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The Internet and Fediverse in a High Latency Future? (monero.town)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This presumes humanity is a space fairing or interplanetary civilization.

How would something like the fediverse, internet, cryptocurrency, etc function with major latency? As an example, a signal takes between 5 and 20 minutes to travel from earth to mars. A roundtrip response would take at best 10 minutes and at worst 40 minutes. Now lets say you live on mars and your home lemmy instance is mars.social. You want to see what news people are chatting about on earth and heard that [email protected] is a good community. If you put that into your instance search box on mars.social the absolute best you can hope for is a response in 10 minutes. I assume the request would totally fail anyway due to rtt being set to low and the packets expiring before they ever reached the destination. The internet we all know and love is totally intolerant of high latency. Just ask people who use satellite internet or tor.

Edit: i think, but am not certain, that ipv6 replaced rtt with hop count. If so this may not be an issue as the time it takes would not matter as long as the hop limit was not reached.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Usenet over UUCP used to function with effective latency of 24-48 hours: 0-24 hours to wait for the nightly dialup call to exchange new messages, and 24 more hours to get the responses. There are a lot of protocols that don't work well, but federated message exchange is one that actually is more or less perfectly suited to a high-latency environment.