Comment by r3trohack3r | Hacker News Reader

Comment by r3trohack3r | Hacker News Reader

Love this and it aligns well with the work I'm currently doing.

I believe local-first peer-to-peer networks have gotten close-enough to being able to deliver feature parity with centralized Application Service Providers for 5+ years now, the industry just hasn't caught up.

For social media platforms like Facebook and X, their "killer app" features are all solvable with hash-based data structures (chains, trees, forests), p2p capability systems, and gossip protocols. Identity systems are solvable in ways that non-technical people can understand.

Part of the solution was the p2p stack maturing. The other part is that centralized solutions have normalized a lot of user flows that p2p can be competitive with, users have been trained up on a lot of patterns that previously wouldn't have been palatable in the market.

There is extreme market demand for it, and the zeitgeist is tuned into the societal and financial failings of ASPs right now.

Facebook is trying to act as the free relay and archivist for the entire world's social graph, there are a lot of hard problems to solve there which personally, I think contributed to social networking silently dying and degenerating into the monstrosity that Social Media is.

Once this stuff starts making it into end-user products, I suspect it's going to be a one way door. P2P can provide user experiences that centralized services can't match - either for technical, financial, or legal reasons.

We are in a sweet spot of opportunity for building the web as it was promised to us.

If folks working in this space want to compare notes, or are looking for work on a well funded no-BS R&D team developing this space, my email is in my bio.

It’s not a technology problem. It never really has been. It’s a business problem, which is another way of saying it's a people problem.

People have been conditioned to believe all software must be free, but that SaaS is fine. People are willing to rent software in the cloud but not pay for it at the endpoint.

Add to this the fact that the cloud is the ultimate DRM. It can’t be pirated if the user doesn’t even have binaries or have possession of their own data.

SaaS provides inescapable recurring revenue and very strong lock in. It’s massively superior from a business model point of view. Meanwhile the (much more) evil twin of SaaS, namely “free” surveillance and addiction driven apps, dominates B2C.

People might want local first software but if they won’t pay for it that doesn’t matter. The whole industry will wrap itself around whatever model pays. Everything is all about cloud and SaaS not because these are technically superior or better for the user but because that's where you get cash flow.

It's deeper than cash flow.

As soon as computing becomes a primary job and not a toy... people clam up about their ideas and stick to safe, generic, bland output.

Computing as-a-job for random plebs, has sacrificed the protection of ideas in pursuit of more innovation and freedom. Resulting in the least innovation and freedom we've seen in decades.

Until we can walk on water again, this spiral will not end. Why people cannot see this spiral and treat it like an existential threat to the web, I have no idea.

A 'new kind of network' is surface level analysis, we need to stop computers sucking the life (and consciousness) out of everything they touch.

Cash flow is way easier, when you can work on something novel and deliver it to the end customer without the concepts being stolen along the way.

> A 'new kind of network' is surface level analysis, we need to stop computers sucking the life (and consciousness) out of everything they touch.

Do you have any ideas on how we might do that?

Yes but I'm completely torn to whom and how I could actually say it. I don't know how people will react, if the key people approve, then I can say it, if they don't I have to keep it private to give it a chance at life.

There's a constant tearing conflict in me, between the status quo programming I've learnt over the years and how I'd want it to be.

It's been bubbling up for a while, everytime I touch a keyboard now I'm rapidly frustrated. It's also difficult to know if it could be finished before we switch to TPM/smaller/more locked down computers.

It is hideously conflicting to be working on privacy tech and need to be internet connected to survelliance at the same time, how can you even begin when teacher is peeking over your shoulder constantly?

It feels like death to share it, sorry!

I've got to get it going and then let it live on it's own terms. Anything else is a tainted experiment I guess.

My idea seems more generic (or less specific) than the topic, perhaps it is of use:

1) The number of people with control over you should be as small as possible.

2) The number of people held responsible for your actions should also be as small as possible.

3) The number of people trusted with your security should also be as small as possible.

If you are going to give up control in favor of convenience you should carefully consider if it is worth it and for how long. Control also means you can pay a huge price at any time. There is a certain risk for the deal to suddenly not be worth it.

If you are going to have others be responsible for your writings and actions you should also carefully consider if it is worth it. The responsible thing to do could be to preemptively shut you down when in doubt. The legal situation/law may also change and require critical analysis of things you wrote long ago. Each word you write is a ticket in the false-positive lottery.

Then when all of the above works out fine you still have to trust people, all of your documents may end up publicly available after some breach out of your control or encrypted behind a ransom paywall. It is going to be different from putting things on usb drives and keeping them in your vault physically.

Yes, for sure SaaS is easier and cheaper (for 1 month :) than BigBoxSoftware you saw years ago.

I am concerned by the threat to open source this model brings to us.

I wasn’t speaking from the customers point of view but the producer’s. I was making a supply side argument for why we don’t have more local first software. But you’re right. I did’t get into friction or lack thereof as a factor.

Can you recommend some p2p technologies that people can start building with today?

Eg I’m tempted to go with a stack of a centralized Postgres with a SQLite for each user (a la Electricsql, mvsql, etc.) because I want users to have their data local as much as possible (in their own SQLite db) but a centralized Postgres database still feels logistically necessary to coordinate eg user accounts and sharing.

I’m all ears on better p2p solutions. I’ve looked into things like eg using matrix or nostr but they don’t feel like the solution I’m looking for yet. But I’m eager to find something that can keep data local and have sharing done more p2p.

We are building our overlay network with libp2p

Our current gossip structure for identity is a hash tree. The secure scuttlebutt research paper by Tarr is a good place to start for that.

For capabilities, we are (currently) using the same concepts as UCAN.

If I may be so bold, Cult of The Dead Cow could very well be interested in this space with their most recent private-first platform framework.

I'm really interested in what they announced at DefCon, but their current website doesn't really give me insight into what's novel about their approach.

I'm sure they're doing a lot of cool stuff - it's just I have no idea what that stuff is.

Couchdb/pouchdb remains one of the best: it's super easy to setup and is production-ready, but it's gonna be json docs with no transactions, so it can be limiting.

Y.js and automerge emerged as solutions combining CRDTs and content transfer, they look really promising. There is a Y.rs version if that's better for you.

I've always dreamt of building something on top of Syncthing, ie something that would use file synchronization. It's more versatile and will definitely last longer than anything else, and it has some built-in capabilities for having a third party helping transport but not being allowed to read content.

I recently came across https://github.com/superfly/corrosion , a service discovery and state management tool that is working completely p2p. CR-SQLite, in particular, allows multiple tables from multiple databases to be merged thanks to CRDTs. I'm sure there's a lot to build on top of it.

I feel like you're not really interested in full p2p but want some centralization point to manage some auth stuff, so I'd investigate couchdb/pouchdb first.

Early days for me, but along the lines of syncthing I am building a local first solution on top of the s3 API https://github.com/endpointservices/mps3 being where I think the lowest common denominator is (e.g. works with minio).

Ah, you should check out Garage (https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/) for a self-hosted, cluster-y API of S3

Definitely check out SocketSupply! https://socketsupply.co/guides/#p2p-guide

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