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An off-grid social network

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Re: An off-grid social network

#231

Post by mundo »

rattray wrote: post #139

So it seems there are two ways to exchange information: 1) be on the same wifi (presumably great for dissidents in countries with heavy-handed internet control, and inconvenient for everyone else) 2) use "pubs", which can be run on any server, and connected to ¿through the internet? So most users would use pubs, which are described as "totally dispensable" (a nice property). But how can users exchange information abo…

Item 1 also applies to people trying to communicate in post-disaster scenarios (e.g. earthquakes).

I know some people who work in that area, and every time one of them finds out I work in software their first question is about mesh networking. If SSB is what it seems to be (user friendly, no-frills ad hoc mesh networking) then that would be huge for emergency and disaster planners! Is it mature enough to be used in this way?

Re: An off-grid social network

#232

Post by cjbprime »

mundo wrote: post #226
cjbprime wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 --…

It looks like SSB is crying out for Keybase integration. Any plans for being able to add a SSB identity to my Keybase account?

Dunno! Would encourage SSB users to post the request to https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/518.

Re: An off-grid social network

#233

Post by lettergram »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #230
georgecmu wrote: post #150

As a historical note, there used to be quite a few very popular solutions for supporting early social networks over intermittent protocols. UUCP [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP ] used the computers' modems to dial out to other computers, establishing temporary, point-to-point links between them. Each system in a UUCP network has a list of neighbor systems, with phone numbers, login names and passwords, etc. Fido…

For those who weren't around, Usenet was built on uucp in the early 80s. As messages were store and forward you had to wait a good while for your messages to propagate - many servers only connected daily! Oh, and better set cron to dial in often as messages didn't stay in the spool too long! Usenet back then was spam free and you could usually end up talking to the creators of whatever you're discussing. I rather mis…

> Usenet back then was spam free and you could usually end up talking to the creators of whatever you're discussing. I rather miss it.

I still use usenet! It's not quite what it used to be, but you should check it out.

Re: An off-grid social network

#234

Post by cel »

rattray wrote: post #225
substack wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to trust the security of pubs. Validation of messages happens through cryptographic signing and public messages are public anyways. You also don't need to trust that pubs will be online much because your followers will also help host your content.

> public messages are public anyways Right, but someone I trust could have their message corrupted, no? eg; some political leader intends to write "everybody vote for Alice" and it is modified to read "everybody vote for Carol". Is this possible? (I generally trust FB not to do this because their business would suffer if they were caught, for example – not so with ephemeral pubs)

Each message includes a signature by its author of its content, so it can't be falsified (unless the author's key is compromised)

Re: An off-grid social network

#235

Post by edraferi »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #219
cakeface wrote: post #210

Can I choose who's content I pass along? I am ok distributing my own feed, that's presumably why I am joining the network. I am not OK passing along someone else's hate speech, porn, warez, malware, spam, etc. I'd like to be able to review the feeds available and say "Yeah sure I'll pass that around." If everything in a feed is encrypted then I'd need to decide. Also yeah my brother who's feed I follow and pass may u…

Curating exercises of freedom of speech, eh? Sounds like decentralization won't lead to more digital freedom after all with attitudes like this.

Your freedom to spread filth is precisely equal to my freedom not to repeat it.

Also, please remember that the American First Amendment limits Government speech restrictions. Private communities and individuals can make any rules they want about social acceptable speech.

Re: An off-grid social network

#236

Post by the8472 »

cjbprime wrote: post #194
the8472 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ship a client with a long list of "cached" nodes that were verified to be long-lived. I mean you need to obtain the client at some point, you can gather a fresh list of nodes along with it. From that point onward you keep your own cache fresh. You could also run your own bootstrap node on an always-up server if downtimes making the lists stale is a concern. You can also inject contacts when starting the clien…

These are excellent ideas. Are any of them implemented? If I download e.g. uTorrent today and firewall off the hardcoded public bootstrap nodes, will it bootstrap?

