Hi, all. I am a web/web3 developer interested in helping to build open
source, private, decentralized alternatives to social platforms like
Facebook, WeChat, etc. I am coming from a technical starting point of
IPFS, Ethereum blockchain and secret contract platforms like Enigma and
Oasis, but I am not yet committed to a certain tech stack, and I
certainly don't want to reinvent any wheels.
I am starting to recognize that some of the privacy protecting
architecture I was envisioning layering on top of IPFS, for example, was
not really at the right networking layer - it should be handled at a
lower layer. As a part of that realization, I have recently found
gnu:net, reclaim:id and related projects and am excited about the
attention you give these layers.
I was imagining that the apps I would like to build would be mobile apps
so that they could be accessible to the majority of users, be able to
protect the user's private keys, and also be able to run in a fully
decentralized/mesh situation when needed/desired.
Textile (https://textile.io/) on top of IPFS interests me because they
are open source, and provide useful functionalities that I would need.
And they are set up for mobile apps. As an example of what can be done
with Textile, you can take a look at this functional photo
sharing/messaging React Native mobile app:
https://github.com/textileio/photos
I have also been looking at open source decentralized identity systems
like https://github.com/uport-project/uport-connect,
https://github.com/iden3 and https://github.com/jonnycrunch/ipid.
Fundamentally, I am an app developer, but one who cares about ensuring
decentralization and privacy by default, with the ability to safely
share identity claims, user groups and content/media/files when desired.
My goal is to build on top of as much existing, reliable, maintained
open source code as possible so we can show users the full functionality
they expect from existing social networking apps to make it attractive
to switch over.
My questions are these:
* Does anything similar to Textile exist in the gnu:net ecosystem?
* Can gnu:net practically operate in a battery-sane manner on Android
and iOS devices? Is there a guide for how to do this? What tradeoffs
are necessary to operate on mobile?
* IPFS uses a modular infrastructure. Would it be possible to swap out
some lower-level networking layers of IPFS with gnu:net modules for
greater privacy? (Reference:
https://github.com/ipfs/specs/blob/master/ARCHITECTURE.md)
* Would it be possible to somehow make the gnu:net and IPFS ecosystems
operationally compatible, perhaps using gateways/bridges, so that
their content/data can be shared? If so, how hard would that be?
Thanks for any insights into these questions, and for your work on gnu:net.
Best,
Brendan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanmiller/
