I’ve been reading posts by Solderpunk:
2020-08-02 - The standard salvaged computing platform
2020-08-01 - Gemini aggregation, curation, etc.
The first post talks about the kind of computing future in store for us when the collapse comes. It’s not great. This is a continuation of Solderpunk’s earlier essay, “Discussions toward radically sustainable computing”.
The second post talks about aggregation and curation of content, and it mentions an idea I’ve heard in a different context regarding the spreading of text. Solderpunk puts it like this:
… relying on the idea that if somebody outside that circle writes something really good on a subject I care about, somebody else in my circle will hear about it through *their* circle and spread the word.
I think this is very similar to how Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) describes it self: “messages are passed directly between friends via a peer-to-peer (p2p) gossip protocol.”
The benefit of a gossip protocol is that sender and recipient don’t need a direct connection, no central server, no clear distribution hierarchy, they’re resilient, but they also don’t guarantee perfect results, nor timely results.
So what would we do, in this hypothetical scenario, using something like Gemini, thinking about censorship, aggregation, curation, and all that?
Perhaps something like this:
I write stuff on a site of mine. The content I link to is also downloaded to my site, and made available to others. Thus, to take this page as an example, assume that Solderpunk’s article is no longer available. The gemini.circumlunar.space domain has fallen. In this future, you could still visit my site, discover the link to his site, and query my site for his page, and get a reply!
This could work because Gemini requests don’t necessarily have to serve the same server they’re hosting from. Take my site, for example: the Gemini Wiki software handles the Gemini and Web aspects of transjovian.org, and the Gemini aspects of alexschroeder.ch, communitywiki.org, and vault.transjovian.org. It would be relatively simple to add this caching to Gemini server, and it would be relatively simple to add this cache retrieval on demand to Gemini clients – assuming we all had this post-apocalyptic future in mind.
And it would work without the issues Scuttlebutt has: no need to download whole Merkle trees of signed and chained messages, no problem repudiating content since there’s no signing of content. Conversely, the network would also not be resistant against poisoning: I could falsify Solderpunk’s posts in my cache, of course, and claim that he’d been a great iOS friend all along, for example. Thus, my idea doesn’t solve the trust issue. All it does is solve the disappearing content issue, the dependency on servers. The single source to get Solderpunk’s posts is no longer his domain, it’s not but the point where his posts enter the system – and from there they get distributed by the people who link to them. We can imagine some servers downloading and replicating them all, for example.
The entire system also smells a lot like a waste of resources. Perhaps we won’t feel too bad about it if it’s all solar powered? Who knows. Perhaps we’re simply once again building a system that devours all the resources available. Yikes!
I still like the idea of circumventing DNS blocks using this system, for example. And of copies spreading slowly, by word of mouth, once sites are no longer reachable from anywhere at anytime.
References:
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And today I stumble upon Earthstar, via @natecull.
Data is mutable. Authors can update paths with new documents. The old data is thrown away and doesn’t take up space. You can “delete” data by overwriting it with an empty document.
That was my main concern with Secure Scuttlebutt. 😀
– Alex 2020-08-03 07:41 UTC