
Briar and Bramble: A Vision for Decentralized Infrastructure - ericdanielski
https://dymaxion.org/essays/briarvision.html
======
ghthor
This essay is and outstanding statement about decentralization and why it's
important. It connects so deep into me that I feel it in my bones. This is the
technological infrastructure we need, going to give there codebase a thorough
inspection and see what I can build with it. Also, I love the finnish people,
shoutout to my previous employer Reaktor Oy who did the honors of introducing
me to the brilliance of the finnish people and culture.

------
wslh
While I love decentralization progress, the great majority of end-users look
for UX don't matter what is behind. They don't care if it is decentralized,
federated, or centralized. Git is decentralized but most people use GitHub and
the UI cannot be decentralized. Also there is a lot of irony here where most
decentralized projects use Slack or Telegram for messaging.

~~~
a-saleh
I looked into Secure Scuttlebutt community, and while I didn't muster up the
courage to really participate, I kinda like that they take dogfooding
seriously.

Their protocol started as a secure peer-to-peer log-store, with first
application as a white-list based social-network [1]

The more interesting part is a git plugin that allows to store repositories in
the distributed log as well. This is complete with a nice web-UI and some
rudimentary issue management [2]

If you had right group of people, you could use this on a local-network, with
no internet access, and you'd have reasonably nice environment for chatting
and collaborating :-) In practice you'd want to be on the internet and
connected to at least one scuttlebut pub to actually see other people, unless
you really organized some sort of offline-cabin-retreat-hackathon :-)

[1] [https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/) [2]
[https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25RPKzL382v2fAia5HuDNHD5kkFdlP7bG...](https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25RPKzL382v2fAia5HuDNHD5kkFdlP7bGvXQApSXqOBwc%3D.sha256)

------
thinkingkong
Its been a long time since Ive seen such a spread in technological capability
and economic practicality.

Decentralization has all these fascinating bits and pieces but not a single
consumer will care unless the consumer is another dev. Id argue blockchain
falls into the same category. What we need are folks who can build products
whose economics _need_ these tools without having to promote the
implementation as the differentiating factor.

IOW all this stuff will succeed when we no longer have to mention the word
“distributed”.

------
merlincorey
This protocol seems pretty cool, and the application, Briar[0], is pretty
neat.

I just installed it, and it wants to do a physical key exchange with a
contact.

Time for a keysigning party!

[0] [https://briarproject.org/](https://briarproject.org/)

------
brokenmachine
I wanted to try Briar but discovered that you have to be within bluetooth
range of anyone you want to add as a contact.

I was planning to use it with my friend in another country but there's no way
that can happen.

------
erikb
Please mark in the headline that this article is from 2016.

------
Cilvic
Isn't control over the application the new centralization?

