Email is already distributed. You can run your own mail server. Usenet and the Freenet forum whose name I've forgotten have already done it, they just have few users. Bittorrent is pretty nice for distributing video. No streaming, but there are tradeoffs in everything. irc? To distribute files? Freenet is probably closest, torrents are probably a better choice. As a private backup? Disks are cheap, and colos aren't that expensive if you want remote backups. I don't know, those sounds like interesting problems.or of an email service
Reddit
or of YouTube
or Twitter
or Dropbox
of Google
or Skype
Bittorrent is pretty nice for distributing video. No streaming, but there are tradeoffs in everything.
utorrent actually has streaming functionality for torrents with video files. It doesn't always work the best, and of course you'll take a hit to your DL speed, but it's cool.
Back when anyone used the eDonkey network, {e,a}Mule had settings to prefer chunks from the start of files, so in principal you could stream video from them. In practice you never got download rates fast enough to do it, so it was mostly just useful for making sure the episode of Firefly you were getting wasn't actually mislabeled CP.
I bet it's doable, people broadcasting posts and shares, and feeds being built on everyone's individual server. I doubt I have the chops for it, but it's very interesting. forwardslash, do you have any thoughts?
Oh man, as you may or may not know I was a backer of Diaspora and I've posted a few thing on Hubski about Tent.io - in short, I think distributed, decentralized systems are the bee knees. Unfortunately I don't even really use the centralized social networks so I don't really have a need for a decentralized one and thus have preferred to spend my time working on things I do use, such as hubski. There are a few cool technologies to broadcast things including pubsubhubbub - which is an awesome name for a protocol - and there are a number of existing distributed networks we could hook into: aggregation via hubski, anyone? Unfortunately a lot of the implementations of these networks are bogged down in existing ideas of things, as such everyone (including me) just asks things like, "So it's just a distributed twitter?" because microblogging is an easy first thing to do. What if you hosted your own blog and had a hub running on the same server. As you posted new content on your blog you would send out pings to those subscribed to whatever you tagged it as, those subscribed to you, or those subscribed to your domain. People could subscribe via a centralized service such as hubski, or their own server, or even via any service which implemented the pubsubhubbub protocol. All in all I have very lofty ideas about what can be accomplished with this.
IMO the key to success here is any given user not having to know that they are not using a decentralized service.Unfortunately a lot of the implementations of these networks are bogged down in existing ideas of things, as such everyone (including me) just asks things like, "So it's just a distributed twitter?" because microblogging is an easy first thing to do.
What are ways we can ensure that Hubski doesn't fall prey to such things?
BLOB_CASTLE will be our pen pal while we are in prison.
SSL would be a start. As it is now, it's http, and wouldn't be hard to tap. I'm assuming Hubski is based off of servers leased/rented from someone or in a colo? Or are Hubski's servers somewhere on Mk's property? Either way, all the non-SSL traffic for Hubski is already flowing through a datacenter or major telecom at some point... Not that hard to monitor as it stands. Most of these datamining and collection projects just look for keywords. Like if you say some words that I'll refrain from saying, then that conversation gets saved and put infront of a rep to look into. So if a "black box" sees a certain string of keywords from in-flight data, it copys that and it gets flagged. Having SSL makes that a little more difficult for them to do that.