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Push Notifications for Decentralized Services
How mobile push notifications currently bring centralization to decentralized services, and how we can avoid it, even for mainstream configurations. Published the 31/01/2025 This post will focus on Android. We all know decentralized applications: emails, Mastodon (and the Fediverse), Nextcloud and other clouds, Git servers, Messaging services like XMPP or Matrix, Feed reader (RSS), some calendars, etc. They are decentralized because they don’t rely on a single server, own by a single entity.
We all know decentralized applications: emails, Mastodon (and the Fediverse), Nextcloud and other clouds, Git servers, Messaging services like XMPP or Matrix, Feed reader (RSS), some calendars, etc. When Android application developers want to add support for push notifications, they usually go for Firebase Cloud Messaging(FCM), the solution provided by Google. There is of course the solution of UnifiedPush, that uses webpush specifications, which is decentralized by default and can do authorization controls using the standard VAPID, based an asymmetric encryption.
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