Another source says the whitelisting thing is not deployed yet, and it'll be patchy for a while. We'll see. If it is deployed, then IMHO: - Darknet is essential. - This means we need really good darknet support e.g. FOAF connections, invites, i.e. the planned darknet enhancements. - It will be largely an isolated darknet. - The restrictions are likely to remain less serious in some places (western-owned businesses, places where they operate, sometimes academia). It may be possible to get a VPN through sometimes. It might be possible to link the internal darknet to the external darknet by linking a VPN'ed opennet node to an internal darknet node. - But generally I'd expect *very few* connections to the outside world. - Hence one thing we should seriously consider is some easy to use tools for manually migrating content from one disconnected darknet to another, based on the binary blob infrastructure. IMHO this should include auto-updates, files, and whole freesites.
I had a longer discussion and the main conclusions were: - Freenet 0.5 was very popular in China a long time ago. This explains the high ranking we achieve on the recent survey. - He confirms that it was blocked. - After it was blocked, there was a long period when 0.7 wasn't available or wasn't ready. - Right now, most Chinese don't use Freenet because there isn't much interesting (Chinese) content on it. - The reasons are similar to why western users don't use it. However, the history implies that if we can get some of the external chinese content authors (e.g. chinese language news sites hosted externally) to post content onto it (or others to mirror said content, which might need better tools for mirroring), we might get a lot more users fairly quickly. - Comments on websites are very important - possibly embedded Freetalk. - Real-time (minutes not hours) comments would be ideal. Some people really do sit on web pages and read every post - and some of them are important. - Microblogging is also very important. IMHO Sone is pretty close to this. A lot use twitter-like tools. - A mobile version would be good. This isn't likely any time soon for various reasons (most obviously bandwidth). - This also implies we need inserting large freesites to be both easier and more reliable: Currently there are two problems: 1) jsite doesn't allow persistent site uploads, 2) performance of big sites is poor, and upload times long, because saces' multi-container code isn't merged. Also, the time it takes to insert sites is a problem, because it means no quick updates. And then you get to the isolated darknet issues. IMHO real-time is hard. We're not going to get a system that does real-time with lots of "pages", "forums" or "channels" any time soon, with the exception of small systems that don't scale such as Flip. However, real-time in Sone is quite feasible IMHO, because you are only following a limited number of friends, and we can use CAPTCHAs and relaying for third-party replies. Full publish/subscribe might allow real-time in Freetalk, but it's a long way off. Real-time systems can work if there are only a small number of people to poll. This would imply a visible list of who is "logged on" to a specific chat, with auto-log-off after a period and CAPTCHAs for announcing when you log back on. I might file a bug for such a real-time-with-channels system. Obviously you don't need to log on to lurk. This would be slightly more scalable than current Flip prototypes. So, priorities: - Make Sone official! - Make Sone subscribe to friends / people you are following at a high priority. - Make Sone use CAPTCHAs, or just a low priority subscription, for everyone else. - Fix and enable by default saces' multi-container site insertion code. (The main difficulty is how to make it work persistently iirc). - Build some kind of tool for large site uploads. jSite can't be easily changed to support big (persistent) site uploads, so maybe we need something else. - Embedding support in Freetalk, suited to comments on blog posts (i.e. thread-specific). - Some support for filtering in the site upload tool so we can replace whatever the markup is for the comments on the external site with the markup for an embedded Freetalk. - Think about even better support for big sites e.g. selective reinserts. (The stuff about big sites is interesting because It's The Content Stupid ... a lot of content is big sites...) - Integration between Freetalk and Sone i.e. you should be able to click on a poster in Freetalk and then either follow them, send them a private message or whatever. - Really good darknet support. - Easy to use tools for content migration. - Think about writing a mirroring-from-web extension for the large site upload tools. After we have most of this, we should try to get some content i.e. get some publicity, try to get some China-specific publicity/content, reach out to them (the obvious ones have mentioned us in the past). -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 198 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20110520/a1593097/attachment.pgp>
