
Secushare: A decentralized, secure social network built on GNUnet - federicoponzi
https://secushare.org/
======
lapinot
I'm quite annoyed by the superficial critics that are currently overflowing
the comments. Of course this is an ambitious project that is driven by (of
course slow paced) academic research. This is very serious and is of course
actively not giving a fuck about current mainstream trends in software
engineering.

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).

~~~
jasode
_> I'm quite annoyed by the superficial critics that are currently overflowing
the comments. Of course this is [...] academic research_

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.

~~~
dx87
The front page currently has articles about Finnish babies sleeping in
cardboard boxes, and the benefits of sleeping with a weighted blanket. Just
because there isn't something you can try, doesn't mean it's not interesting.

~~~
jasode
_> Just because there isn't something you can try, doesn't mean it's not
interesting._

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.

------
nickik
I have seen a lot of their presentations at 33C3. Its quite interesting ideas
that I was quite interested in.

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.

~~~
F3nd0
Have you gotten in touch with the developers? They recently redesigned their
website, and are trying to make the project more approachable in general. If
you have any remarks or suggestions for improvement, I'm sure they would be
appreciated! (There's a contact page:
[https://gnunet.org/en/engage.html](https://gnunet.org/en/engage.html))

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/](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.

~~~
nickik
I have seen an looked at some of these efforts, and its very nice. I don't
really have usecase, or time to work on a project like that.

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.

------
johnisgood
Oh wow! I thought I disliked GNU but after all this... damn. This project made
me dig deep into other GNU projects. I have to say I am extremely impressed.
GNUnet, their featured and upcoming applications are intriguing. There is even
GNU Taler, a privacy-preserving payment system. These projects are remarkable.
I hope that they will continue working on them. They must! This is the
direction I would like the future to take. I love the Secushare website, too,
it is utterly informative and the design is pleasing my eyes. The content is
stimulating my mind. Their goals are restoring my faith. Please make this a
reality! I am so excited about this!

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](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](https://gnunet.org/en/engage.html)

------
sbazerque
This sounds a lot like my own side project's goals, but I've made it work
inside the browser using web-rtc. There's a (somewhat) usable prototype
online.

[https://www.hyperhyperspace.org](https://www.hyperhyperspace.org)

------
blobster
Clicked expecting to see a social network. Instead got a generic introduction
on something that doesn't exist.

~~~
skrowl
Seems like vaporware. The "built on GNUnet" in the subject line really should
be "planned to be built on GNUnet" or maybe "imagined on GNUnet".

------
folex
Last commit to
[https://gnunet.org/git/secushare.git](https://gnunet.org/git/secushare.git)
is from 2017:

    
    
        commit 4fbc224f25d71c30b16a2f5aa45cb1f2954d2d38 (HEAD ->             
        master, origin/master, origin/HEAD)
        Author: t3sserakt <t3ss@posteo.de>
        Date:   Wed Sep 20 22:15:53 2017 +0200
        
            deleted test
    
    

Is development still going?

~~~
F3nd0
Yeah, probably just moved to other repositories for the time being. (E.g. I
think
[https://git.gnunet.org/groupchat.git/](https://git.gnunet.org/groupchat.git/)
is from secushare.) The PSYC chatrooms are pretty active, and they have
recently opened some issues in GNUnet's bug tracking system, too
([https://bugs.gnunet.org/](https://bugs.gnunet.org/)).

------
arkh
Decentralized social network: a customized phpBB with a good OpenID module
would be enough. Host your own, authenticate yourself to other instances, use
RSS feeds to create your own composite timelines.

~~~
kerkeslager
Your idea breaks down immediately when you realize that hosting your own phpBB
instance is far outside the capabilities of most users. This means that you're
at least centralized into groups around phpBB hosts, i.e. this is a federated
system.

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.

------
crispyporkbites
This page uses a lot of words to explain almost nothing, the linked
“introduction” page is similar.

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/](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

~~~
runn1ng
This is true about anything GNUnet related, really.

~~~
Avamander
I still find this image of GNUnet-GTK hilarious:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/0/0a/Gnunet-
gtk_0....](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/0/0a/Gnunet-
gtk_0.10_under_arch-gnulinux.png)

~~~
iamnotacrook
I like how the availability of each file is 0%. "Yeah, we focused on the
amazing UI first - we'll handle downloading later".

~~~
jancsika
I wonder if they considered simply shipping with hashes for each byte of data
of common files users may want to download.

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.

------
gwbas1c
Cool idea: Looks more like building blocks than a complete application.

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.

~~~
jkepler
Couldn't a micropayments option (built on bitcoin's Lightning network) where
friends send the same micropayments back and forth keep SPAM at bay, since one
wouldn't return the micropayments to spammers by way of return comments?

------
ilaksh
It sounds cutting edge to me but the last time I tried to install GnuNet on
Windows and Ubuntu I gave up after awhile because it seemed like, if I recall
correctly, it wouldn't run on Windows anymore and something was broken with
the Ubuntu build/install I was trying to do.\

It seemed like I would need to debug a broken build in order to use any of it
for anything.

------
kd3
Lots of good ideas. Continue working on it.

------
kunkelast
That's the solution we need, to replace Facebook and Twitter! :) I'm in.

------
p4bl0
Anyone knows the relationships (if any) between this project and RetroShare?

~~~
F3nd0
I don't think they're associated, but they seem to have a similar function.
secushare has a comparison page where they compare their project to others
(including RetroShare) for various use cases, so you might want to take a look
at that.
([https://secushare.org/comparison](https://secushare.org/comparison))

------
motohagiography
Who are some people who will use this and what does one get for taking the
risk to associate with them? It seems superficial, but for a social network,
it's the only question that matters.

~~~
motohagiography
Following this up:

Their statement on how it will not disrupt society:
[https://secushare.org/society](https://secushare.org/society)

And statement on their threat model:
[https://secushare.org/threats](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.

------
phs318u
for those wondering if there are more tangible alternatives, check out the
“social” apps on Blockstack (sadly there's no way to filter/sort).

[https://app.co/blockstack](https://app.co/blockstack)

EDITED: fixed to use a public URL.

~~~
lapinot
Being "more tangible" is an opinion, so i could just counter "non-argue" that
i think these things are actually less tangible, we would now have ended-up
nowhere since there is nothing more to add (tbh i actually have that opinion,
which might be explained by what follows).

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.

~~~
jancsika
To steelman the argument: I think by "more tangible" OP means, "software in a
working state."

Secushare clearly isn't in that category of software yet.