> If I download e.g. uTorrent today and firewall off the hardcoded public bootstrap nodes, will it bootstrap?

Possibly, which mechanisms are used varies from client to client. Usually DHT bootstrap is not a primary goal but a side-effect of other mechanisms. Things that work in some clients:

  magnet -> tracker -> peer -> dht ping
  torrent -> tracker -> peer -> dht ping
  magnet -> contains direct peer -> peer -> dht ping
  torrent or magnet -> multicast discovery -> peer  -> dht ping
  torrent -> contains a list of dht node ip/port pairs
As you can see all but the last piggyback on regular torrent connections. But that's more because file transfers are the primary purpose and the DHT is not the raison d'etre of those implementations. If DHT connectivity were considered more important clients would also try more direct approaches.

Re: An off-grid social network

#237

Post by neves »

lettergram wrote: post #233
anexprogrammer wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who weren't around, Usenet was built on uucp in the early 80s. As messages were store and forward you had to wait a good while for your messages to propagate - many servers only connected daily! Oh, and better set cron to dial in often as messages didn't stay in the spool too long! Usenet back then was spam free and you could usually end up talking to the creators of whatever you're discussing. I rather mis…

> Usenet back then was spam free and you could usually end up talking to the creators of whatever you're discussing. I rather miss it. I still use usenet! It's not quite what it used to be, but you should check it out.

Can you still access it though Google? They've bought DejaVú!

Re: An off-grid social network

#238

Post by crypt0x »

DenisM wrote: post #117

My friends and I have thought this through in detail a while ago, and have a few suggestions to make. I hope you make the best of it! Distributed identity Allow me to designate trusted friends / custodians. Store fractions of my private key with them, so that they can rebuild the key if I lost mine. They should also be able to issue a "revocation as of certain date" if my key is compromised, and vouch for my new key…

> Distributed identity

a very nice person whom i like to call mix made a module for this recently: http://git.scuttlebot.io/%25XJz%2BcF9oIgd1eHYFGg3ycVwowLEseL...

Re: An off-grid social network

#239

Post by johnchristopher »

vhodges wrote: post #37

I've been thinking about this very thing the past few days! Forgive the rambling, this is the first time I've written any of this down... My idea is to use email as a transport for 'social attachments' that would be read using a custom mail client (it remains to be seen if it should be your regular email client or have it be just your 'social mail' client. But... if using another client as regular email, users would…

I had been thinking about something like that too some years ago. Subject or first line of the mail should act as headers for the mail client extension parser. You could tag the social object you send out (event, picture, status update) and users could subscribe to those (the client would just filter out)(it solves the problem of being interested in an author's upcoming books and social comments but not in his comments on his family vacation). Likewise you could choose who get your updates.

Problem is you don't have a mean to publicly advertise your status and offer a way to subscribe. That would be a third party provider. I can imagine someone fetching everyone's updates and providing a mechanism to just resend the mail via a public web repository that would act as a public registration hub.

That would be a huge data mine though. Unless you add pgp in the mix and then you have to hit the mark on the client pgp handling to easily allow close friends to give out their public key.

Wouldn't that make a fun POC project ?

I remember I was thinking about it when pownce came out.

I still believe the net would be so much more fun with the likes of pownce and w.a.s.t.e around :(.

I remember having some actual conversations on w.a.s.t.e. That's never happening with torrents.

Re: An off-grid social network

#240

Post by thomastjeffery »

itchyjunk wrote: post #68

I am not much of a social networking type of person, but I have wondered how nice it would be to network with a community like HN. For example, I see a nice comment chain going on in some news article, but as the article dies so does all the conversation within it. Maybe it's just me but if I see an article is x+ hours old (15+ for example), I don't bother commenting. What type of social networking would HN use for n…

Notifications are the only feature I really miss comparing HN to Reddit.
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