile eyed robotic CEO of social media blocking your entire outreach.
The other problem is of anonymity.
Along with returning the IP address of end point 2, the structure can be enhanced so that it not just returns the IP address, but also relays the message through the same path it found the IP address recursively encrypting and decrypting it at each hop. This will give you a strong anonymity.
The 1st scenario, I understand, is what IRC (Internet Relay Chat) did. The 2nd scenario, I understand, is what TOR does.
We combine the two and we get a medium for social media / data sharing, that neither can be brought down by the whim of one single person, nor the data pathway be easily traced or tracked. It can be, but it will take as much effort as it does in case of TOR.
None of this is new. it is a combination of routing and encryption principles, but the current architecture of software / apps is not built this way. They are built using the most basic "star topology" (endpoing 1 has to get the IP of endpoint 2 by going to servers controlled by a single authority)