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An off-grid social network

staltz.com

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Re: An off-grid social network

#221

Post by substack »

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…

Your computer will only help host data that was hosted by people that you follow. If you don't want to spread content that you disagree with, don't follow people who post such content.

Re: An off-grid social network

#222

Post by JdeBP »

staltz wrote: post #178
XaspR8d wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I suppose I'm targetting the protocol a little too much when I should think about what features clients can implement. I'm certainly happy with the "gossip" approach; I just see it as challenging for some people to adopt when they are coddled with the idea that they can censor their past.

Another very important point with no-deletes is: you can't deny history. You can't, in real-life, take back something you said. The mechanics of digital deletion in centralized systems is a big problem for History . I remember Julian Assange describing a corruption scandal that was essentially erased from History because a digital article by a large media company was deleted, and not replicated fast enough.

Usenet is, once again, a lesson here. Remember cancel messages. Then remember forged cancels. Then remember the people who decided to stop respecting cancel messages. Then remember the discussions about signed cancel messages. And so on. (-:

Re: An off-grid social network

#223

Post by mikenew »

someone7x wrote: post #52

This excites me. I'm probably naive, but I always imagine that one day I'll retire and spend my days trying to work on an open source mesh network (or something similar). I want future generations to live in a world where 'the internet' isn't a thing that authorities can grant/deny. A headless social network is a promising omen of a headless internet.

I think the InterPlanetary File System is what you're looking for: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs

Re: An off-grid social network

#224

Post by substack »

rattray wrote: post #151

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/…

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.

Re: An off-grid social network

#225

Post by rattray »

substack wrote: post #224
rattray wrote: post #151

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/…

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)

Re: An off-grid social network

#226

Post by mundo »

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 --…

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

Re: An off-grid social network

#227

Post by mundo »

substack wrote: post #224
rattray wrote: post #151

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/…

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.

So, if I post a GB worth of diary entries, who ends up caching it by default? Just my followers? People I follow? Pubs I connect to?

Re: An off-grid social network

#228

Post by rattray »

staltz wrote: post #143
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…

It depends if you want to use it like Twitter (public announcements) or like Facebook (closed small/medium circles). If you use like Facebook, then it's enough that one person among your circle of friends (probably the most tech-savvy one) would host a pub and use that for their friends. You can see how you would probably be connected to a few pubs, because you usually have different circles of friends. If you want t…

Okay... in the FB case, though, my friend has to send me the IP/DNS address of their pub somehow, right? eg; Signal?

What about organizing groups, which might currently use Slack? For example, political dissidents who don't necessarily all know each other personally. They must use some other communication channel to communicate pubs?

Re: An off-grid social network

#229

Post by mstade »

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.

I was thinking the same thing, and I don't know enough (or anything really) about this to comment to this, but my second thought was that this probably works like bittorrent, where you don't need all of a file to make sense of the individual pieces.

Let's say for instance that the file you're downloading is a long text file containing a novel, but all you care about is chapter 3. Then all you need are the pieces for chapter 3 – the rest can stick around in the ether somewhere.

This is harder to do with bags of bytes obviously – how do you know which bytes belong to chapter 3? – but if the pieces are self contained messages where you don't need either the previous or the next to make sense of it, then it should be trivial to link to them and the distribution could work like this. Whether it actually works like this or not I have no idea. Sounds like an interesting project anyway!

Re: An off-grid social network

#230

Post by anexprogrammer »

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 miss it.

Quite a few tech companies used private newsgroups for support, so you'd dial into those separately. As they were often techie to techie they worked rather well.

I first came across Usenet and uucp via the Amiga Developer programme. Amicron and uucp overnight all seemed a bit magic back in 87 compared to dialing into non-networked BBS's to browse, very, very slowly!

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