I'm leading an effort for a pretty large refactor and cleanup of all of the existing telehash work (look at the commit history), honing in our mission and simplifying it's usability.
We're trying to make it easy for any developer to add/use end-to-end networking that has strong encryption and connectivity built in.
One problem I saw was that the hashnames are still too long and random to be practical for many use cases like building instant messaging on top of it.
What you kind of need on top of it is some kind of possibility to find other people/hosts.
One possibility is kind of a social network way: You show your "friends" who your "friends" are. Hashnames that are friends to many of your friends are most likely friends and could be suggested to you. Another possibility is local node detection. Other devices you own are most likely on the same network.
Another problem is that sometimes instances aren't online but still should be able to receive messages. You either need to persuade some nodes somehow to store messages or you need central servers.
These are interesting problems, and we've certainly had a few debates at the Telehash meetups about the meaning of "identity" and such. Hashnames aren't expected to be human-friendly. Ultimately, I think it's a problem to be solved at a higher layer than Telehash.
Telehash is an online protocol, in much the same way that IP is an online protocol, so message store-and-forward isn't in scope. However, such a system could be built on top of Telehash. In fact, developing the design for just such a system has been on my mind quite a bit lately. ;)
I think friend discovery is an abstraction layered on top of the protocol itself. Consider the address books on every personal device. In fact, most of the popular communications protocols/infrastructure of the last century has required its own social abstraction.
From what I understand, hashnames aren't supposed to be like domain names. They're supposed to be like IP addresses. Normal people don't need to type or remember IP addresses very often.
So what it needs is a DNS replacement. Something like namecoin might work.
How does this compare to something like BitMessage? I think this does not provide anonymity in terms of IP cloaking and I don't see any kind of spam protection.
Correct -- Telehash provides a basic communications layer, and is not an application, nor does it directly provide anonymity. The intention is to solve one specific problem, and solve it well. All sorts of applications could be built on top of Telehash to provide things like messaging or anonymity.
But discussion there is closed, and discussion here is active. Doesn't that suggest that this should not be killed, and instead should simply be allowed to run its natural course?
You can see from this chart[0] that the item disappeared down the rankings at pretty much exactly the same time you said that. So if you didn't kill the item, did you apply a penalty? Doing anything that takes the item off the front page - especially when it's already off the "newest" page - is pretty much equivalent to killing it.
We're trying to make it easy for any developer to add/use end-to-end networking that has strong encryption and connectivity built in.