Lukas

Hey guys, i recently had an idea how bt sync could be used as a social network. It's not very practical, because it's made for this purpose, but it could basicly work today. With further developement in that direction the impracticallity could change. My Idea would be like having a profile website in a folder that is shared with bt sync. of course it's not possible to have comments, so it's actually more a blog/website. but read on and you get my idea. - the big social networks (facebook/twitter/google+) are all central and we have no control over our data. - there are some open source alternatives, like diaspora, but there's still the problem with the infrastructure. With Diaspora I have to register at a certain Pod. Then my username is like "username@podnumber" or something like that. If I want to migrate my content to another place i have to communicate the new "adress" to all my friends. Also, if my pod is like in europe, people in south america have a worse connectian that people from europe. Also, i have to copy all my data and upload it at the new place. That's not very convenient. Now let's imagine my profile is like a torrent. Nobody but me knows the full access secret, but my friends all have the read-only secret. If I want to migrate my content, i just have to add the full access secret to the new location. All my friends would help keep my content available, but I would have the control. another thing that would help would be a "backup secret", that would let people share my content without them being able to access it (the torrent would be on their computer, but still encrypted). I am not sure, if this is planned, but somewhere i read a statement of the bt sync staff mentioning this with the words "not yet" ... A backup secret would let me add my content on several places. so maybe a pod/profile hoster would just be a btsync client with lots of backup secrets on it. Of course with the latest version of bt sync there isn't much possible besides profile pages. Since "friends/read-only-secret-receiver" cannot write comments, it's not real social interaction. But maybe you get the Idea, of what would be possible. Now let's brainstorm, what should be added here. I am not quite sure, how bt sync works. but I guess we need a few new kinds of secrets. The protocol would have to be adjusted to the social network use. Some thoughts: - maybe we need a different read-only secret for every friend in order to be able to unfriend every single person without having to give everybody else new read-only secrets. I don't know how the secrets work, but maybe this isn't possible with the current version? - the read-only secret must enable the friends to post comments - that means that they have to be able to add (maybe that means also "change") content. note: maybe the comments would only be part of the friends profile, but would be associated with our content. This maybe a little tricky - but could possibly be solved with other kinds of secrets - more following. - How can friends of friends access certain content? Maybe friends can generate secrets based upon their read-only secrets? - also: maybe every new statusupdate has to be associated with a new secret maybe some kind of a "sub-secret". this sub-secret would be communicated to all the friends automaticly since they have subscribed to my feed. But would this mean, that every friend who has a different read-only secret (why? - see upper thoughts) would get a different sub-secret? There are a lot of things here that i possibly didn't thought of. Problems that I didn't think of. But generally I think this could work. Think of it - a organicly decentral social network, that would be impossible to crack.

Thanks for your answer, but I think your suggestion isn't what i am looking for. Of course I can encrypt a folder and then share it over bt sync. But then I have to sync the whole folder everytime i change a little thing i guess. Also, I use one service (truecript) within another (btsync). the idea with the 3rd type hash would me like an LAFS (least authority file system) only that this isn't a filesystem. To be more specific, I want to solve the following problem: I have content, that I want to share with 2 or 3 friends. I have different content, that I want to share with (partly) different friends. No one has an always-on-computer/server. Syncing isn't very efficient /fast, since they have to be online. So It would be good, If more of friends-group A could help friends-group B to sync/share the content. But group B has things, that shall be secret to group A. So if the content could be stored and shared from all friends together the network would be much more reliable. Only the B content would have to be encrypted for A. So group B would give group A 3rd-type hashes. I don't know exactly how bt sync works, but i guess it's like splitting the files from a folder in many many blocks, encrypting them and then submit them. There also has to be some communication about which file/blocks have to be overwritten and checksums and all of that. So just leave the encrypted blocks encrypted but make them available for the others. That's (my) idea.

I have a request. "blind sharing secret". There are 2 types of Secrets/Hash/Codes. One is full access, one is read only. Could you add a third one? This third hash would let other people "host" my content from their server, but not let them read it. It would still be encrypted for them, but would be available to the network. It would be an easy way for others to help me share my stuff and have it available with higher redundancy, but still remain private. Additional/optional features: --When I am sharing someones private/secret data from my place, I'd like to choose a maximum amount of disc space. If the folder is bigger than another person offers, the data tends to distribute itself over the network so that to still be completely available. - scenario: me/person A is sharing my 3rd-type-secret for anonymous/encrypted sharing with person X and Y. X and Y offer 1Gigabyte of data each. My folder is 1.5 Gigabyte. The protocol now has the tendency to distribute the fragments so, that X and Y offer the complete Data when combined. 0.5 Gigabyte is redundant. (for the future: btsync could even find out, which data is used/changed more frequent, and hold that data redundant). --People can choose how much bandwidth (and discspace - see above) they offer for each encrypted folder. --to better know, what's going on, the encrypted shared folders can be given names or describtions in order for the blind sharer/hoster (the host who doesn't know what he/she is hosting) to know what's going on. If the owner wants to share that. otherwise the folder has just an ip or name.

I have an Idea, but I am not quite sure if the privacy issues are a problem: 1. I put a file in a folder that i share with person X. 2. Person X's btsync-client checks if this file is already in another btsync folder on X's computer. 3. If the file already exists, it is copied directly into the folder. Problem: I could know if the file is already on the persons computer, if I see that nothing is uploaded but still the folders are in sync.

a browsable / filterable history would be great. - history per shared older - enabling logging of history for different folders. -Data Up/Down/Both for Individual Folders in time-dependency. -Size of individual Folders relative Change. It would be useful to see, how long a folder hasn't been accessed and also how much of the data they got. For example if I share a folder of fotos with my friends, i could see, if all of them downloaded the data. If the Data wasn't accessed in a while i could delete the folder on my computer to save space. Make this data well formatted please (maybe also as an rss-stream?), so people can build nice visualisations with it. the following filters (if the logging data is be accessable within bittorrent) would be great: - User - Folder - Direction of Traffic - Time (show results from ... till) And: Donations Button

Can someone of the more active discussion-members post a list of already proposed suggestions? I started reading but the post is 11 pages long already. I am sorry, If I say something, that was already said before. - Syncing connection usage scheduling. The Ability of giving different Folders different priorities for the syncing. Like "sync this folder as quick as possible" or "sync this folder faster in the night", "don't sync this folder, when i am using mobile internet/slow connection speed". - Option to add disk space for backing up other users data without the ability to access/decrypt it. -> This was proposed before but I am not sure if this means, that i have to store the files of a friend completely, or just a part of it. I think the clever (and elegant) way here would be to add features like in an LAFS (least authority file system). - Also the option of "globally backing up data combined with prepared loading/weighting funcions". Like I assign 1 GB of Storage for backing up/storing the Podcast Archive of [person]. The whole Archive is 2 GB, so only ~50% of it is on my computer. The Rest is stored on other Computers who store this. Now normally the newest podcasts are more relevant as older ones, so it makes more sense to have the newer more redundant. This could be done with a weighting function (or prioritising different files). The newest podcast could then be present with 100% - so when i want to access it it is already ready. (This could also be applied for torrents where files that reguarily update - but of which I not often use everything). - more detailed status data about folders and files within (sync status of folders and individual files). Maybe also available as raw data (so people can create their own status grafics.) - possibilty to create secrets for individual files (maybe like this: [folder-secret]:[file-subsecret] that's all for now. Thanks!