bt sync used as a social network

[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.

[Danny]

There is this: vole.cc which seems like what you're talking about. Looks promising if they can keep up with it.