Here's a sample group link. Go ahead, try clicking it. It will take you directly to the prompt that asks for your name, and then directly into the Decentricity group I just created. Your browser generates your private keys behind the scenes, and every time you open the iris.to website you'll see all your groups and chats.

If you look around you'll find that with a bit of WebRTC setup, you can make video calls. You can also copy your private keys so you can always recover your account on any device. To enable local offline chats, you can set up P2P nodes of your own and federate them to existing nodes you're connected to. This little web-based app even gives you notifications when messages come in.

Ready for the next step? Find the Download Link and choose your OS to download the desktop app. I've tried the app in Ubuntu and Windows, it runs like butter on both platforms. The best thing about this app, of course, is that it allows offline connectivity between users in the same local network.

Use Cases

• I'd love to see a zombie movie that features this app. If society totally breaks down and we had to rebuild communications from scratch, Iris.to would be the way to do it.

• Planning your next secret tryst? Spin up an Iris chat window and have your partner scan the QR code.

• Want to deploy customer service for a website/event/venue , but not sure whether you should use Whatsapp, Telegram, or some other chat app? Use Iris QR codes instead, and chat with your customers without them having to go through lengthy download and login processes.

• I mean, it's a chat app. The possibilities are endless.

Why Hasn't It Caught On?

I have no idea. Their Facebook page is 6 years old and only has 135 likes last time I checked. There's a paltry list of articles shared on the page, none of them on mainstream media, and trying to Google the project by its chosen name, "Iris Messenger" yields nothing on the first page of Google.

Fighting the huge social & tech giants can't be that easy or cheap, and looking around their sites, I think the only monetization model they have is through bitcoin donations. Judging from the amount of people on their Facebook page, I'm not sure they're getting a lot of those.

What Is Next For Iris Messenger?

Iris is high-quality software, in my opinion. The experience is well-designed, account creation is instantaneous, and the apps & websites run well. Sure, there are some rough spots -- spinning up new host nodes isn't as straightforward as it should be, and the Linux AppImage doesn't package-update -- but those are only tiny flaws in what is an absolute minimalistic gem of a chat app.

I think you should use it. I think you should tell your friends to use it. I think you should send your iris.to group invites in your Whatsapp groups and tell them to chat with you on Iris instead. I think you should use your iris.to link in event posters, Linkedin profile, and your Instagram bio. If we want a truly decentralized future, this decentralized chat app needs to go viral.

And if you have a few Satoshis laying around, you should donate to them. Here's their bitcoin address:

3GopC1ijpZktaGLXHb7atugPj9zPGyQeST

You might have noticed that it says that Commotion Android is "to be released in early 2014", and alarm bells might be ringing in your head. Especially when you click through to "phones" and it shows that the last release was in 2012. Yes, this is hardly Enterprise-grade implementation.

But it works.

I've actually tried Commotion Wireless back in 2017 with two TP-Link routers and a rooted phone. Everything connects, everything was relatively easy to set up, and if I wanted to blanket my housing complex with Commotion intranet, I would have been able to.

Why Hasn't It Caught On?

My opinion:

• Meshnets in general haven't caught on because the mainstream internet is so ubiquitous in the First World. Everyone is online, everywhere, and there is no need for an "alternate internet".

• Meshnets also haven't caught on because of the lack of applications built for meshnets, and the ubiquitousness of applications or websites built for the regular internet (Facebook, Netflix, etc).

• Meshnet implementation is seen as technologically challenging and are only done by networking geeks.

• Commotion Wireless has actually caught on -- there were city-wide implementations back in 2013 -- but I don't think it has been maintained, because of the lack of incentives for people to work on these meshnet projects. I think Commotion caught on in the wrong area of the world: most Commotion implementations are in the US or Europe, where there is relatively little connectivity problems. There is no incentive for adoption or expansion in these communities. And thus, ironically, the Commotion Wireless communities dwindled in number.

What's Next for Commotion Wireless?

I'm going to deliberately conflate this with the question "what's next for meshnets?"

My answers:

• Meshnets need to go plug-and-play, and it needs to use the Commotion Wireless strategy of being very community-focused. Make it as seamless as possible for a community to plan, purchase, and build everything they need to get a meshnet up and running.

• These seamless, plug-and-play meshnets need to to be targeted to third-world countries or remote regions with connectivity problems.

• Meshnets need a way to incentivize node runners. Here are some alternatives:

  • The thing that immediately comes to mind is the Blockchain route of treating each node runners as miners and basically allowing them to receive tokens. A bunch of projects online are trying to do this, including:

    • SmartMesh.io --> payment-focused meshnet with light blockchain nodes implemented in IoT devices.

    • Althea --> lets routers share internet connectivity and have these routers directly pay each other for the bandwidth. (I might actually review this one later since I think it sounds cool.)

  • You can get funding from an NGO / govt entity and have them donate these funds to volunteer node runners in a remote region. Check with the United Nations Broadband Commission, Electronic Frontier Foundation, or other NGOs. Or contact your local city government for a partnership.

  • A company can actually help deploy meshnet nodes for a region. "Wait," you might say, "How is this different from an ISP model of deployment?" The difference would be that these meshnet companies would only be selling the nodes, and maybe some troubleshooting services. The control of the nodes would still reside with the node holders -- i.e., the households and individuals in the community.

  • You can create a "killer app" for a meshnet platform that drives people to use it simply because they want to access the application's function or content. This could be anything from social media apps, chat apps, or media streaming apps. Package your app in the open source wrappers that Commotion Wireless has provided, and share them far and wide.

Why Hasn't It Caught On?

It was far too ahead of its time. When I tell people I used to have a VR office running on a server I host myself back in 2013, I get disbelieving looks. Also, a lot of people thought it was a game and approached it as such, and get disappointed because it was never meant to be a game and had no actual gameplay. The graphics look basic -- not because the server engine is bad, but because not a lot of development goes into the "viewers" (the client-side apps). Meanwhile, the entire VR industry has been relegated to gaming use cases, ignoring implementations like the use cases I mentioned.

What's The Future of Opensimulator?

Opensimulator remains the best collection of open source code to start your own world simulation server. However, the newly-launched project Decentraland -- which has a similar premise, with the addition of a Blockchain framework that takes care of digital assets ownership and the running of the platform -- might be the one to dominate this space and bring it to the mainstream. I'll reserve judgement for now, and I'll post another review about Decentraland once I've explored it further.

For now, let us tip our hats to the original worldbuilders -- Opensimulator and Second Life.

If you want to stop your "centralization addiction", your first steps would be to find self-hosted alternatives to the apps you currently use. And there are plenty of those online (check out these Whatsapp replacements, Facebook replacements, and Spotify replacements) but if you want to get immediately up and running, you can use Nextcloud.

What Exactly Is It?

Nextcloud is a self-hosted server package that contains a bunch of apps you can immediately use. They have a good ecosystem of applications that are immediately installable, including online collaborative office suites, chat & videoconferencing apps, media servers, map servers, and even an app to solve ransomware attacks via entropy analysis. A Nextcloud server can federate with another, which means you can host your own chat app in your home PC and still be able to talk to another user that installed Nextcloud on his/her own home PC.

There are alternatives to Nextcloud, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention them here: FreedomBox, SolidProject, Yunohost, and others. I prefer Nextcloud, but these other projects are awesome too. FreedomBox is a Debian implementation, so all Debian apps run well on it. Solidproject is backed by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Yunohost is ridiculously easy to install on your computer and probably has the best UI/UX design out of everything I've tried.

Use Cases

• Small business implementations of Nextcloud would be a lot cheaper than a similar Google Suite implementation, because you don't really need to pay for any of these services. Nextcloud does have a paid tier (Nextcloud Enterprise) but what they provide there is basically just hosting, optimization & maintenance. Installing Nextcloud on your own office computers is 100% free.

• Since we're all stuck at home (I'm writing here post-pandemic, 2020), a Nextcloud for the family might be an amazing idea. Use it to share movies, leave messages for your parents, create a joint shopping list, schedule chores.

• Host a Nextcloud in your community and use it to coordinate activities. Do book drives, set up a gift exchange, plan a party.

Why Hasn't It Caught On?

It has caught on. It claims to be an "industry-leading" solution with over 250,000 servers online.

You probably haven't heard of it, though. That's because Nextcloud seems to be marketing itself mostly to businesses and enterprises, instead of to hobbyists and communities. There's nothing stopping you from installing your very own Nextcloud, though -- so give it a shot!

What Is The Future of Nextcloud?

Here's what's interesting about Nextcloud: It is an open-source, community-contributed offering with a decentralized model of implementation, and it is also an Enterprise offering with clear SLAs and pricing models. The Enterprise ecosystem effectively funds further development of the technology, and the open source community contributes directly to the creation of new technologies.

I am a lot more confident about Nextcloud's future than I am of many decentralized projects I've tried, simply because it already has a good monetization model. It's a tried-and-true one, too: It's exactly the same model RedHat, Hyperledger Fabric, and other open enterprise implementations use.

Use Cases

• Replace Zoom with this. If you want to make a private room, turn on the password. If you want to make an invite-only room, send the private room link via invite and communicate the passwords to your invitees. If you want to host a public event, broadcast your room link on Linkedin or Facebook.

• Use it as a video F2F customer service app. Rather than forcing your customers to download an app just to talk to your representatives, send them a Meething link and they'll be connected as soon as they click the link.

• Use it as an alternative to any other videoconference app. Only have the free Zoom and just hit the time limit? Move over to a Meething room. Got disconnected from Google Meet? Meething room. Got kicked out from Microsoft Teams? Meething.

• (Coming soon) Generate an avatar on your device, have it follow your expressions, and have conversations anonymously while having your expressions represented by your avatar, without any server ever seeing your video feed. Great for whistleblowers or just, y'know, kids.

Why Hasn't It Caught On?

IMHO, it's mostly brand awareness:

• The name kind of sucks. Trying to search for "Meething" is a pain because every search engine thinks I was trying to type "meeting". Even after telling search engines to explicitly search for "meething", I still mostly get results of websites where someone misspelled "meeting".

• Still about the name: I told my friend about it and he thought I said "me-thing" or "mi-thing", and he thought it was a website about IoT devices. (Internet of Things, get it?)

• Admittedly it does lack some features compared to Zoom: The room host can't mute people or remove them from the meeting, there is no calendar integration, and the default video quality seems to be non-HD. It is totally free and without time limit, though, so I think those are fair trade-offs.

• All their sites -- from the main site to their Github, have nearly no documentation, which is not very friendly to users or developers.

• There is only 2 articles online about them: The ZDNet article and the Globe News Wire press release. As a solution that relies on B2C adoption, their PR drive really leaves much to be desired.

What Is The Future of Meething?

I would say the future looks bright, actually, if they manage to work out the kinks. The Globe News Wire press release I mentioned says they just received funding from the Mozilla foundation, in June 2020. This could be huge for them: they'd be able to develop this into a tiered Enterprise offering much like Nextcloud above, where they are still fully open-source but companies hire them to deploy and manage private nodes.

BTW check out this post by Mark Nadal, the creator of Meething. The team built the app in seven weeks, and that was only two months ago. This is early days yet for the future of video communications.