Secushare: A decentralized, secure social network built on GNUnet
secushare.org
secushare.org
It is technically ambitious: no-bullshit distributed systems are hard with the current Xcoin trends. GNUnet strives to imagine and implement a networking stack that is mostly friend-to-friend, eg a network where the topology is dictated by the real life trust relationships (just as most old low-level protocol did, think bgp). It wants to support delay-tolerant and low bandwidth networks that exist outside of our privileged western world, have privacy protections on the routing level, etc etc.
It is politically ambitious since much of it is deeply anti-commercial, striving for local self-management (and that on several stacked levels). In particular it strives to have an architecture that defuses the network effect that comes with walled gardens. Applications built on top will probably do the exact opposite of the neuropsychology-based methods of drawing attention that is being used in almos every single mainstream private and free software web application. Imho there is limited value in reimplementing all these mechanisms like suggestions, notifications, infinite stream based information architecture (think mastodon) that have negative aspects on the content (superficial and intellectually aggressive content) and negative aspects as a tool (no decent archiving or information retrieval).
So yeah, this is very much in progress, but GNUnet as a whole is currently federating a lot of academic (and non-academic but still very much based on experimental science methods) work, it's already a gold mine of papers, thesis, experimental protocols, foundations for radically different applications, etc. Please take the time to go deeper than just the front page, it is really worth the time (this is a website, not a marketing page, you have to actually explore it to understand what it's about).
I'm guessing there would be less readers' irritation if the following text that's at the bottom was moved to the very top so it's the 1st thing people see:
>secushare is a research project that hasn't reached prototype status, yet. [...] So if you truly want to get started with secushare, please read how you can help on the introduction page.
Many readers would prefer that above text to be shown before the following paragraph which is structured as a "teaser":
>Imagine Facebook, Whatsapp, Gmail and Skype rolled into one, without the centralized surveillance and control. Crazy? Well, it hasn't been tried before, at least not our way. So let's give it a try.
The "let's give it a try" is actually a request for more "researchers" instead of "users". Instead of a beta or even alpha system to experiment with, the current status is that they need programmers to help build it from nothing to a prototype.
There's nothing wrong with asking for help but it takes a whole page worth of text to get to that point. Even if a software project has moral goals, it doesn't mean readers will not be annoyed at the way the presentation's text is ordered from least important ("imagine if...") to most important ("not even a prototype").
The HN demographic is probably overwhelmingly working programmers instead of academics so they're already predisposed to prefer something concrete they can try out.
Please don't misrepresent what I actually wrote. I did not dismiss the project as not interesting.
I made a very specific point in my reply to OP (lapinot) and the complaint of "superficial criticism":
If one structures the project's landing page text so that it makes something sound promising at the top but then later reveal that the status is actually "not even prototype" at the bottom (after ~10+ minutes of reading), that "teaser" style of slow reveal is going to invite hostile criticism from some readers. (E.g. see this thread's other comments of "vaporware", "generic introduction on something that doesn't exist", and "this page uses a lot of words to explain almost nothing.") Yes, maybe those comments are unfair but consider if the text's obfuscated style of exposition triggered those responses.
The lesson for project authors is: Yes, your project can have moral ethics, pursue ideals of privacy & decentralization, be "interesting", and other laudable goals, etc -- but you'll throw all that good will away if the project's text describing it disrespects your readers.
There's nothing wrong with an interesting project that's looking for contributors to build something real.
I feel extremely tired of Beads-on-a-String networking which essentially still boils down to phone calls with extra steps which we falsely label as somehow constituting an Inter-Network capable system, despite neither IPv4 nor IPv6 in any way actually supporting internetwork communication. RINA addresses this issue completely, but it doesn't address the privacy infrastructure GNUnet addresses.
https://secushare.org/architecture
In my opinion it is worth going over most if not all of the website's content. It is time-consuming, I know, but it is such a gold mine. There are links to other websites, too, and when I get the time I will open those links as well. So much useful information, so much to explore and learn! I love it.
The problem with GNUnet in general that it seem very inaccessible to those outside of the university context. In their presentation they show that they did all these great test, but very little how I can run them, or achieve things with GNUnet. GNUnet is academic and has not yet found any real-world use case that I know off and thus suffers the problem of academic projects.
Overall they have a very interesting vision of what you can do, but its pretty far in the future and the website is a bit of nonsense. It took me a couple hours of listing to the craters to understand what they were really trying to do.
But yes, most of the sub-projects seem experimental, or on a low level and lacking a pleasant way for people to make use of them. It seems possible to integrate the GNU Name System into a web browser, though, and re:claimID (https://reclaim-identity.io/) has an add-on in development. GNUnet news list some ‘major design issues’ they're aware of, so hopefully stuff like filesharing will work well enough once those are fixed.
I'm sure if you get into it, you can lots of information but I have observed with multiple people that they start reading are interested and then drop out quickly.
Thank you so much! If someone can afford to help them (Secushare, GNUnet) financially, please do! I will dig even deeper and try to contribute as much as I can as I have some knowledge in C and cryptography.
For anyone who is interested in contributing to Secushare: https://secushare.org/introduction (especially the "How can you help?" section)
For anyone who is interested in contributing to GNUnet: https://gnunet.org/en/engage.html
commit 4fbc224f25d71c30b16a2f5aa45cb1f2954d2d38 (HEAD ->
master, origin/master, origin/HEAD)
Author: t3sserakt <t3ss@posteo.de>
Date: Wed Sep 20 22:15:53 2017 +0200
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In practice, federated systems become centralized. Email, for example, is now mostly centralized in a few providers: GMail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc. Even if you don't use one of these providers, they have a significant percentage of your emails.
