firestr VS construct

Love to see P2P coming back. Back in 2013 I built a P2P application platform called Firestr (https://www.firestr.com) that was targeted as an all in one platform to build and share graphical P2P apps. The apps were built using a built-in collaborative app editor. You could build P2P apps with friends using P2P!

You create a conversation with one or more people and can then launch apps into that conversation. The people on the other side didn't have to have the apps installed. If they liked an app, they can install it with one click and use it in their own conversations. If they wanted to change the app, they can do that too!

Despite how easy all these new P2P app frameworks are, none of them are as easy as Firestr was.

Example apps

https://github.com/mempko/firestr/tree/master/example_apps

Example p2p drawing application

https://github.com/mempko/firestr/blob/master/example_apps/d...

If that's the bar, then mobile Linux is simultaneously very fucking far, and dramatically closer than most people might think.

As far as messaging apps, they're all technically there - the best kind of there for the crowd that this would interest. Spinning up a Matrix server means maybe a days work for this crowd, which allows (and I currently use it for) Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram, and more. Even better, due to constant improvements by Matrix, the server is only getting lighter and your options more varied with things like Construct [0].

Email is there - one only really needs to ensure geary is set to scale to the phone screen. As far as gMail, I'd question what the overlap is between "Privacy conscious enough to use a Pinephone" and "Uses gMail instead of anything IMAP".

That only leaves navigation and social media. For the former, I've used the mobile site in-browser on my Android phone that the Google Maps app was too heavy for. And for both on the Pinephone, especially the pro, Waydroid [1] is getting closer to closing the gap.

To be honest, I could see it being mainstream for geeks within two years. Though that's unlikely what you meant by mainstream - which I think we can agree is several more years away, if ever.

[0] https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct

[1] https://github.com/waydroid/waydroid

On its project GH roadmap, why then does it say:

It does - the point is that anyone can spin up their own Matrix server (or pick an existing one) and get involved; they don't have to use the fosdem.org one.

Separately, in terms of implementations: Dendrite is usable these days, albeit beta: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/08/dendrite-is-entering-beta, and meanwhile Synapse is stable. Conduit (https://conduit.rs) is making progress on federation (and works for simple use cases), and Construct (https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct) exists too.