Show HN: Flux, a tiny protocol that rethinks email from the ground up
Hi HN, I have been experimenting with a messaging protocol called FLUX. The goal is to explore what email might look like if it was designed today instead of in the 1980s. FLUX tries to simplify a few things that feel complicated in the current email stack. Identity is based on cryptographic keys instead of usernames and passwords. Messages are signed and verified automatically. The transport is real time and does not depend on the traditional SMTP relay model. The current implementation is small and meant as a prototype. The whole server is only a few hundred lines of Python so the protocol is easy to read and experiment with. Repo: https://github.com/levkris/flux-protocol I am mostly interested in feedback on the protocol design. What problems would appear in a real deployment. What parts are unnecessary. What would need to exist for something like this to actually work on the open internet. Thanks for taking a look. levkris (wokki20)
Discussion Highlights (2 comments)
wokki20
Hi HN, I have been experimenting with a messaging protocol called FLUX. The goal is to explore what email might look like if it was designed today instead of in the 1980s. FLUX tries to simplify a few things that feel complicated in the current email stack. Identity is based on cryptographic keys instead of usernames and passwords. Messages are signed and verified automatically. The transport is real time and does not depend on the traditional SMTP relay model. The current implementation is small and meant as a prototype. The whole server is only a few hundred lines of Python so the protocol is easy to read and experiment with. Repo: https://github.com/levkris/flux-protocol I am mostly interested in feedback on the protocol design. What problems would appear in a real deployment. What parts are unnecessary. What would need to exist for something like this to actually work on the open internet. Thanks for taking a look. levkris (wokki20)
ramon156
Considering it went through two major versions in mere hours, the changelog specifying POC changes (instead of spec changes) and for some random reason switched from WS to (fetch functions?) I'm pretty confident that there is no thought behind this. I dig the idea, I dont dig the goal (reinvent email because it's "hard"?), and I don't dig everything after that. Just write a spec at this point, the POC does nothing more than exist for existence sake