Is this a thing I can sign up to? How does it make my life better? All I can tell so far is that it’s secure and some kind of social network
Compare this to the WhatsApp landing page: https://www.whatsapp.com/
Edit: looks like it’s a framework for building apps, still unclear to me if it’s usable or any apps exist for it yet
> secushare is a research project that hasn't reached prototype status, yet. Consider that it basically consists of a new Internet stack combined with a full-fledged distributed scalability alternative to cloud technology. The challenge is so big, please be patient that we're not done quite yet.
(I agree that the homepage is not clear at all btw)
I have a feeling it was written by people whose mother tongue is not English - probably Italian.
Then users could "download" by brute-forcing each byte of data. This would not only keep the content private but also the metadata.
It might also speed up adoption.
Yes, the overwhelming impression is that they'd like to avoid being like WhatsApp in that they don't want to have any users.
Even if you are hoping to contribute, the "Getting Started" section which actually details what exists of the project is buried down at the bottom of the page - and that section is the closest the site comes to giving a proper explanation of what secushare actually is in terms of technology. The rest is waffle.
What makes you say that?
> Even if you are hoping to contribute, the "Getting Started" section which actually details what exists of the project is buried down at the bottom of the page - and that section is the closest the site comes to giving a proper explanation of what secushare actually is in terms of technology. The rest is waffle.
I suspect your issue stems from your approach to the project. I found the website tremendously informative. I spent a great deal of time on reading from top to bottom, and I followed the links, even links outside of Secushare.
The website tells you exactly what Secushare is, it goes into detail, you just have to go through "Navigation", and for example when you encounter an unfamiliar term in the context of the project, click on it to gain understanding, then continue.
You may want to start with https://secushare.org/, then go to https://secushare.org/introduction. You will reach section "Buzzwords to Dig Into". Go through them one by one, or pick whichever you would like to know more about. You could go to "Navigation -> Answers" instead as there will be links to the same pages. There are many different ways to go about this, but it essentially boils down to taking the time and effort to do so, and an open, curious mind.
I'm curious how a system like this is resilient to SPAM.
Specifically: The (cough) power of centralized systems is that they have an economic incentive to police themselves. (Although we can disagree about how well they do it.)
Example: I don't get a lot of SPAM on Facebook, but I get a ton of SPAM emails and phone calls. Likewise, LinkedIn is mostly SPAM, so I don't use it very much.
It seemed like I would need to debug a broken build in order to use any of it for anything.
Their statement on how it will not disrupt society: https://secushare.org/society
And statement on their threat model: https://secushare.org/threats
The language is a bit passive, but charitably, their intent is to push surveillance stakeholders into either a) using social means to infiltrate group membership, or b) targeting user endpoints with malware. The tool will do this while frustrating passive interception.
Presumably we can use ML bots on accounts to infiltrate communities by now and then hand the reins to an investigator as a cover identity when it becomes useful.
Just not sure how this is all desirable.
EDITED: fixed to use a public URL.
To add something which is not an opinion, i would say that these blockstack or actually Xcoin based whatever "dapp" (seriously, what is this vocabulary, these are brandings, marketing terms) have nothing to do with gnunet or secushare on the moral level, they are really different beasts with different goals, different contexts. Marketing vs science, social vs commercial, private vs libre... Really, if you're not seeing the objective difference here then you're not trying.
Secushare clearly isn't in that category of software yet.
> Being "more tangible" is an opinion
Yes. However my post was in response to someone who seemed disappointed that the story was not about something that was available. It was not meant as a criticism generally, but as something else to check out for those who might share that disappointment.
> “dapp" (seriously, what is this vocabulary, these are brandings, marketing terms
Some may use this term as a marketing ploy, but “dapp” is literally nothing more than “distributed app”. What is distributed? In the case of Blockstack, the users’ data and their identity. By design it ensures that control of data and identity is not only distributed to the users, but cannot be centralised (or recentralised), irrespective of the app. [0]
> have nothing to do with gnunet or secushare on the moral level, they are really different beasts with different goals
Firstly I’d argue that this is an opinion. But secondly I’d add that it is an ill-informed opinion. The Blockstack design means that users retain control of their data and their identity, and these cannot be taken from, nor weaponised against users. This is not merely a statement of intent [0], but am outcome of design [1].
> Marketing vs science,
I believe this is adequately addressed by their white paper which I won’t attempt to summarise. [1]
> social vs commercial, private vs libre
The GNU philosophy is not about free as in beer but free as in libre. It is also not anathema to commercial use. The Blockstack core is licensed under the GPL v3, and all documentation is Creative Commons licensed. I’d argue that a worse denial of freedom (than software freedom) is having your data and identity held hostage ie. denial of the freedom to move or remove my data and identity. Holding your digital self hostage is eminently possible by a cloud service even if it’s built entirely on open source software, while not possible for a Blockstack dapp even if it were closed source. The core philosophy of Blockstack is “can’t be evil”.
> if you're not seeing the objective difference here then you're not trying
An opinion. I could counter that you didn’t try very hard to see the similarities.
[0] https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-core/blob/master/RE...
[1] https://blockstack.org/docs/how-blockstack-works
[2] https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-core/blob/master/RE...
In contrast, check out these dApps which are immediately usable, https://d.tube/ & https://notabug.io/ (they're GUN based, but I know Blockstacks should be able to do this too).