Twister – Decentralized p2p microblogging | Hacker News Reader

Twister – Decentralized p2p microblogging

twister.net.co

76 pointsSami_Lehtinen29 comments

For me, the more interesting applications in this space are not necessarily normal communications, but "next level" anonymous/pseudonymous protocols, which are by default encrypted, highly private and decentralized.

I really wish something like this would take off.

Reddit and friends are great, but it's just too easy to game the system/censor if you control the central server.

On the other hand... nobody's really got decentralised spam prevention working, and the only really effective anti-spam systems that I know of rely on hidden data, which implies centralisation.

The only serious ways of dealing with it are pay-per-use, which disproportionately affects certain subsets of the population, or web-of-trust, which nobody's got working for reputation on a grand scale yet.

Bitmessage uses proof-of-work to prevent spam.

"When you send a message, your client must first compute a Proof of Work (POW). This POW helps mitigate spam on the network. Nodes and other clients will not process your message if it does not show sufficient POW. After the POW is complete, your message is shared to all of your connections which in turn share it with all of their connections."

https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Proof_of_work

https://bitmessage.org/wiki/FAQ#How_does_Bitmessage_work

So what does a message actually cost in terms of dollars, power, time? How does it prevent low volume spam?

And that may prevent botspam, although I'm skeptical. But I seriously doubt it will have an effect on abuse (people stalking others, posting harrassing Tweets, etc.)

This. The project homepage literally claims (as a good thing) that "...no one can censor you. No one can remove your posts. Your account cannot be blocked."

So not only does this not help with abusive behavior, it states that abuse will live forever and be impossible to block or filter.

/me shudders

Almost like the Internet. So spooky

Rather different, actually. If I decide your inbound SMTP mail is spam, I can block it. Ditto for blog comments, XMPP contact requests, or really most any protocol in use on the public Internet b/c of course there will be griefers and spammers and all kinds of bad out there and we need tools to filter and protect against it.

You have the right to say anything you want (though not without consequences). Conversely, I should have the right to literally not see/hear it once I've decided it is causing me harm.

Claiming that your platform/protocol makes this impossible just sounds naive at best and nefarious at worst to me.

Thunderbird's spam filter works pretty well, doesn't it? It's completely decentralized.

I do agree it's a difficult problem though.

Shared/public/open source warning lists are distributed intelligence, letting end-users pick their own feed.

Web of trust.

I created https://hashcash.io/ to try avoid spam by forcing bots and users to "pay" with CPU cycles.

How well does such a solution scale up? You need to keep the requirements low enough that it runs on mobile CPUs, but if it becomes widespread enough, doesn't it make sense for a bot farm to pick up a Bitcoin mining ASIC to grind out the hashes for them?

so far it work great. in future issues might arise, but then i can always tweak hashing algo or switch blockchain. So these ASICs, created purposely to crunch hashes for my service will be obsolete the moment i tweak it a bit. So it have to be software...

As for mobile/desktop/etc - I would expect each community to have their own main audience to which site owner can tweak `complexity` parameter. And in V2 work will be happening in background while you browsing site, so when time come to post comment - enough work already will be done. Hope this make some sense :)

Easy. You just get message from the people you "follow". So if you want to send a message to someone, you must make them add you to their "list" first.

Before anyone bothers with it, none of the Docker stuff for the project works. I've got a container building the code, but I'm not getting anything from the daemon once it launches.

Here's the repo I'm working now: https://github.com/kordless/swarm-twister

How does it compare to GNU social/StatusNet?

StatusNet was federated not P2P, last I checked.

it has a lot of competition https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page whisper coming from ethereum project https://github.com/NikolaMandic/Buyan

Bitmessage is for private conversations. I assume the same is true for Whisper. I think Twister is mainly about censorship-free public conversations (like Twitter, without the censorship part - see Turkey, etc).

Bitmessage is also used for decentralized mailing lists, which are known as "chans".[0]

Also, check out bitchirp.org, which is a twitter-like public website that publishes messages sent to the BitChirp chan.

[0]https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Decentralized_Mailing_List

Can you explain what "Buyan" replaces? It looks like it's a local webapp using webrtc and peerjs to simulate a twitter-like service?

It is going to be p2p webrtc messaging app with blockchain. it won't be local. and it's going to be extensible by user

now I heard there is this thing also http://telehash.org/

I hope there is some consensus on protocols between all the various similar projects.

can't find the link to source code :-|

I find it highly likely you put as much time into finding the source as you did writing this comment.

Nevertheless: https://github.com/miguelfreitas/twister-core. Also the paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.7152v1.pdf.

I've had a similar idea, but using the web for everything, just haven't bothered with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com