Re: [Social-discuss] distributed social networks

[carlo von lynX]

Hello Melvin, long time no see!
Did you make a Bitcoin fortune? ;)

> >Eight years ago there was this "gnu social p2p" vs
> >"gnu social" dispute.

Actually it was in this very mailing list,
that's how Melvin and I are still lurking...

There was this awareness that federation was not
going to be sufficient, yet a majority of people
wanted to have a federated system because it is
better than having nothing. So now we have more
than one federated system as hundreds of developers
invested years into refining them and even
embedding teleconferencing and dunno what.
Just look at Matrix.. it's federation taken to
the max. Superfancy, but it doesn't protect metadata.

While at the same time maybe a dozen people
worked on distributed social networking, not even
coordinated into the same project (Teddks tried
to implement 'gnu social p2p' as a one man project
and ran out of breath at some point, or so it
seems when looking at the codebase) which I guess
is the reason why in 2018 we still don't have what
humanity would actually need to get away from 
Facebook. Let alone the power to establish it.

On Sat, Jan 20, 2018 at 01:20:19PM +0100, marc wrote:
> well, i hope to help re-open this enterprise project, why not at
> gnu? makes sense to try. or let's try a bunch of us further
> something really well based-done.
> 
> i agree that blockchain has shadened the brighter p2p is, and this
> worries me, as you see, i do phrasing mistakes with that.

Both concepts are suboptimal. P2P precludes the use
of servers as agnostic relays, but Tor has shown that
relays are a fab thing. Blockchain has introduced the
idea that broadcasting to thousands of nodes is normal,
which it isn't. Reasonable distributed systems should
be in-between, employing Tor-like relays to achieve
cloud-like UX, distributing content to achieve resiliency
without needing worldwide consensus. And by this I think
I described how secushare/GNUnet try to do things.

> >Reinventing Bitmessage?
> 
> i forgot to mention zeronet.io, that uses bitmessage, since it says
> it also uses blockchain tech, would you dislike it as a code base,
> let's say for a mory groupy fakebook-like project?

Zeronet runs on Bitmessage? I thought it was Bittorrents
announced on a Blockchain. I haven't looked at the code but
conceptually I can *imagine* that Bitmessage could be tuned
to make millions of slender streams rather than dozens of
superheavy ones. That means to reduce metadata protection
in favor of reasonable bandwidth and usability.

Other than that it just needs a decent data format for
Activity Streams type of data (we use PSYC but other people 
prefer to use less efficient formats such as JSON or XML).
This would be a more overheady solution than secushare,
and it would not come with a generic protocol stack that
you can also use for other use cases for networking 
technology and thereby increase the privacy of all
networking, but still, it would be something.

> >You would want all users to publish how long they have been
> >watching some crp and prove it by some cryptographic means?
> >Just when I thought we had enough surveillance economy.
> 
> hey wait there :), i said "users who agree to donate their (even
> inner interactivity) data".
> i.e. i want to donate even my mouse clicking pretending..
> why should i be denied to contribute this type of data to the most
> or some other refined machines if i want to?

I believe users have no right to donate data that speaks of
their social network, because it is data about other people,
and when aggregated it has the power to bring down democracy.
So to me social networking that exposes metadata is nothing
less but unconstitutional. If there weren't players such as
Facebook, I'd say even 'gnu social' is incompatible with
democracy in the long run.

We don't need to trade data. Let's embrace ethical micro-
payment like TALER and make the surveillance economy illegal.
And let's design systems that resist bulk eavesdropping, not
spend another decade underestimating the risks.

> forced privacy is forcing, and despite for passwords or such
> security things,
> appeals to privacy have to be recomendations, or otherwise can be
> security or integrity patronizing fallacies

That is one of the great mistakes we have been making in
this whole discourse - that we only think of ourselves when
talking privacy. But there is a higher good at stake than
our personal privileges. It's what's left of democracy.

> in this sense, as a PoC, i imagine a wysiwyg like editor that let's
> you offuscate for robots some pieces of some text from some type of
> content

Huh?

> btw. staying watching something for more than 5 seconds, could be a
> easy way to moderate anything.

Oink?

> >Has anyone told you blockchain people that basic income
> >models over ethereum fail because the super-rich needed
> >to finance it will simply not take part?
> 
> this was coming from the proof-of-presence issue, but has gone into
> another, very interesting, point, which my reply is:
> 
> any community, including the states, can start a basic income

Yes, but they need a way to oblige the super-rich to
contribute their part, or it will be a redistribution
from middle class to the poor, which backfires given
how in the current economy the middle class is
disappearing.

> we do not need the super-rich to help us in this, we can do it much
> much easier than we think, but we are too lazy. it is easier to stay
> in our confort areas (including complaining about the super rich
> only, which is not your case carlo)

Nope, all of the UBI models do not stand the test of
time if the super-rich can opt out. That's actually
what all the UBI disputes are about. The critics are
right, UBI can only work if we radically redesign the
entire economy.