Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghughes | Hacker News Reader

You're so close to what I am currently building that I feel like I have to chime in. I left Apple's security team a few months ago to go solo and build an app that is similar to Facebook/Instagram and Snapchat in terms of functionality and UX but uses the Olm protocol (similar to Signal) to protect all content. So, fear not - something is being done, and I'm sure I'm not the only one working in this problem space. I think it's ripe for innovation, counter to popular belief; the trick is to do it in a way that doesn't require a PhD in computers to operate the damn thing, as was the issue with previous attempts.

View on HN

I'm skeptical as to how worthwhile your effort is as long as the outcome is just another alternative to FB. We've seen countless examples of how these alt-social nets failed. But I do see a lot of value in the tech you might be developing, and if in some way we could embed it into existing social nets, that would be amazing. Fingers crossed!

How easy would it be for Zuck to just update the TOS to say "encrypted content is against our TOS" and ban you?

Zuck can't add any encrypted content to your personal profile, which means he doesn't make any money off you. And Zuck can do pretty much whatever he wants in his castle, I'd say.

Not very, but getting them to outright do so would be an excellent step forward for privacy.

I wouldn't be so sure of that.

Content is mostly irrelevant, metadata is way more interesting. In other words they do not care what you say, but who you say it to, when you say it, from where, at what time, and so on.

This is not true. They munge through the posts. In fact, that is one big reason they can target people so well.

I run design collective (group of designers and design students) we have been looking for social media projects to help. Is your project aimed to be opensource or it is comercial bussiness?

We could might be able to help. Even just with small things like design analisys and testing.

Both; there will be ads and the source will be publicly available, license TBD. Please get in touch, email is in my profile.

Ads means tracking a.k.a. no privacy.

Not necessarily: https://crypto.stanford.edu/adnostic/adnostic.pdf

Ads? Ha. I'm out.

You just killed your project. Nobody is going to use a security centric product littered with ads. Ads are exactly what people should be worried about, tracking their tabs and browsing activities.

Very interesting.

> the trick is to do it in a way that doesn't require a PhD in computers to operate the damn thing, as was the issue with previous attempts

This sounds similar to the story of PGP. Many attempts have been made to get people to use it, but it just didn't catch on (on a big scale). So I'm curious: how will it be different this time?

I see the problem with this is gaining traction. With no users on board you'll have no users on board.

Unless ofc you're just building this for yourself and your friends, which is something I thought about doing myself but then realized that even my friends cba to install yet another chat app.

> I see the problem with this is gaining traction. With no users on board you'll have no users on board

That's the same reason Facebook would never beat MySpace and MySpace would lose out to Friendster.

Metcalf's Law and initial traction are real challenges to achieving critical mass of users, but it has been done. I'm biased to hope for @ghughes success and that enough people care about privacy to give it or similar services a shot.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

How are you going to recreate the main selling point of facebook, i.e. the Newsfeed ? If things are encrypted, how are you going to determine relevance, etc.

The selling point of facebook is not the newsfeed. The selling point is that every other person is already registered on facebook.

> How are you going to recreate the main selling point of facebook, i.e. the Newsfeed ?

When you post, the content is sent as an encrypted message that can only be decrypted by people who should be able to see it (either all of your friends or just a subset of them). The client automatically takes care of key management and is responsible for keeping track of sent & received posts, comments, etc; it renders a news-feed-like UI on top of that data. The end result is a familiar UX on the surface, but the underlying mechanism for transmitting data between users is far more secure than the traditional approach of using a monolithic database that contains everyone's data in plaintext.

> If things are encrypted, how are you going to determine relevance, etc.

The client is solely responsible for that. For now the "news feed" is strictly chronological, but I plan to augment it later by prioritizing posts that might be particularly interesting to the user. There are plenty of ways to make those decisions locally.

hey, im going to implement something similar as well, and your idea gave me an idea - id 'like some help getting started - grappling with crypto since im new.

can we get in touch somehow ? too bad hn doesn't allow private messages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com