Re: [Social-discuss] project ideas and use cases

[elijah]

On 03/17/2010 04:19 PM, Blaine Cook wrote:

> Extending secure interaction models, especially those encoding group
> dynamics, to a pure p2p environment would be challenging at best.

Yeah, I totally agree. However, there is some middle ground, but I think
it is probably easier to bridge the divide from the p2p side rather than
the website side.

You do not necessarily need a website to provide persistent presence,
and you do not need to trust the provider of your persistence.

Two examples: mozilla weave and wuala. In both cases, your data is
encrypted on the client and stored in the cloud (by mozilla in the
former case, and by wuala + distributed clients in the latter case).

Wuala has two basic ways of sharing:

(1) with other users via the wuala client
(2) with other users via the website (either publicly or via unique url)

So, wuala has a hybrid model. In case #1, the sharing uses a distributed
hash table of client-side encrypted segments. In case #2, the files are
decrypted and pushed to the wuala website.

This allows the user a nice range of choices in the security versus
sharing continuum. It also provides persistence that you can pay for (by
buying quota from wuala) or persistence that you can earn (by keeping
your client open and hosting other user's data).

So, eventually, I think the wuala model is the future, but it will be
hard to get there.

My primary point is that it would be impossible to achieve this model by
starting with a website. You must first start with a p2p client and then
build a way to sacrifice security for sharing later.

But a project like this would take a long time to bear fruit. So, I
still think it makes sense to talk of two projects, gnu-social-website,
and gnu-social-client. I agree with what Blaine says about
gnu-social-website and gnu-social-protocol. It is also the more
realistic project and it is an important project.

In the long term, however, there is a clear technological choice that is
most compatible with a free society and the goals of the FSF:
decentralized p2p clients. Liberty demands nothing less!

-elijah