ZeroMe – Decentralized Microblogging on ZeroNet

https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2017/10/12/zerome-decentralized-microblogging-on-zeronet.html

by doublec • 9 years ago

79 37 9 years ago

bluishcoder.co.nz

corobo3• 9 years ago

The trouble with every decentralised anything I've seen is that the on-boarding is so.damn.complicated. Peer to peer doesn't work if there are no peers.

You can almost tell that a service is going to fail to adopt any sort of critical mass by the size of your scrollbar in articles about them.

Additional:

Uncensored
Sites are served by visitors

Technically, decent idea. Realistically, you're hosting the stuff people don't want to pay to host.

metalliqaz2• 9 years ago

Technically, decent idea. Realistically, you're hosting the stuff people don't want to pay to host.

That's some damn good clarity right there.

metalliqaz2• 9 years ago

Not being sarcastic there, his comment summed it up so well. Why downvotes?

detaro2• 9 years ago

A lot of microblogging/social network is "stuff people don't want to pay to host". Some of the rest is "stuff people would pay to host, but for reasons they want to post it on services that don't allow them to pay to host". With a P2P system, you at least have the option to pay to host (=setup a server or pay a service to help serve content that's important to you around)

doublec6• 9 years ago

Onboarding isn't too bad with ZeroNet to get a node up. The post demonstrates getting it from github but there are 'bundles' available for most platforms which include dependencies and are just unzip and run.

There is effort to create identities, etc though. The article is long because ZeroNet has a lot of features.

Seanny123• 9 years ago

Technically, decent idea. Realistically, you're hosting the stuff people don't want to pay to host.

Very personally, I see it as contributing a small amount of a very non-scarce resource (bandwidth, disk space, computing power) so that I have greater control over the platform I'm using. I loved both Twitter and Medium, but the corporations that run them have different ideas about what they're for. I see web decentralised about letting the user choose their experience instead of having it enforced on them.

corobo3• 9 years ago

I see it as I'm going to be on the hook for hosting a child porn gallery at some point

jokoon• 9 years ago

Filecoin seems to be one solution...

To be honest I would be more interested in a solution where you get to host as much data on the network as you host on your machine, or something in proportion, at different levels of redundancy.

For example hosting a blogpost sqlite database file should be accessible to all hosts, since it will be never so big, but it can't be lost with a high enough level of redundancy.

Tepix• 9 years ago

No kidding. Getting a .bit domain and a plugin to actually be able to resolve them in a browser is quite an achievement.

dogruck2• 9 years ago

Speaking of onboading -- why doesn't someone build "Just like Twitter minus everything everyone dislikes about Twitter"?

Is it due to the challenge of building critical mass?

yjchen• 9 years ago

Does Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org) fit what you just described?

doublec6• 9 years ago

Yes, I think it's the challenge of critical mass. There's quite a few twitter-likes around, including decentralized ones (ZeroMe, twister, Sone) but building beyond a set of initial users is difficult.

detaro2• 9 years ago

There's a bunch of twitter-likes. Since I don't know what you dislike about Twitter, I don't know if they fit your definition of "minus everything everyone dislikes about Twitter" (there isn't one list of "everything wrong with twitter", nor a non-contradicting list of such lists). And of course, they all have some issues with growth/lack of critical mass (how big of an issue that is again depends on the users and their preferences)

whatyoucantsay• 9 years ago

P2P apps are enough of an onboarding hassle that they have only gotten popular when there's a powerful incentive, such as the promise of downloading every popular song or movie at will or evading the speech laws of a totalitarian state.

It's not binary, however. As friction decreases, the number of sufficiently motivating use-cases increases non-linearly and there are multiple thresholds.

StavrosK• 9 years ago

Weeell, it depends. For example, with IPFEssay, you just write something and press "publish":

https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/Qmbm5CGDjGDgU4vd18dF9LavSrXsbFXk...

