
This is Fine: Optimism and Emergency in the P2P Network - lftherios
https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/this-is-fine/
======
NortySpock
I found this struck a chord with me.

The key point of the article is that most social P2P systems (Mastodon, Dat)
are fully public and do not hide the user's data from the system administrator
or physical infrastructure network.

This is at odds with how these systems are often "marketed" as tools for
fighting against The Government" or "The Corporations"\-- when the open nature
and lack of anonymization mechanisms of these tools expose those who are
currently technically breaking the law (to prove a moral point) to be
trivially detected by law-enforcement.

I personally have considered running a few P2P nodes for fun, but the amount
of moderating and administration I would need to do and the risk of the
service being used for illegal purposes pushes me firmly in the camp of
watching from a distance.

~~~
olah_1
It should be noted that Mastodon is in process of adding e2e encryption. And
Matrix chat has implemented the ability for server admins (at least on synapse
server) to enable e2e encryption by default for all rooms.

Even still, as long as accounts belong to specific servers, the relationship
of user to server admin is still a little too close for comfort imo. Perhaps a
simple business relationship of "you pay me and I host you" would help here.

~~~
kitotik
Agreed. In matrix/synapse, even with e2e enabled the server gets a ton of
metadata, including presence info. Also the identity server exposes quite a
bit.

------
ianopolous
A decentralized social network should have trust-less servers. The servers
should just store encrypted data and serve it up, without being exposed to the
social graph and with other metadata minimised.

Identity should also be independent of servers (and hence DNS).

At the networking layer they will also need to use something like onion
routing or a mix network to fully protect the social graph.

~~~
mikestaub
With that limitation, it would be impossible to replace the centralized
services as the UX would be far worse. With modern web apps 100ms makes a
difference in loading times.

------
black_puppydog
This takes a while to digest. I've been hanging out on SSB (aka scuttlebutt)
for a while now and I do enjoy the community. So this hits very close to home,
and I guess it's good that it does.

The author, one the one hand, writes this in the concluding paragraph:

> Without cohesive organisation, mobilisation to harden security and privacy
> and without a sincere commitment from protocol designers to revise their
> collective assumptions, the push back from incumbent power will leverage
> each and every socio-technical flaw in each and every network.

But on the other hand they write:

> The moment demands not another protocol, not another manifesto, not another
> social network, but a savvy understanding of the political dynamics of
> protocols and the nakedness of today’s networks.

I guess that's a call for doing some serious stock-taking before writing the
next (iteration of an existing) protocol? I'm fairly confident that the
"solution" to this, if it is to be found, will have _some_ technological
component to it. But Cade Diehm is right in pointing out that that will not
suffice, not by a long shot.

If we expect every (human-made) protocol to have flaws and vectors for
"incumbent retaliation" like the bittorrent copyright suits of the 00s, then
_one_ way to side-step this would be to reduce the harm such tactics can do.
Not saying that's easy, but establishing the social norm that copyright
records won't get you into trouble when trying to find a job, that would be
cool. There's a whole cultural aspect to this that has largely been confined
to some niche cyberpunk (and even more niche, and frankly artistically
lacking) solarpunk subcultures.

So where do we go from here? Do we "simply" design protocols and networks
around them that don't allow siphoning off the entire traffic? Do we establish
spaces (physical, mostly) where being "burned" by a copyright lawsuit won't
matter, going full walkaway (look it up if you don't get the reference) or
what should happen?

~~~
mr_spothawk
vibes, puppydog... vibes indeed.

it's important to know that Dat & SSB are such a security hole. the thing
about SSB in particular, though... is it's main value prop:

    
    
      this tool can be used on a sailboat with no web access
    

our worldwide, global, ungated internet may be the thing that leaves us quite
soon.

postal mail was also subject to intrusive surveillance for as long as written
words have been delivered by humans. submitting them to the internet, and
expecting that we should somehow be blessed with total freedom from prying
eyes may have been the mistake.

more networks could be the answer. distributed social groups. decentralized
governance.

more countries could be the answer... if we want to abandon the central
authorities and the power they concentrate.

it's clear from this point in history nothing will be the same again. but
staying connected to the global net comes with obvious trade-offs for personal
security.

------
iampims
I wish the article linked to p2p protocols that were designed with privacy in
mind.

~~~
summm
Actual Application, somewhat good usability, but not really sophisticated
regarding privacy: [https://retroshare.cc/](https://retroshare.cc/)

implements one single concept, but seems abandoned:
[https://wiki.bitmessage.org/Main_Page](https://wiki.bitmessage.org/Main_Page)

~~~
lum0r
Bitmessage is not abandoned
[https://github.com/Bitmessage/PyBitmessage/commits/v0.6](https://github.com/Bitmessage/PyBitmessage/commits/v0.6)

------
heckerhut
Wow, rarely seen such good writing on this topic. Encouraging to see that
these ideas are well and alive and kept available until the impossible
suddenly becomes possible.

------
ximm
AFAIK peer-to-peer is about preventing censorship, but the author seems to
assume it is about preventing surveillance. So a large part of the criticism
is missing the point.

Still, it is a problem that these systems are not preventing both and it is
also a problem if users expect the latter but only get the former. Protocols
need to be specific about their threat model.

------
Lammy
Nit: The background-color style on `.lyt-txt label` makes this very difficult
to read for me:
[https://i.imgur.com/XYIH36q.png](https://i.imgur.com/XYIH36q.png)

