Member: Decentralized Twitter alternative, uncensorable, open source | Hacker News Reader

Member: Decentralized Twitter alternative, uncensorable, open source

member.cash

72 pointsFreeTrade61 comments

I'm curious how uncensorable this really is. If there's no moderation and there are posts violating FOSTA/SESTA, I'm pretty sure someone is going to be having a talk with their domain registrar at minimum.

They're running on AWS (ask Parler how that's working out) and their contact is a gmail address, this seems like the opposite of uncensorable.

Their github repo mentions "A host with good capacity and DDOS protection would be helpful to the project," which I'm assuming means it's also extremely vulnerable to DDOS.

That's true, as soon as a large enough group of people act offended by something, AWS and big tech are required to censor them, in case people get a bad case of the "WRONG" opinion.

As long as it is decentralised, the AWS thing shouldn't be a problem. It didn't seem to be for Diaspora.

So member.cash is an instance of Member - it's there to make it easy to see how it all works.

Member is open source, so you can host a mirror on your own infrastructure. You might make that mirror available publicly, or you might use it privately. Shutting down all the public instances would likely be a game of whack-a-mole. Similarly, its not dependent on AWS, or a gmail address.

While a single website might be vulnerable to DDOS, the vision is many independent instances which will allow for great redundancy.

So is this a federated thing like Mastodon, or is everyone operating a mirror running a copy of the whole site?

From what I understand the messages are stored in the Bitcoin Cash Blockchain

It is not federated, each mirror uses its own Bitcoin Cash node which contains a complete record of all the actions on the blockchain.

Yes, but how would one go about removing posts that violate human decency? If I were to host an instance, I would want to not host any content illegal in my country (Child Porn for example). How do you go about preventing that?

You can't prevent that, and that is the inherent flaw in Member and all similar platforms.

That is the intent of these platforms.

Shutting down all the public instances would likely be a game of whack-a-mole.

It is like playing whack-a-mole, but with a government mallet that's 5 miles in diameter.

You forgot the most important part: because it's pay to play, there will only ever be a half-dozen moles to whack if the project is successful, or one if it isn't.

Source: I used to run steemit.com.

I'd LOVE to hear some stories/experiences/lessons/rants :)

Maybe I could tip some steem, if i can locate my ancient wallet

As soon as this contains some illegal content - child pornography, violent/obscene content law enforcement will start going after anyone hosting a mirror and the ISPs/Hosting providers they are using, the whole thing will crumble like Napster.

The Achilles heel of all these services

In the US it’s illegal to provide communications equipment or service to terrorists

Sure, support decentralized chat services where terrorists are moving to avoid Twitter

Enjoy having the FBI come to your door if they find out you have nodes on those networks

Trusting people you don’t verify is never a good idea. Building a protocol that verifies computers but not the user of the computer is insane

Oh yes, nice math you got there. But who is really on the other end?

twitter and reddit are full of this

Not to mention anti-Semitic tweets, & in the past Isis accounts, who were shutdown by a "3rd party".

"Run it against your Bitcoin Cash Node to process Memo transactions into a database."

Since the protocol of this is based on inscribing transactions into the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, that means posting content will cost transaction fees. In this case, it seems the server operator is expected to pay for that.

According to bitcoinfees.cash it's currently at $0.0025 per inscription.

Yes, each action on the blockchain requires a small transaction fee but the fee is paid by the end user, not the server operator. There are advantages and disadvantages to this, but remember the old saying, 'if you're not paying for a product, you are the product.'

That old saying doesn't flip around to mean that any service you have to pay for is worth the cost.

I personally don't want to use niche social networks, which is what any pay-to-play platform is, due to the barrier to entry.

It's a feature not a bug. How many trolls will disappear if you have to pay to post? It brings other problems like economic disenfranchisement leading to social disenfranchisement for those less fortunate in the world but it is an interesting design experiment.

Most of the people I wish to read or interact with on social networks will never use a system that requires an up front payment.

To me (and, I assume, most people) it is most assuredly a bug.

That may change though. Say we brought in UBI to solve the problems I described above. At the same time twitter is over run by bots making engaging there even more exhausting than it is now. Maybe your peer group have been banned because of one thing or another. Would you consider it then?

Once a Member instance is big enough to be attractive for spamming/phishing/otherwise-exploiting the bot herders will arrive anyway, using compromised Member clients, just as current spammers don't generally pay for the data volumes they generate. Perhaps the entry barrier of charging will keep Member small enough to delay this.

"Delay" is the key word. Not prevent. Any service big enough too attract more than "fringe" users will start seeing spammers eventually.

Ok but normally you pay for bandwidth and storage, but here you have to pay for the ability to store a message. While someone else pays for bandwidth, compute and storage.

You just added another expense without solving anything.

Perhaps it’ll make people think twice before posting, which would be a blessing on the world if looking at the standard of 98% of Twitter posts.

