If it's possible to create a p2p social network where data is stored locally I'm going to do it. At least I'm going to try. There are challenges though. But it's the ideal social network. Very decentralized and user control over their own data. #social #p2p #foss #linux

@libertyoftheforest technologically certainly possible, yet the challenge comes to sustainably build and evolve it such that it remains commons-based. An interesting area, where I focus now as former fedi commons janitor :)

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@marcel @smallcircles @libertyoftheforest I'd like to mark data longevity explicitly, even if it can be folded into maintenance.

Yes, you can run quite a few services on a tiny devices now. But one glitch and it's all gone forever.

Centralization does not solve it by itself, but through pooling of resources. It is cheaper to have redundancy at scale - when the effort went into your backup solution and ops is amortized per user.

In a way we have to replicate this aspect but in a distributed fashion. Not only your tiny device should serve your community, but your neighbors too: "I host your backups and you host mine".

has a good story here for privacy and distribution, but they got bogged down on the protocol level.

@dpwiz @marcel @libertyoftheforest

I am working on this overarching notion of Social experience design to cocreate social networking solutions.

Here there are 3 perspectives: 1) individual needs 2) inter-personal relationships and 3) societal impact.

And they map well to different networking architectures.

1) hybrid (p2p, federated) message/event based architecture.

2) social graph, identity, addressing

3) semantic knowledge networks, linked data.

We have the tech and the open standards.

@just small circles 🕊 We were just talking about a hybrid approach to nomadic identity, where someone could have their identity on their device or on a server or both at the same time.

For those who are not familiar with the concept, nomadic identity is when your identity is not tied to a specific device or server and can be moved around freely. It is similar to portable identity but takes it two steps further: you can have your identity on more than one server or device at the same time, and your content (such as posts) sync between devices and/or servers. If one goes down, you can use the other, making each location of your identity an independent backup. It also makes it easy to migrate to a new server or device since your content moves over too, not just your identity.

If you want full control, you can self-host the server, or you can use a provider for the server who handles the tech for you. This gets synced with your device which you own, creating two copies of your identity and content in two locations.

It is currently implemented on a server-server basis on several platforms, both over Zot protocol and ActivityPub protocol, but there is no reason why this couldn't be extended to the device level or client application.

@marcel @smallcircles @libertyoftheforest With a few more levels of "we host your backups and you host ours", slicing, mixing, and anonymous scattering it is possible to achieve the level of resiliency above and beyond those of centralized silos.

However, this gets into political territory if we really into privacy as those would require extreme levels of anonymous mixing and you'd almost guaranteed to host some **nasty** stuff without a way to kick it out or even detect.

So, p2p is in the bind here: either you're vulnerable to metadata dragnets and association tracking or inadvertently trade resources with someone you wouldn't like (if you had the option to know).

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