What do we need most, to create a decentralized network?

I am just a regular Joe with no big voice, but I’ve what I’ve been saying to anyone who will listen is that folks like us need a “parallel society” including banks, online payment systems, web site, social media platforms and so on. A complete top down parallel society. Otherwise, we will be cut off from the ability to live and communicate.

I think the first things we need to handle is hosting and payment processing.

* hosting modeled on Digital Ocean and eventually AWS 

* DNS purchasing like namecheap/godaddy 

* easy payment like PayPal which should support as man currencies as possible plus crypto 

* code repo like Gitlab/Github

If we had those four things we'd have a great foundation to build on. However, it would also be very expensive 

P.S. I work in web development/devops and would love to help anyway I can with this

I believe starting can done in a balanced channelizing of overall effort in three main directions:

• People having understanding of distributed architecture can start draft/mulling on few intelligent designs (It will help us in deciding/uncovering other needs like new standards/protocols).
• Most important one: PR of idea should go on multiple platforms (can and will help in funding and team building part).
• As the above of two steps start returning some input. Should gather a team of members from all departments of tech (as in frontend and backend) to start on a prototype.

my vision for this is a standalone html/javascript web page that anyone can copy to their computer. after loading the page a creator would add their private key which is effectively their identity. the page would then go off to a small custom server, or possibly even use something like ipns to locate the 'latest' content id of social media created by the creator. each latest piece of content could include new follows of other creator profiles, as well as a link to previous content. the software running in the browser can spider all the content to bring together your feed of posts from the people you follow and present the timeline to interact with. i wouldnt mind spending the time proving out whether this could work or not, i'm just having some mental blocks right now related to my day job which is draining my developer mojo. excuses excuses i know. i should come back with a prototype and stop wagging my fingers at this keyboard.

i really do feel like Matthias Beyer lays it out pretty well with this article:

https://beyermatthias.de/blog/2018/02/25/blueprint-of-a-distributed-social-network-on-ipfs---and-its-problems-2/

I just had some issues with ipns in the browser being able to create and update an entry that another instance in a different browser could resolve. But the actual content, posted and got a cid for via js-ipfs, i was able to load that cid in another browser right away. So resolving the tip of the graph seems like the challenge to me and i am toying with ideas for a tiny server that anyone could run to do that, something that would be easy to spin up on a tiny vps instance with a docker image and super simple config of one approved public key to allow social graph tip updates of the person who owns it and anyone else they feel like adding to the approved list of creators that can update through that server. 

A week ago I might have argued with you.  Now, I think you are spot on!

Is the idea to create a new social network or to be a meta-level structure on top of all other social networks so people can find and follow as networks emerge/are censored? If the latter, one can bootstrap off the other communities and not worry about getting everyone to select and invest their effort one “Twitter/FB substitute”

In terms of the non-technical and more philosophical, there needs to be a user ownership protocol - call it the "Internet Ownership Protocol (IOP)" or "Digital Sovereignty" - where users own their data in the strictest sense. 

I haven't hammered out the details but one of the systemic issues of the internet is the dominant business model of 'collect as much user data now and aggregate and sell later'. It has helped facilitate the rise of the surveillance state 

Maybe I'm wrong but improved micropayment economics suggest the possibility of 3rd party "data brokers" as-a-service where users by default own their data unless they opt-in what data they want collected by these brokers who later aggregate, sort, and sell to larger firms who rely on the ubiquitous ad-based business model that exists today (Google, FB, etc.).

Users receive payment for the sale of their data and if they choose to turn off the spigot, then the mining and payments stop as well.

Think of the early commodities traders but now the commodity is user data.

Agreement on the standard is very important things should start from here only. The tech and architecture should be driven by the standards!

A rough idea honestly hasn't given many thoughts but this what I have in my mind, it scattered!

Open-source(tech-wise UI only) forum for discussion without any censorship but light moderation (no abusive posts/comments). This many can easily contribute to it and improve it regularly. Backend (DB, server, and other stuff) must be private and well secured, now I am not very good at the backend part but together with other devs, we can figure it out, best way to use amazon service they will take care of the security part. A dedicated team will be needed for all of it.

Anyone will be able to most but we have to have verify internet celebs as they have a mass audience we can also allow other users to vote for a verified account but there will be spam and we have to handle, there will spam in everything from voting to comments we can only filter it up to certain level only.