Member.cash’s blockchain architecture completely eliminates the need for centralized hosting providers — at least for pure text short message data. It’s as impervious to censorship as the blockchain being used to directly store the short messages.

This is really quite a sensible approach for member.cash as it looks to gain a footing as a safe harbor for censored conservative voices.

Many are asking why not Mastodon. The “Member.cash” protocol could ship inside of a native desktop application which scans a general purpose blockchain already on your computer for embedded messages. Ideally this would be done with a thin client, so that nobody has to download terabytes of data.

What is the benefit of using a blockchain here? Why do you need distributed and decentralized consensus? I mean on the face of it this just makes no sense. What am I missing?

EDIT: IMO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitmessage was a far superior alternative to this.

Why would anyone do a twitter clone that doesn't support activitypub or at least ostatus these days?

Also it's easy to run Member fully independently on a Windows desktop - download link (3.5GB)

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:E1E4C04EFEA99A16A992FEF7F8E8F3C5964E865E

It includes :

A pruned, fully synced Bitcoin Cash Node (Bitcoin Unlimited v1.9.0.1)

Member server, fully synced database

Member client

To run it, just unzip it, and run 'install.bat', it will install the node as a service and run the server in a window. To open the client, open 'client/index.html'.

That's all. 100% sovereign social media, runs as long as Bitcoin Cash network stays up.

https://twetch.app is similar but more popular. Uncensorable isn't the word I would use - the data is stored on the blockchain but the website is just like any other. The difference is instead of needing to 'export' your data - it can be instantly accessed through the bitcoin network

Twetch is interesting, especially the marketing. However, while it uses a blockchain, it is a private platform and does not use an open protocol (probably to create a moat).

How does it handle abuse? Can anyone sign up and just firehosing garbage into the blockchain?

I've read what I could here, but I'm still not clear on how this differs from Mastodon. Is it the web client?

It's PR for Bitcoin Cash, a blockchain looking for a problem.

Better than Ethereum then, which is a blockchain causing problems.

The problem was clearly described in Bitcoin's whitepaper.

It differs from mastodon because it's on the blockchain & mastodon isn't. The problem is I don't see why that's better. Being on the blockchain also means a (less than a penny) processing fee, just as a standard BTC/BCH transaction, paid by you, so you're paying to post. The one advantage to that is users could potentially tip each other. Google, Twitter, & Facebook are proof that people don't like having to pay to use something if there's a free alternative. Plus it means having to have BCH which most people don't understand.

name sounds super sketchy. Member cash? Sounds like you are making money from members.

It's on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, that's where the name comes from.

This explains the name but the problem is that this name induces distrust and many additional questions even before visiting website: do they want to monetize me/my content? do I have to pay for it? etc. Unless intention is to have it limited to circle of people who already know what this "cash" is then I don't think it's a good idea - especially now when censorship, tracking and shady data collection practices are becoming mainstream topic.

how does this handle straight up illegal content? If someone uploads say, copyrighted material to the chain, who is voluntarily going to host an instance of this site?

It doesn't.

1. There's already pages where people can inscribe random text and images into blockchains: https://cryptograffiti.info/

2. Researchers found that the Bitcoin blockchain already contains presumably illegal content: https://blockchain.comsys.rwth-aachen.de/

Excerpt from paper #2 on that page:

"we consider the remaining three instances objectionable for almost all jurisdictions: Two of them are backups of link lists to child pornography, containing 274 links to websites, 142 of which refer to Tor hidden services. The remaining instance is an image depicting mild nudity of a young woman."

As for who is hosting it ... even though illegal, blockchain mining is still very profitable if you have subsidized cheap electricity like in China.

> As for who is hosting it ... even though illegal, blockchain mining is still very profitable if you have subsidized cheap electricity like in China.

Please cite blockchain mining being illegal.

It's literally on Wikipedia if you cared to search for it.

Too difficult to link to it?

I think they're referring to the ability to post illegal content, which can't be blocked.

This is what I am afraid of. The developers have the best intentions here but it would be difficult to stop a larger problem than it is solving.

The very first post I read on this community Home Screen is “I am sad”. Doesn’t paint a promising picture.

Next up: I am angry, nobody hears me.

What are the costs to operating something like this that requires adding to the Bitcoin blockchain? And who pays? What would costs look like if it had 1,000,000 new posts at current prices, etc?

I love the concept but how do we protect against spammers?

“Want to earn $1000 a month browsing the internet???”

This can't be the first decentralised twitter clone, can it?

I believe it is the first public platform - the others are private platforms.

What's a "public platform" in this context?

Member is open source and anyone can run it privately.

Twister[1] came out several years ago (built using blockchain + BitTorrent tech), but looks like might now be abandonware.

1. http://twister.net.co/

I'm not sure which would be the "first" or when member.cash started, but pretty sure Mastodon has been around longer. https://joinmastodon.org/

Maybe OStatus sites? IIRC Identi.ca was around in 2011, but I don't remember if they were federated from the start or if that came a few years later.

pretty good but needs a better UI

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