Highly appreciated, folks. Especially @mix.desktop's draft which I used almost verbatim.

There are a lot of people who reach out to me by email and I usually don't answer, because email is always a bit more formal, and it's information you tell one person and then N people can't read the response, and N is much larger than 1, which in the end means you end up communicating a lot of the same things over and over again. I really wish people would ask me on any public medium instead, like Twitter or SSB. But this fellow wrote so much text that I felt bad not answering anything.

I got a very long email, can I delegate reading it and thinking about it to someone else? I am so swamped with work, this is getting intense.

Dear Andre & Manyverse Team,

My name is REDACTED, and I am a retired programmer and I (like many
others ;) have been looking for something like Manyverse for a long time
because I am so sick of all the mainstream social networks and all the
problems they create/present.

I love the basic concept of Manyverse and when I saw the beta of
Manyverse I was very excited to try it out so I downloaded it
immediately on both my Windows PC and my Android phone.

Unfortunately, I found it difficult to connect with anybody who wasn't
already a manyverse user and the lack of Pub/Room servers requiresome
rather technical gymnastics to set up. I could set up a pub/room
server myself if I had a good chunk of time, but unfortunately, I don't.

This got me to thinking ..

In my opinion, the dependency on room/pub servers to find other friends
is a major barrier (if not THE major barrier) to Manyverse adoption.
What if we could get rid of the dependency? Or at least, create an
option that allows people to utilize Manyverse without having access to
a pub/room server or the resources to set up a pub/room server?

How could this be done?

I pondered the question for a while, and I have an idea. Perhaps you
have already thought of this idea and don't think it would work or don't
have the resources/time to pursue it, but on the off chance that you
might be interested and think the idea has merit, I want to share it
with you.

My idea is basically to embed IP look up & sharing functionality in
manyverse itself. Basically, have each manyverse instance keep track of
its' own internet address and share that address with other friends
manyverse clients whenever it changes. Since devices on the internet
change IP's every so often (some quite often, some much less often),
this obviously means that each instance of manyverse COULD have out of
date information. That is why there would need to be some critical
minimum number of instances in the group so that whenever one instance
drops out or changes IP, the others still maintain the integrity of the
lookup service.

This gets rid of the entire requirement for room/pub servers to be set
up (and maintained) and replaces it with a distributed virtual
equivalent that can actually be more resilient (and more secure since
pub/room servers are a target for hacking).

How I envision it would work:

A person downloads Manyverse on their phone or computer, installs it and
runs it.

The manyverse app takes note of its' public IP address and stores it
locally.

The app then asks the user to invite at least 3 other trusted
friends/users to install manyverse (if they haven't already) and this
invite includes an encrypted version of their current IP address. This
invite would be sent by email or text or similar.

When the user's friends download and install manyverse, then their
instances take note of their IP address and then share that with the
inviter's instance of manyverse (via the IP address given in the
invite). Now each of the trusted friends are connected to the inviter
in manyverse and the inviter's instance of manyverse has current IP
addresses for all the invitee's instances. The inviter can then connect
the other invitees to each other by sharing their IP's with them so all
participants now have complete, up-to-date IP addresses for each other
and can communicate with each other via manyverse's current methods.

Each manyverse instance should be checking at regular intervals if its'
own IP address has changed. If a participant's internet address changes
(as they often do), then their manyverse instance should notify all
other instances in the group of their new IP address so that
communication can continue as normal.

Of course, the failure condition to this system is if ALL participants
change IP addresses (or go offline) simultaneously. But this condition
would be rare and get much smaller as more instances (participants) are
added to the group. Since the relationship is exponential, the chances
of a simultaneous IP change/dropout of all participants becomes
vanishingly small as the number of participants goes up to more than
just a handful. If someone runs an instance on their home PC (or
raspberry Pi or whatever) all the time, the chances of a simultaneous IP
change or dropout of all participants is extremely small even with just
a few participants.

What do you think? Good idea? Dumb idea?

REDACTED NAME

p.s. keep up the great work. I love what you are doing.

contracts with the US military

So sad.

On Linux, you can run this in the terminal (if you don't have Adwaita, replace it with some other theme):

GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark manyverse

Also, to force light theme:

GTK_THEME=Adwaita:light manyverse

@Mix Android @SoapDog (Macbook Air) Paolo from ssc (the company that Dominic is working at) called me today and he wanted to sell me the idea of using their SDK instead of nodejs-mobile and Electron. Turns out what they're building is an alternative to Tauri and Electron, where the value proposition is something like "run everywhere, on Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android" and "like Node.js, but just libuv to give you TCP/UDP/FS".

If you're interested in trying out early tech, check their SDK page: https://socket-sdk.dev/