The forum/app main page should be dedicated to short articles, why Twitter is famous (one of read less, tweet from anywhere and the reach). There are already many apps which claims to be non-partial out there, does the world need another one? like Gab, the Indian version of Twitter, FB

The option to be completely anonymous

Hi,

What level of in-dependency do you aim to reach? I assume you will be using the existing intranet...

So maybe start with a brainstorm team to determine what you actually want, and how censure resistant it should be. What the weak points are of most systems and how to avoid them.

The first thing you need are tech guys who have been working in this field. The biggest challenge is i guess, communication, translating your demands into the right available technology. Usually there's a big gap in language and way of thinking. Only then can you tell if, or what hardware you need.

But why would you need to create a decentralized network, when one already exists?

Check out https://odysee.com/, https://lbry.tv/

And if this somehow does not work for you, or you want to extend it, then, consider copying it. Would not be surprised if it's largely open source.

I'll admit to not being a domain expert in any of what I'm discussing.

To answer your question, focus on the low level protocols, build proof-of-concept apps that are useful that we can show to people.

More broadly, we need to think more fundamentally, and have some foresight into what the world might look like in 20-30 (or maybe 2-3) years.

It is plausible, even likely, that we are going to experience universal institutional failure. In particular, our trust networks have what amounts to a single point of failure, which is the university system, and that single point of failure has been compromised. The legal system, the medical system, finance, most scientific research, and various engineering fields all rely on the university system to credential their participants. The university system is compromised and is beyond recovery at this point. We should plan for the legal system, the medical system, scientific research, and engineering credentialism to all fail, because they are all dependent on a failed system.

Recent history has shown me that my predictions seem to come true much quicker than I anticipated.

The law as a system fundamentally doesn't make any sense. I could write a whole 1000 word essay about that, but will save that for later. But good riddance to the law. Medicine and engineering are important though.

We need to build technological replacements for these systems. In particular

- The law: develop smart contract technology, and expand its scope. RSA doesn't care about a court order. This needs cognitive effort, as well as prominent proof-of-concept cases. Cryptocurrency is the case model we should look at. But expand the scope to other aspects of enforcing social order. The key idea of cryptocurrency is giving everyone skin in the game. Social order enforcement via distributing skin in the game seems like the correct approach.

- Medicine: need domain experts in chemistry to decentralize knowledge about medicine, so that people don't have to get medicine from doctors. Wrongthinkers should expect to be denied medical care (including surgeries) on the basis of wrongthink. I don't have many specific ideas. This needs cognitive effort from domain experts.

- Finance: I think the cryptocurrency people have made a lot of good progress here. Cryptocurrency as it stands has a fatal flaw, which is it can't survive long-term netsplits (meaning you can't merge divergent blockchains). Some cognitive effort should be placed in tweaking the blockchain concept so that it can survive long-term netsplits, and that it has some mapping with the physical world, so that it can survive power outages.

- Scientific research: This problem seems to be fixing itself. But perhaps some cognitive effort should be placed into creating incentive structures that allow curious and creative people to profit off of doing useful research. Basically we need to solve the public goods paradox.

- Engineering credentialism: Basically we need a replacement for building and bridge inspectors; physical equivalents of checksums. I have no specific ideas here.

The problem with most existing trust systems is either

1. Cycles in a network of trust. This ensures if one node in the cycle is compromised, the entire network is compromised. If the New York Times publishes fake news, it will be repeated in the Washington Post on the grounds that the New York Times published it, and eventually make its way to downstream outlets.

There is a hierarchy of judges in the American court system, who form a check on the political establishment, which controls the judge's ability to be promoted. This means that the hierarchy will select against judges that are willing to rule against the political establishment.

2. People forced to permanently trust a node. If a node becomes sufficiently trustworthy, and through whatever mechanism, people are forced to trust it, it is almost guaranteed to be compromised because of upside/downside asymmetry.

The trust models for the replacement systems must be carefully designed so that they do not contain either of these pathological structures. Ideally a decentralized system should not contain the concept of trust. Supposing it does, a hard constraint is that all trust networks need to be forkable (cryptocurrencies and open-source software have this feature, but courts and companies do not).

