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Comment by hyperluz | Hacker News Reader

I think those investing efforts and time developing participatory democracy systems, are trying to solve these kind of communication and reasoning problems.

Examples: https://www.noemamag.com/tomorrows-democracy-is-open-source/

and

decidim.org

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I'd like to work on something like these, and I didn't know about them--thanks for sharing.

But I don't think the web has the right structure for an app like this. (Decidim seems to be a web app. It's hard to find information about this "Open Insight" thing they're talking about, presumably it is too?)

If you're using the web, somebody controls the server and the others have to trust that person to not abuse their role. It's not exactly primed for democracy.

Blockchains aren't quite right either. You solve the untrustworthy admin problem but you've got this really strong notion of THE official record, which only some people are going to have the ability to update, and that will be used by the powerful at the expense of the weak.

Whatever the right structure is, I think it's partition tolerant. Any party needs to be able to disconnect themselves from any other party such that:

- everything not reliant on that trust edge still works (the web would struggle with this)

- the untrusted party has no ability to censor the revoker, even if they're well trusted by the others (blockchains will struggle with this)

I've been tossing around ideas for what the ideal protocol would look like. SSB is the closest thing I can think of to compare it to, but nothing about it feels very solid yet.

You're welcome and I'm glad you appreciated. Also, thank you for your insights. About "Open Insight", I think it's not so open at the moment, since I couldn't find any kind of code repository. Maybe it is at an early design phase. Decidim.org is made with Ruby on Rails (good for fast prototyping, but a questionable choice for a critical system, IMHO).

Have you heard of Veilid? It’s sort of envisioned as a framework for building encrypted distributed/federated apps. It’s early days and in active development, but the idea and goals of it remind me of the issues you raised.

https://veilid.com/

https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid

DEF CON 31 - The Internals of Veilid, a New Decentralized Application Framework - DilDog, Medus4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb1lKscAMDQ

An Introduction to Veilid, by Christien Rioux - Rust Linz November 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h288gZTjJOM

There’s also Willow Protocol, which is sometimes compared to SSB and Veilid, but I don’t know as much about it.

https://willowprotocol.org/

Comparison to Other Protocols

https://willowprotocol.org/more/compare/index.html#willow_co...

Edit:

Veilid, So easy a Teenager Can Do It! - Bianca Lewis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BfxIGD6Xno&t=362s

Veilid, yes, willow, no. Thanks for pointing that out, I'll read up on it

I'm starting with something that's familiar but not structurally aligned with what I want to do (git+ssh). I intend to make the "backend" pluggable so I can use the same app to evaluate different distributed frameworks (Veilid, IPFS/Ceramic, IPFS/OrbitDB, Holepunch, IPv8, ...)

Otherwise I'll just spend my life tinkering with distributed frameworks and never end up with a distributed app.