Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Sadly this is the culture now at tech companies. All the data has to go through company servers, whether it makes technical sense or not

Pretty sure I flunked a system design question this reason. I was asked to design an online chat system. I asked of they wanted support for groups, they said no. So I gave them simple two way socket solution.

Apparently that wasn’t good enough, They wanted a full DB storing everyone’s conversations, that you could query, etc. I suspected it had nothing to do with any technical considerations. They just wanted that data.



Did they want multi device? How do you sync messages? History?


You can sync with timestamps

History can be stored locally

Centralizing this just seems way more complicated to me, unless you want groups. Even then for small groups P2P isn’t such a terrible idea

Not sure what you mean by multidevice, I do t think they cared about mobile


There are also Jami and Tox as decentralized Slack alternatives.


Or Mattermost, Zulip, or... Briar, among others. :P


Mattermost and Zulip aren't decentralized.


True, you can only self-host.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: