On Thu, 9 Nov 2006, Florent THIERY wrote:
I'd say the biggest difference is that you don't host your mails. A local-user-hosted mailserver network would be P2P, in the P2P user sense.
technically, POP email would fit shirky's definition of P2P. the intermediate MTAs, including your POP server, only host the mail temporarily. of course, POP has declined in favor of IMAP and webmail, which don't fit his definition.
having said that, his definition is probably more useful for social and political purposes than technical ones. jabber, napster, and ICQ (jabber, AIM, etc.) all use centralized servers, with occasional direct connections between peers. that's not the kind of P2P this list usually discusses.
-Ryan -- http://snarfed.org/ _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
