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for those wondering if there are more tangible alternatives, check out the “social” apps on Blockstack (sadly there's no way to filter/sort). https://app.co/blockstack EDITED: fixed to use a public URL.
In contrast, check out these dApps which are immediately usable, https://d.tube/ & https://notabug.io/ (they're GUN based, but I know Blockstacks should be able to do this too).
It is technically ambitious: no-bullshit distributed systems are hard with the current Xcoin trends. GNUnet strives to imagine and implement a networking stack that is mostly friend-to-friend, eg a network where the topology is dictated by the real life trust relationships (just as most old low-level protocol did, think bgp). It wants to support delay-tolerant and low bandwidth networks that exist outside of our privileged western world, have privacy protections on the routing level, etc etc.
It is politically ambitious since much of it is deeply anti-commercial, striving for local self-management (and that on several stacked levels). In particular it strives to have an architecture that defuses the network effect that comes with walled gardens. Applications built on top will probably do the exact opposite of the neuropsychology-based methods of drawing attention that is being used in almos every single mainstream private and free software web application. Imho there is limited value in reimplementing all these mechanisms like suggestions, notifications, infinite stream based information architecture (think mastodon) that have negative aspects on the content (superficial and intellectually aggressive content) and negative aspects as a tool (no decent archiving or information retrieval).
So yeah, this is very much in progress, but GNUnet as a whole is currently federating a lot of academic (and non-academic but still very much based on experimental science methods) work, it's already a gold mine of papers, thesis, experimental protocols, foundations for radically different applications, etc. Please take the time to go deeper than just the front page, it is really worth the time (this is a website, not a marketing page, you have to actually explore it to understand what it's about).
for those wondering if there are more tangible alternatives, check out the “social” apps on Blockstack (sadly there's no way to filter/sort). https://app.co/blockstack EDITED: fixed to use a public URL.
That page looks like it has a login-wall, which is not a good first experience. In contrast, check out these dApps which are immediately usable, https://d.tube/ & https://notabug.io/ (they're GUN based, but I know Blockstacks should be able to do this too).
for those wondering if there are more tangible alternatives, check out the “social” apps on Blockstack (sadly there's no way to filter/sort). https://app.co/blockstack EDITED: fixed to use a public URL.
To add something which is not an opinion, i would say that these blockstack or actually Xcoin based whatever "dapp" (seriously, what is this vocabulary, these are brandings, marketing terms) have nothing to do with gnunet or secushare on the moral level, they are really different beasts with different goals, different contexts. Marketing vs science, social vs commercial, private vs libre... Really, if you're not seeing the objective difference here then you're not trying.
This page uses a lot of words to explain almost nothing, the linked “introduction” page is similar. Is this a thing I can sign up to? How does it make my life better? All I can tell so far is that it’s secure and some kind of social network Compare this to the WhatsApp landing page: https://www.whatsapp.com/ Edit: looks like it’s a framework for building apps, still unclear to me if it’s usable or any apps exist for…
From the "Getting Started" section: > secushare is a research project that hasn't reached prototype status, yet. Consider that it basically consists of a new Internet stack combined with a full-fledged distributed scalability alternative to cloud technology. The challenge is so big, please be patient that we're not done quite yet. (I agree that the homepage is not clear at all btw)
I have a feeling it was written by people whose mother tongue is not English - probably Italian.
The problem with GNUnet in general that it seem very inaccessible to those outside of the university context. In their presentation they show that they did all these great test, but very little how I can run them, or achieve things with GNUnet. GNUnet is academic and has not yet found any real-world use case that I know off and thus suffers the problem of academic projects.
Overall they have a very interesting vision of what you can do, but its pretty far in the future and the website is a bit of nonsense. It took me a couple hours of listing to the craters to understand what they were really trying to do.
I'm quite annoyed by the superficial critics that are currently overflowing the comments. Of course this is an ambitious project that is driven by (of course slow paced) academic research. This is very serious and is of course actively not giving a fuck about current mainstream trends in software engineering. It is technically ambitious: no-bullshit distributed systems are hard with the current Xcoin trends. GNUnet s…
I'm guessing there would be less readers' irritation if the following text that's at the bottom was moved to the very top so it's the 1st thing people see:
>secushare is a research project that hasn't reached prototype status, yet. [...] So if you truly want to get started with secushare, please read how you can help on the introduction page.
Many readers would prefer that above text to be shown before the following paragraph which is structured as a "teaser":
>Imagine Facebook, Whatsapp, Gmail and Skype rolled into one, without the centralized surveillance and control. Crazy? Well, it hasn't been tried before, at least not our way. So let's give it a try.
The "let's give it a try" is actually a request for more "researchers" instead of "users". Instead of a beta or even alpha system to experiment with, the current status is that they need programmers to help build it from nothing to a prototype.
There's nothing wrong with asking for help but it takes a whole page worth of text to get to that point. Even if a software project has moral goals, it doesn't mean readers will not be annoyed at the way the presentation's text is ordered from least important ("imagine if...") to most important ("not even a prototype").
The HN demographic is probably overwhelmingly working programmers instead of academics so they're already predisposed to prefer something concrete they can try out.