D — MAIL
Decentralization defeats deplatforming.
Mexico, Germany, France and countries around the world have expressed concern over the deplatforming of a sitting US president and his followers by a collection of American tech companies, India should prioritize national support for decentralized platforms like Ethereum to create social networks and messaging apps that US corporations can’t shut down. Part of the solution can also be national replacements for Twitter, but non-Indians won’t be on Indian Twitter, and India will still need to get messages out to the world on neutral international platforms. That’s what crypto permits.
Note that the risk of political deplatforming is not theoretical. Once you’ve banned the “most powerful man in the world”, it’s no big deal to ban anyone else. Every day brings another headline to this effect. Recall too (a) that the US already once banned then-Chief Minister Modi’s physical entry for many years and (b) that millions of people in India are currently dependent on American apps like Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook, Gmail, PayPal, and Google Pay. Given sufficient negative press, American technology companies may ban Prime Minister Modi and his followers not just from entering the US, but from much of the internet itself. And not just from communicating over the internet, but from sending and receiving payments over US-controlled platforms like SWIFT, PayPal, or Google PaPal. Digital hostilities may commence with little warning.
The need of the hour is to develop decentralized platforms which treat every user as the root user and no one can deplatformise someone else with some contrasting views.
Recently WhatsApp was accused of breaching the privacy and using the data of their users for monetizing and other undeclared uses. The users were forced to accept the new terms and conditions or otherwise find some other platform for messaging. The way WhatsApp has become a part of us today it is difficult to switch to something new, and this is what gives the Facebook owned platform an advantage.
D-Mail solves both of the above problems. This decentralized email application is a prototype of how a messaging system would work on a blockchain. No human power on this planet can block your account/address from the chain. You have the power to do what you want on the internet. Neither can somebody else keep a check on your messages unless you give them your address and the password you are using for sending and receiving emails.
As Naval Ravikant once said in one of his podcasts — “We are not far from the day when you will find my views on a pointer to Blockchain. And no one can block/remove that pointer”
The future is decentralised, be it finance (DeFi) or social media.
Challenges
Emails usually involve sending attachment files/photos, but storing them on a blockchain is not possible because of the storage issues. Hence for sending files via the messaging Dapp we make use of the Interplanetary File System(IPFS). If one wishes to send a file, he/she shall upload the file and carefully copy the link that is returned after uploading in the email body. Another challenge is of the response time. Communicating with blockchain often takes some time since it solves a cryptographic puzzle to find a nonce value that adds the block to the chain. This is a problem of scalability, Blockchain has always had a problem with scalability.
Demo Video
Check out Github for better understanding of the code and would love your contributions.
Contact me on Twitter if you face any difficulty in using D-Mail
Would love to see your email on our DApp D-Mail. Drop an E-Mail at the address 0x4762551964D4a557c24F5826c1b1CCd551080adE
Thank you sheetal singh for being such a sport and helping out with the Front End.
Cheers!
