The Dawn Nexus Forum

The Forum is a collaborative text editing system with the notion of ownership of a post, the ability to delegate the right to edit a post, the ability to attach arbitrary short tags and to form tree structures of comments attached to other objects, including objects external to the chat system.

Drawing from the mechanism of distribution of messages in Bitmessage, but instead of attempting to conceal recipients, instead their network locations are used to optimise the transit of messages so a sufficient number of copies are distributed by nearby nodes to ensure delivery.

Further, nodes can be configured with whitelists and blacklists to implement private message networks and to counter spam and misbehaviour by users.

The Forum uses the BFT database replication protocol for messaging but there is no assigned Validators, instead, messages are sent to a validator set that are nearby the destination, based on the pings between nodes.

The message is pushed directly to the destination if it is online, this is why the service advertisments have expiry, to reduce time wasted pinging offline nodes. The backup messages are left with other nodes nearby anyway, for redundancy, and if a node newly has an edit posted to a message it synchronises the message back to the original post

When an account appears in a new network neighbourhood, its queries of its message database are also cached to the new area. By default messages have an expiry, but a user can choose to allow one or more of their nodes to perpetually store messages to and from themselves.

Messages are encrypted by default to the private key of the recipient, as listed in the Registry.