This is no longer theoretical. Have a look at https://www.elastos.org/, and yes, its not an easy read or a project to grasp, but it's essentially complete and absolute decentralisation, to the point of no central servers, data repositories or backdoors even on a theoretical level. It's being used to build a lot of cool stuff at the moment, including, yes, completely decentralised and fully censorship resistant Twitter clone called Feeds. The tech is in its infancy, but it's usable right here. Right now.

TL;DR Elastos, Feeds on Play Store. www.elastos.org decentralised operating system.

@BladeMcCool, I like your vision. Is IPNS a typo and you mean IPFS like @elros says?

@admin Larry, BitTorrent is p2p. So is IPFS. Are there advantages to BitTorrent over IPFS for large files, e.g. video? We need to get storage right.

Let's say we run with this. How would one delete one's content? I think it's important for people to own their words (and images—still and moving), and I would prefer that nothing be deleted; instead, one should be able to issue a retraction. But I also believe we need to plan for the inevitable scenario comes up: death captured on video. How do we handle taboos like that? Pornography needs to be labeled so that people can filter it out.

What I would add to @BladeMcCool's vision is this: a Web of Trust (WoT) that one can join. Members of the WoT are able to tag content. At the risk of alienating forum members on the first day, I'll throw out my peeves: violence (one cannot un-see a beheading, for example, and I intend to keep my memory clean of such images), pornography (I know @admin has been a long-standing enemy of child pornography), NSFW (not all NSFW is porn), lies, and bulls—t (e.g. a vague claim of election fraud that lacks evidence that can stand up in court). I want to completely filter out violence and porn, and I want to be warned about NSFW, lies, and BS, including metadata that tells me which WoT members have labeled it as such. A little more about BS. Consider Twitter's Bulls—tQuantum account, a humorous service that cuts through it and makes one think critically, IMHO.

Ran out of time editing my previous post. So here is my second draft.

@BladeMcCool, I like your vision. Is IPNS a typo and you mean IPFS like @elros says?

@admin Larry, BitTorrent is p2p. So is IPFS. Are there advantages to BitTorrent over IPFS for large files, e.g. video? We need to get storage right.

Let's say we run with this. How would one delete one's content? I think it's important for people to own their words (and images—still and moving), and I would prefer that nothing be deleted; instead, one should be able to issue a retraction. But I also believe we need to plan for the inevitable scenario comes up: death captured on video. How do we handle taboos like that? Pornography needs to be labeled so that people can filter it out.

What I would add to @BladeMcCool's vision is this: a Web of Trust (WoT) that one can join. Members of the WoT are able to tag content. Members can belong to as many WoTs as they wish. I might have a WoT for my vocation, a WoT for my avocation, a WoT for friends, etc. I would want a WoT of content vetted by the news source of my choice. I personally would rely on the judgment of World News Group, for one. I would want to read what the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The British Broadcasting Corporation, and National Public Radio (only four examples off the top of my head) have vetted because, well, like it or not, they're influential.

At the risk of alienating forum members on the first day, I'll throw out my peeves that I would use WoT tags for: violence (one cannot un-see a beheading, for example, and I intend to keep my memory clean of such images), pornography (I know @admin has been a long-standing enemy of child pornography), NSFW (not all NSFW is porn), lies, and bulls—t (e.g. a vague claim of election fraud that lacks evidence that can stand up in court). I want to completely filter out violence and porn, and I want to be warned about NSFW, lies, and BS, including metadata that tells me which WoT members have labeled it as such. A little more about BS. Consider Twitter's Bulls—tQuantum account, a humorous service that cuts through it and makes one think critically, IMHO.

One thing I think is going to be important is a balance between anonymity and accountability. Inasmuch as we should be able to say what we want online, if we do post things online, we need to be accountable for them. This includes libel, slander, threats of violence (especially if they can be used as evidence of premeditation), etc. However, we also need to ensure people can have privacy. I think blockchain has a lot of potential in this area as a way to tie users to their profiles without having to publically reveal their identities... unless legally necessary.

Yes I agree with this. People cannot hide behind anonimity and post all kinds of nonsense.  People are allowed to have opinions but free to express them, but the rest of them need to know that they are actually people.  Trends are easily manufactured by money.  Abuses are hurled at the drop of the hat. No one can have more than 1 personal account and it has to be verified. This will automatically enforce sanity in discourse. 

Blockchain offers the best interms of tamper proof identity storage and connected messages.