It's an extra click to actually pin the thing on Eternum and host it for 100 years on $0.01. If you want an actual blog, it's a bit more complicated, but still not by much.

philfrasty• 9 years ago

Is ZeroNet built on ipfs or a standalone implementation?

cocktailpeanuts• 9 years ago

it's based on BitTorrent

doublec6• 9 years ago

It is not built on ipfs. It uses the bittorrent DHT to associate site addresses with IP addresses (or tor onion addresses if configured to use tor). Actual transfer of data is done via a custom p2p service implemented within ZeroNet.

thatzerodude• 9 years ago

Peer to peer doesn't work if there are no peers.

Thankfully there's thousands of peers, and quite a few of those are people escaping the GFW of mainland China.

z3t4• 9 years ago

How does peer-to-peer get pass the firewall ? They can host stuff anonymously inside the country though.

j_s• 9 years ago

An off-grid social network | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14050049 (Apr 2017, 366 comments)

https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/#other-projects

reacharavindh• 9 years ago

How nice would it be if humanity united together and formed a non-profit organisation like ICANN that would run an IDentity+social network service with ability for people to plugin their extra features (like photo album, blog, things/services they sell etc)... As a central body it can still retain the ability to shutdown ID of non-acceptable content like child porn and dangerous propaganda. I’d happily donate to have such an unbiased body.

jack1243star• 9 years ago

Non-acceptable content will always become censorship. Freedom of speech comes with a cost.

bobcallme• 9 years ago

As a central body it can still retain the ability to shutdown ID of non-acceptable content like ...

The problem with that is who gets to choose what is acceptable and what is not? If I make criticisms about something or someone's actions, is that "non-acceptable" content? During these discussions, the lowest common denominator is used, but the reality is that definitions change or people try to expand the definition to include what one does not like or agree with. The price for free speech and expression comes a great price with many risks, but it is worth it. We have seen centralization fail time and time again with platforms like Facebook and Youtube censoring (demonetizing) unfavorable opinions or ideas.

I’d happily donate to have such an unbiased body.

As soon as you start picking, choosing and expanding what is acceptable and what is not, it is no longer unbiased.

marknadal2• 9 years ago

It has been really exciting to see ZeroNet grow, we need this!

Curious, does it still use git to push a JSON record change in a large blob to a remote bot that then commits it? Are you working to re-architect this? I'm hoping I can convince you guys to partner up with us, we just got a prototype of end-to-end encrypted P2P data structures working ( https://youtu.be/ik_dqXBMBHw ) that is storage/network efficient (syncing diffs) and fully decentralized using CRDTs. Shoot me an email (check profile) if you see this. I've been keeping an eye on ZeroNet for the last year or year and a half-ish (?), and really excited about its growth.

doublec6• 9 years ago

It does not use git internally - other than for source code control - and it does not push to a remote bot. There used to be a demo app called ZeroBoard that used an external service that it did an HTTP POST too, back in the days when ZeroNet had not other way to do that type of thing. The app is still around but it's superceded by other things.

marknadal2• 9 years ago

Huh, then how do you handle dynamic content versus pages?

feelin_googley• 9 years ago

I am not very familiar with this project but I see it uses UPnP. Does it rely on UPnP or is it only opportunistic use? If the former, what happens if the user's custom router does not run a UPnP daemon, or if the user prefers to disable UPnP in her consumer router?

doublec6• 9 years ago

It does rely on being able to communicate through that port - UPnP is one of the options it uses to ensure it can receive external requests. If you run using the tor option it evades firewalls via tor.

627467• 9 years ago

I love Zeronet project. the only problem I have is, within my corporate network I can't run my node.

I also have a hard problem understanding how to use ZeroMe from different devices... I use the same masterseed (maintaining my ID) but my ZeroMe profile does not seem to move between my devices. I find the hub concept difficult to understand...

sitepodmatt• 9 years ago

Didnt Opera do something like this years ago? Opera Unite

Dowwie• 9 years ago

Wait a second-- ZeroNet was written in Python and hasn't iterated to a lower level, popular systems programming language yet? Hold the presses! Before I get too excited, though-- would someone involved with the project share what's the reason?

lostmsu• 9 years ago

How exactly did they solve cross-site scripting? It looks like all pages run under same hostname:port pair.

ZeroMe – Decentralized Microblogging on ZeroNet

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