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An off-grid social network

staltz.com

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Re: An off-grid social network

#21

Post by the8472 »

glasz wrote: post #10
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…

to me it always sounds like approaches like dht are the solution but i'm having difficulties diving into it for the purpose of implementing it for my own apps. are there any noteworthy resources for non-academics to get started?

Well, for an in-depth understanding you will ultimately have to read the academic papers on specific DHT algorithms, but you don't have to be an academic to read academic papers, no? Besides that there are the usual resources for higher-level overview or gleaning some details: wikipedia, protocol specifications, toy implementations on github, stack overflow, various blog posts/articles that can be found via google.

But a DHT is usually just a low-level building block in more complex p2p systems. As its name says it's simply a distributed hash table. A data structure on a network. It just gives you a distributed key-value pair store where the values are often required to be small. In itself it doesn't give you trust, two-way communication, discovery or anything like that. Those are often either tacked on as ad-hoc features, handled by separate protocols or require some tricky cryptography.

Re: An off-grid social network

#23

Post by freehunter »

s_kilk wrote: post #18
rocky1138 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being able to switch nodes pushes you to try and host your own instead. That's what I've done. IMO we should instead be looking at packaging a self-hosted version into a native Windows and Mac app. Run it in the background and everything's done.

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.

Re: An off-grid social network

#24

Post by rocky1138 »

s_kilk wrote: post #18
rocky1138 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being able to switch nodes pushes you to try and host your own instead. That's what I've done. IMO we should instead be looking at packaging a self-hosted version into a native Windows and Mac app. Run it in the background and everything's done.

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

Make backups. How is this any different than saving photos just in case you spill water on your laptop keyboard?

Re: An off-grid social network

#25

Post by ISL »

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.

Re: An off-grid social network

#26

Post by vog »

bitwize wrote: post #8

So... it's kinna like USENET then?

Not sure why this was donvoted. From a bird's eye view, the whole system looks remarkably similar to Usenet, especially in the old times of UUCP, back when systems were mostly offline and had relatively short timespans to exchange information (via dial-up connection or similar).

What's different now is that we have pleny of disk space, and more than enough computing power to perform proper cryptography.

Re: An off-grid social network

#27

Post by staltz »

cosenal wrote: post #22

You can make sure that the author wrote this post by copy-pasting [this signature]( https://raw.githubusercontent.com/staltz/staltz.github.io/ma... ) <-- 404: Not Found. Now I am not so sure on who the author is anymore...

Thanks for mentioning. Should be fixed now. I recently migrated from gh-pages to netlify.

Re: An off-grid social network

#28

Post by rocky1138 »

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.

How about this: you buy a physical device at Wal-Mart for $29.99, plug it in, hook it up to your wifi and leave it plugged into an outlet. It's got Mastodon or GNU Social on it and could look like this, but branded: http://thegadgetflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SmartPlu...

Re: An off-grid social network

#29

Post by freehunter »

freedaemon wrote: post #17

> For instance, unique usernames are impossible without a centralized username registry. This is Zooko's triangle and was squared by blockchains. Namecoin (2011), BNS (the Blockstack Name System, 2014), and now a bunch of other fully-decentralized naming systems can give you unique usernames. Recently, Ethereum tried launching ENS and ran into some security issues and will likely re-launch soon.

Problem is, I don't want to be assigned a username. I hate it when I get assigned a username. I want my username. If you hand me a username of "$&OdUgr606cZ", I will never remember that, I will never share that, and I will consequently never ever log in.

But it doesn't matter because this issue is already solved. We already have globally unique usernames. They're called email addresses, they are unique by their very nature, and they are (for all intents and purposes) already decentralized.

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