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Secushare: A decentralized, secure social network built on GNUnet

secushare.org

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Re: Secushare: A decentralized, secure social network built on GNUnet

#31

Post by kerkeslager »

arkh wrote: post #19

Decentralized social network: a customized phpBB with a good OpenID module would be enough. Host your own, authenticate yourself to other instances, use RSS feeds to create your own composite timelines.

Your idea breaks down immediately when you realize that hosting your own phpBB instance is far outside the capabilities of most users. This means that you're at least centralized into groups around phpBB hosts, i.e. this is a federated system.

In practice, federated systems become centralized. Email, for example, is now mostly centralized in a few providers: GMail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc. Even if you don't use one of these providers, they have a significant percentage of your emails.

Re: Secushare: A decentralized, secure social network built on GNUnet

#32

Post by kerkeslager »

lapinot wrote: post #13

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…

Thanks for writing this. Do you have any good starting points for someone interested in developing applications on GNUnet?

Re: Secushare: A decentralized, secure social network built on GNUnet

#33

Post by jancsika »

iamnotacrook wrote: post #21
Avamander wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find this image of GNUnet-GTK hilarious: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/0/0a/Gnunet-gtk_0....

I like how the availability of each file is 0%. "Yeah, we focused on the amazing UI first - we'll handle downloading later".

I wonder if they considered simply shipping with hashes for each byte of data of common files users may want to download.

Then users could "download" by brute-forcing each byte of data. This would not only keep the content private but also the metadata.

It might also speed up adoption.

Re: Secushare: A decentralized, secure social network built on GNUnet

#34

Post by antsoul »

kerkeslager wrote: post #32
lapinot wrote: post #13

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…

Thanks for writing this. Do you have any good starting points for someone interested in developing applications on GNUnet?

Read and follow the bug reports, specially this one : https://bugs.gnunet.org/view.php?id=4625

Re: Secushare: A decentralized, secure social network built on GNUnet

#35

Post by dorfsmay »

lapinot wrote: post #13

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…

Can its network federate? Can you use a single identity across networks?

Re: Secushare: A decentralized, secure social network built on GNUnet

#36

Post by jancsika »

lapinot wrote: post #15
phs318u wrote: post #9

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.

Being "more tangible" is an opinion, so i could just counter "non-argue" that i think these things are actually less tangible, we would now have ended-up nowhere since there is nothing more to add (tbh i actually have that opinion, which might be explained by what follows). To add something which is not an opinion, i would say that these blockstack or actually Xcoin based whatever "dapp" (seriously, what is this voca…

To steelman the argument: I think by "more tangible" OP means, "software in a working state."

Secushare clearly isn't in that category of software yet.

Re: Secushare: A decentralized, secure social network built on GNUnet

#37

Post by jasode »

dx87 wrote: post #29
jasode wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm quite annoyed by the superficial critics that are currently overflowing the comments. Of course this is [...] academic research 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 secushar…

The front page currently has articles about Finnish babies sleeping in cardboard boxes, and the benefits of sleeping with a weighted blanket. Just because there isn't something you can try, doesn't mean it's not interesting.

> Just because there isn't something you can try, doesn't mean it's not interesting.

Please don't misrepresent what I actually wrote. I did not dismiss the project as not interesting.

I made a very specific point in my reply to OP (lapinot) and the complaint of "superficial criticism":

If one structures the project's landing page text so that it makes something sound promising at the top but then later reveal that the status is actually "not even prototype" at the bottom (after ~10+ minutes of reading), that "teaser" style of slow reveal is going to invite hostile criticism from some readers. (E.g. see this thread's other comments of "vaporware", "generic introduction on something that doesn't exist", and "this page uses a lot of words to explain almost nothing.") Yes, maybe those comments are unfair but consider if the text's obfuscated style of exposition triggered those responses.

The lesson for project authors is: Yes, your project can have moral ethics, pursue ideals of privacy & decentralization, be "interesting", and other laudable goals, etc -- but you'll throw all that good will away if the project's text describing it disrespects your readers.

There's nothing wrong with an interesting project that's looking for contributors to build something real.

Re: Secushare: A decentralized, secure social network built on GNUnet

#38

Post by F3nd0 »

nickik wrote: post #17

I have seen a lot of their presentations at 33C3. Its quite interesting ideas that I was quite interested in. 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…

Have you gotten in touch with the developers? They recently redesigned their website, and are trying to make the project more approachable in general. If you have any remarks or suggestions for improvement, I'm sure they would be appreciated! (There's a contact page: https://gnunet.org/en/engage.html)

But yes, most of the sub-projects seem experimental, or on a low level and lacking a pleasant way for people to make use of them. It seems possible to integrate the GNU Name System into a web browser, though, and re:claimID (https://reclaim-identity.io/) has an add-on in development. GNUnet news list some ‘major design issues’ they're aware of, so hopefully stuff like filesharing will work well enough once those are fixed.

Re: Secushare: A decentralized, secure social network built on GNUnet

#39

Post by F3nd0 »

p4bl0 wrote: post #28

Anyone knows the relationships (if any) between this project and RetroShare?

I don't think they're associated, but they seem to have a similar function. secushare has a comparison page where they compare their project to others (including RetroShare) for various use cases, so you might want to take a look at that. (https://secushare.org/comparison)
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