Spam-free messaging platform

General
#1

Hi!

Sorry for flooding the forum with new ideas, but I was really excited to have found this initiative. :smile:

My friends and I were thinking about designing a new messaging system that is free of spam, one where people sending unwanted messages is ruled out by design. We too arrived at some sort of ‘proof of work’ design, and were thinking, what could the kind of work that is proof. Raw computation did not seem like a good idea, because burning battery on mobile devices to send a message did not seem like the best idea. Sending via hard to earn certificates (for eg. ones obtained via CAs seemed like a good idea, however this design had it’s flaws.

As far as I understood both the general ideas and the technical parts, Tribler seems to employ all the techniques required to implement a messaging system that is free of any company and is sufficiently secure.

Do you think that the techniques employed by Tribler could be reused for such a service?

#2

The easiest way would be to for messages to be accepted only if they come from known contacts.

We worked on a distributed chat prototype based on Dispersy which worked, but got abandoned due to lack of developer interest. The GUI was written in pyside, if you are interested I could try to find it for you.

#3

Indeed, accepting only from known contacts is a good choice, but this is the case for Skype also, and it does suffer from some degree of spam in the form of contact requests.

How do you imagine making new contacts? Would the amount of work put into making new contacts be weighted by how trustworthy you are? If you have some documentation to what you imagined that would be nice. Surely there must be some form of discussions that lead to actual coding.

#4

It’s as easy as not showing contact requests until you don’t add the contact yourself too, or only showing the friends of your friends for instance.

Maybe @root has some links to documentation about the subject.