Posted by: @dkrishnakumar

Blockchain offers the best interms of tamper proof identity storage and connected messages.

Web 3.0 is what we call it in the Blockchain community. It's time to take back control from those who misuse it. 

Maybe this is obvious, but Parlor and any other competing/opposing tech will be analyzed for exploits. Not the same as security, but I think a good thing about a decentralized approach like blockchain is that transactions (posts, replied, etc) can be independently verified via multiple sources/nodes.

I'll also echo previous posts about how critically this effort requires a solution that is independent of any hosting source. Nodes must be able to host and interconnect in as many ways as possible, so the system is not at the risk/mercy of connectivity providers.

We have been working for several years on a decentralized social media platform called Hive. It operates on a peer-to-peer network and uses a blockchain to store the text data and the URL hash links to other forms of data (images/video). Users create accounts that are tied to cryptographic keys that allow them to control their account information.

The data can be accessed via a number of different web interfaces, here's a few:

• https://ecency.com
• https://hive.blog
• https://peakd.com
• https://leofinance.io

I have to go now, but I'll leave more info later about how it works, and some of the plans for the future.

Decentralizing the application and infrastructure is doable but can be complicated. The real trick will be decentralizing the DNS. ICANN is now a private company. You need to register a domain name with a registar to be found on the internet. At some point, ICANN and the registar will simply deny allocating a public IP address for the application. This will make all these other points moot. If we are going to decentralize we need to find a way around the private company that controls the Internet's IP address allocations.

For several years, my colleagues and I have been researching and developing a peer-to-peer system designed to replace HTTP as the primary protocol for the Internet.

More recently, several (entirely separate) projects sprung have emerged from the ether with similar motivations, namely:

• Secure Scuttlebutt
• DAT
• IPFS

In a free and open Internet, any of these protocols can be used to facilitate secure, decentralized storage and network communication. However, in the context of a well-funded and hostile adversary hell-bent on censoring communications, each of these technologies have serious weaknesses when it comes to:

• User Anonymity
• Peer Discovery
• Network Filtering
• Data Dissemination

Without going into too much detail, our research led us to conclude that the design of Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) is closest to meeting our objectives, with modifications to address the weaknesses above by adding:

Discovery

• Proximity-based (Bluetooth, WIFI)
• Broadcast-based (UDP, Multicast)
• DNS-based
• IP-based

Encryption

• User identities
• Feed identities
• Connection encryption
• Payload encryption 

Dissemination

• Opportunistic gossip-about-gossip

Persistence

• Mutual reciprocity
• Proof-of-Storage

Deception

• HTTP/TLS overlay protocol
• Firewall hole-punching

Our work to date has been nascent, and we have not yet opened the project to others outside of our core team. Now, given recent events, it seems we were foolish not to create an open development community at the outset. The hour is late.

With that in mind, I’d like to strongly suggest that SSB is a shortcut to where we would all like to be  technologically, and encourage those who are technically minded among us to join the development of SSB directly.

We intend to merge our progress with and join SSB in the near future. I expect our work will be more than welcomed, but in any event the license of SSB is broadly permissive (MIT), and therefore we needn't worry about our ability to pursue our ends separately if necesssary in the long term. 

Yours,

Proteus Mirabilis 

After reading some posts, it is apparent a few groups of developers have done some stuff.

That’s great. But.

In the end, the weak link with any set of code intended for wide use is the marketing. Getting the system/standard into wide distribution. I assume there may never be a large monetization capacity here, so getting the system into wide distribution will be difficult to organize. 

The subject of this thread, “What do we need most to create a decentralized network”, I believe the top priority is a plan to get this spread across the world. Indeed, the value of a “social network” is in getting a sufficient number of people involved, and in enabling the network to self-organize into smaller sets of individuals that have common interests, and maybe more important, no preexisting hatred to divide them.

In observing how the large socials operate, it is apparent they have some very highly developed software designed to hook up individuals, and tamp down fist fights. This sort of thing might be impossible to develop in a decentralized network, but may be possible by designing the network architecture as a standard and allowing any number of secondary software organizations to write code to use the system.

That paradigm will allow the “smart” element of building a strong and distributed social to be at the end points. The user interface level of the system. And those user interface elements should be easily replaceable, just as I can use any number of different web browsers to access the same sets of URLs.

I haven't read the article or discussion but figured it might be relevant:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25731419