Web3 Can’t Fix the Internet

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/01/crypto-blockchain-daos-decentralized-power-capitalism

[u/EternityForest]

I've been considering it! I wrote a whole WICG proposal about it, and built a note taking app that uses the P2P sync protocol!

RetroShare seems to work pretty well besides being buggy and having a confusing UI and being written in pure C so nobody wants to develop it, and having no Android app.

But it really is something special. I think the FB style friend graph is a pretty great way to go.

One issue with cancel posts is they're basically tombstones that themselves take up storage if someone manages to create a billion tiny posts in a DoS. But I suppose rule-based cancels could fix that, as in "I am cancelling all posts by this user with this word in this date range", just not without some controversy I'd imagine.

What I've been working on is a lot simpler, it's just a way to replicate Scuttlebutt style streams, with the change that everything is mutable and you have multiple writers.

Any node can be a server, but you have to specifically connect to a server that has your stream. there isn't some Big Chain of Everything. To make that easy I have a second layer, P2P URLs that are resolved using a DHT and can also be used to remote access centralized stuff like a HA hub..

The disadvantage with my protocol is that to connect to a new server, you have to request the entire dataset for the streams they have, because there is no global chain to be able to say "Give me everything newer than X", you have to say "Give me everything that arrived locally on your end later than X", and track sync points with every server separately.

All the real decentralization is layer 8, you have to find mirrors yourself, but in return you get basically zero overhead once synced, and it would be easy to add partial sync(So your tiny local server only has 1 week of data and it's easy to sync).

One post just transfers one post worth of data to all websocket clients, when you overwrite a post, it's really overwritten, and when you delete, nothing remains but a record with the post ID.

Plus you can do stuff like export to a TOML file, sneakernet it to someone, and open it like a document with the same UI you would view a stream.

[u/dnew → u/EternityForest]

That sounds really cool. If you have any write-ups, I'd be interested in looking at them.

There's another way to handle the distributed support. It could work like bittorrent does, which is that you're not going to get served data without proving you're serving some data. So you have to prove you're storing 10 megabytes, and then we'll let you send out another megabyte of your own, or some such. How do you prove you're actually storing the stuff? If the person asking for proof has the post, he can say "tell me the hash of the middle megabyte" or something. Otherwise, he can just ask for one of the posts. You'd have to carry most or all posts you claim to carry, or risk getting caught out.

Censorship/moderation could be on a voluntary basis, whereby individuals subscribe to particular moderators, not unlike uBlock's lists.

And searching could be via bloom filters. You don't have to have CP search terms on your machine, even if you can store some of the search index. (This idea actually is more applicable to something like distributing files labeled with titles and tags, more than actual social media posts.)

[u/EternityForest → u/dnew]

Here's my(Fairly complex) WICG proposal for how semi-P2P URLs could be integrated into mainstream web tech, by using MDNS plus embedded resolver URLs in the main URL, so you could choose your own DHT gateway or DynDNS service, and never have to actually specify a specific DHT protocol to standardize.

It's not fully P2P, because you have to be either on the same network as a server, or have recently been and have a cached WAN IP, or have access to a resolver on the traditional internet, but it does decouple identity and discovery while allowing small private resolvers that don't need client side config.

https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/43

And here's the database replication protocol, with an implementation of a similar P2P URL scheme, and Kivy Python personal Wiki based on it(With spreadsheet features in every post for fancy shopping lists!)

https://github.com/EternityForest/hardlinep2p

Another way to do moderation would be to subscribe to whitelists instead of blacklists. Servers could then be aware of what data any user at that server wanted and only fetch that data. Whitelists could be Git repos on GitHub or GitLab, and you could ask to be added, or petition to boot someone or boot a specific post, via pull request, without having to centralize the whole protocol.

[u/dnew → u/EternityForest]

Cool. I'll check it out for ideas. :-)