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An off-grid social network

staltz.com

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Re: An off-grid social network

#151

Post by rattray »

Bit of feedback: when you download the desktop application, it prompts for a desired name, image, and description.

It's unclear whether this can be changed later, and I'm not yet sure whether I want to use my real identity or a throwaway.

After creating an account with the default ¿randomly? generated name, I tried to use an invite obtained from http://198.211.122.115/invited which was linked from https://github.com/staltz/easy-ssb-pub.

All I got back was "An error occured (sic) while attempting to redeem invite. could not connect to sbot"

It worked with http://pub.locksmithdon.net/ though I feel a bit odd trusting a "locksmith" I've never heard of to stream lots of data to my harddrive...

It's cool that anyone can host a pub – basically, an instance of FB/Twitter/Gmail, it seems – but things 1) will get expensive for them, and it's unclear how they'll fund that – and 2) now I have to trust random people on the internet – not only to be nice, but also secure.

As a "random technically aware netizen", I honestly trust fooplesoft more, since they have a multi-billion-dollar reputation to protect. (Not that I trust fooplesoft).

Re: An off-grid social network

#152

Post by gknoy »

freehunter wrote: post #23
s_kilk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then your laptop gets stolen and everything's gone.

Or you shut your PC down when you leave the house and then want to access your network from your phone.

SSB's central premise -- distributed users, making an ad-hoc network connection whenever they are physically close, or perhaps have some network connection -- bakes in an assumption that a user's ability to connect to the network is sporadic.

It seems like the system would work just as well for people who decide to turn their system off when they go to work, or are on a sailboat. Of course it's not convenient in the same way that always-on social networks are, but that seems to be specifically not the point of SSB.

Re: An off-grid social network

#153

Post by cjbprime »

pcmonk wrote: post #146
platz wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> distributed identity piece is there a good reason not to rely on keybase.io Depends on your definition of "distributed", I suppose

My impression was that keybase is distributed? Can it be used without talking to keybase's servers?

The Keybase server manages giving out usernames, and recording the proof URLs for users, and then your client hits the URLs, checks that the proofs are signed with the appropriate key, and caches them to watch for future discrepancies.

Keybase offers decentralized trust, in that the Keybase server can't lie to you about someone's keys -- your Keybase client will trust their public proofs and not the Keybase server -- but it's not a distributed/decentralized service as a whole, because you still receive hints from the server about where proofs live, and learn Keybase usernames from it.

(I work at Keybase.)

Re: An off-grid social network

#154

Post by jdormit »

AljoschaMeyer wrote: post #100
jdormit wrote: post #86

I think I missed something. If information is exchanged when machines are on the same network, how does the guy in New Zealand get updates from the guy in Hawaii? Is there a server involved, or does the New Zealand guy have to wait until he is on a network with someone who has already connected with the Hawaii guy?

(Public) information is not only shared between friends, but also between friends of friends. So as long as they have common friends connected to the internet, the data flows without problems. To help with this situation, the network includes so called pubs. These are basically bots that run 24/7 and friend people. The article very briefly mentions them. More information here: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/concepts/pub.…

Very helpful, thank you!

Re: An off-grid social network

#155

Post by cjbprime »

the8472 wrote: post #3

> However, to get access to the DHT in the first place, you need to connect to a bootstrapping server, such as router.bittorrent.com:6881 or router.utorrent.com:6881 This is a common misunderstanding. You do not need to use those nodes to bootstrap. Most clients simply choose to because it is the most convenient way to do so on the given substrate (the internet). DHTs are in no way limited to specific bootstrap nodes…

I think you're being uncharitable in attributing a misunderstanding. The OP used the phrase "in the first place", and it's mostly correct that if you don't have any cached nodes (hence that phrase), the bootstrap nodes do in fact act as a single point of failure for you.

The multicast neighbor discovery is a neat idea. I wonder what percentage of clients/connections it results in successful bootstrapping for.

Re: An off-grid social network

#156

Post by XaspR8d »

Basic question: since the entries form a chain and reference the previous, is there no way to edit or delete your old entries? (I see it "prevents tampering" and there's something of a philosophical question here about whether you're "tampering" with your own history when you editorialize -- I agree with the crypto interpretation, but in the context of offline interaction, social communication isn't burdened with such expectations of accuracy or time-invariance.)

If so I see that as a fairly large limitation for the common user. Even though truly removing something from the internet is effectively an impossibility, I think most non-technical folks aren't actively aware of this, and I'd at least like the option make it harder for folks to uncover.

Re: An off-grid social network

#157

Post by agravier »

cjbprime wrote: post #153
pcmonk wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression was that keybase is distributed? Can it be used without talking to keybase's servers?

The Keybase server manages giving out usernames, and recording the proof URLs for users, and then your client hits the URLs, checks that the proofs are signed with the appropriate key, and caches them to watch for future discrepancies. Keybase offers decentralized trust, in that the Keybase server can't lie to you about someone's keys -- your Keybase client will trust their public proofs and not the Keybase server --…

Are you working on a fully decentralized architecture?

Re: An off-grid social network

#158

Post by JdeBP »

lj3 wrote: post #105
ISL wrote: post #25

The storage requirements are tremendous, though, right? If I want to have access to everything that's been shared with me, I have to store it all. In the case of images, the storage burden can get large quickly.

Does Scuttlebutt intend to store every post forever? Or could posts 'expire' and get deleted, like on Usenet? It would be on you to save the content you wanted to have long term. Somebody could always take on the burden of capturing an archive of the whole thing in perpetuity and provide web access to it, like the archive.org does for usenet.

Note that after the turn of the 21st century, people were not expiring non-binaries posts on Usenet.

I observed in 2011 that HighWinds Media had not expired any non-binaries postings since 2006, and that Power Usenet had not expired a non-binaries posting for eight years ("3013+ days text retention" was in its advertising at the time). People effectively just turned non-binaries expiry in Usenet off, in the first few years of the 21st century. I did on my Usenet node, too.

I observed then that the Usenet nodes' abilities to store posts had far outstripped the size of the non-binaries portion of a full Usenet feed, which was only a tiny proportion of the full 10TiB/day feed of the time.

Re: An off-grid social network

#159

Post by staltz »

XaspR8d wrote: post #156

Basic question: since the entries form a chain and reference the previous, is there no way to edit or delete your old entries? (I see it "prevents tampering" and there's something of a philosophical question here about whether you're "tampering" with your own history when you editorialize -- I agree with the crypto interpretation, but in the context of offline interaction, social communication isn't burdened with suc…

There is no way (as far as I know) to delete old entries, and I think this is good because with gossip mechanics we cannot lie to ourselves: there is no way of stopping that information from spreading.

What's possible, on the other hand, is to make a message type "ignore the previous" which client apps would interpret to hide them, but obviously a client app can be configured to not hide them.

Re: An off-grid social network

#160

Post by staltz »

rakoo wrote: post #69
s_kilk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then your laptop gets stolen and everything's gone.

If I understand scuttlebut correctly, your stuff is broadcasted to whoever it might concern and the pubs. If you still have your private key, you should still be able to access whatever is in the ether, right ? You somehow become the recipient of your own messages. Only the thief will also have access to your private key, so the account can be considered compromised.

This is a valid point and I don't trust my computer. I would trust, however, a Ledger Wallet http://ledgerwallet.com/ and theoretically and economically it's feasible to have a Ledger wallet app to sign every SSB message. This would be awesome to have.
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