freetheinter.net

The Ideal Social Network

Sun, 27 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In order for individuals to win the information war, they must be:

resistant to manipulation by centralized entities, and
able to safely and easily coordinate with those they trust

For this to be the case, the end-user features of an ideal social network are assumed to be:

data is only accessible to the intended recipients
users only see content shared directly by people they deem trustworthy
data is safe and accessible to the owner
service is reliable

One potentially feasible approach is outlined here.

Overview

All self-interested centralized entities eventually make decisions that favor themselves to the detriment of others. As a result, it’s unsafe to rely on information services controlled by centralized entities.

Every individual should have sole control over their own social infrastructure in order to establish themselves as equal peers to every other entity. This requires individuals to host their own services, which in turn requires minimizing the cost and complexity of hosting.

The system described here is a low-peer decentralized message exchange platform with all design decisions made in the interest of the individual user’s independence from third party manipulation.

About

Sun, 18 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This project aims to defeat manipulation from centralized entities by popularizing systems that put individuals in control of the spread of information. This project is currently pursuing these activities: blog about ideas related to the project to get attention. collect resources to acclerate development. break work into tickets and start working on them. For more, please see the faq.

Project Bootstrap

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

To get started, we need to decide what tools we will use. The first experiments will be focused on particular parts of the system to prove that current plans are viable. simulate node discovery - now many, and of what type of nodes are required for normal communication to be feasible mock up consensus method creation: format, interface, sharing. it might be fun to see if LLM agents can talk to each other using various consensus methods and get good results.

Clustering

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Functional goals: Given a list of IP addresses, maintain communicative cluster capable of sending and receiving messages between members Maximize ability to maintain cluster with various commonplace network conditions: dynamic IP address periodic temporary connection loss long term connection loss hardware failure Ensure attack surface is minimized to third parties nodes must allow connection from the internet due to changing IP addresses randomly calculated rendezvous windows

Key Management

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Cryptographic keys are used at every interface - between nodes to establish identities, to decrypt received data, to encrypt data before transmission, to encrypt data before storage, to decrypt data read from storage, etc. It’s critical that all other components are properly structured around safe key management, so this will be one of the first components developed. Key generation Every user generates a root key that serves as the ultimate recovery key, which is used to bootstrap their cluster.

Messaging

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Simple messaging layer, which can be built upon for more complex communication schemes. sharing of simple messages, with references to other messages creation of conversation groups group message exchange between clusters

Data

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Data layer - persistent storage duplicated between one’s own nodes and some nodes of trusted friends. stores messages always encrypted at rest combinatoric streaming engine requires compromise of multiple nodes to access archived data. combine stream of two remote nodes to construct messages in memory locally redundant - any two nodes can be used to recover all data relay, sender, receiver roles trusted friends can serve relay role only one sender at a time fully encrypted on nodes of trusted people you know

Consensus Engine

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

If we’re not going to rely on third parties to tell us what to think, we need to build a system to help us arrive at consensus without them.

The overall approach here is for small groups of individuals to participate in a process that allows them to achieve local consensus. With so many independent consensus decisions being made, and with no ability to know the results from any of them, mass propaganda will become much less effective.

Over time people will accumulate a wealth of consensus results that distill the careful thoughts and discussions of those that they trust the most.

Contribute

Sun, 18 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The best way to support this project is to share and discuss it with people you know. Feedback Please share any feedback using the Suggest Changes link at the top of every post, or by creating an issue on gitlab. Contribute directly Work toward implementing the components. Define, detail, or refine components. Fund development For now this project is just a hobby. To incentivize more development time, please donate to this bitcoin address:

FAQ

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

What it this?

Motivation

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Humans have lost control of the future.

We can regain control by facilitating widespread consensus.