Taarafo

Taarafo: Engineering Free Speech https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLan3SCnsISTQNkgtVMqJu896TghXjGYzt

Hassan Habib's objectives align well with our objectives to build a fully decentralized social media platform. His current codebase, let's be honest, is centralized. He knows it. And he states here his intention to fully decentralize a user's content and shares his thoughts on how he might do it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGov4vuGj8A&list=PLan3SCnsISTQNkgtVMqJu896TghXjGYzt&t=2523s

Contrary to the video, it is not technically feasible to give each user their own blockchain like Bitcoin or Ethereum because a) each user would need a node network that is talking to all the other user's node networks, and so on, and b) that type of blockchain is specifically designed to defend against the "double-spend" and similar types of issues concerning decentralized money, and a social media platform is a much simpler use case.

However, in recent years, a new type of chained hash ledger design has emerged that is just as cryptographically secure as a traditional blockchain, and that is KERI. (warning: Rabbit Hole!) see my notes on that in the KERI file.

Self-Certification of Identifiers is the innovation. Here, suffice to say that each user could store their Keys in a KERI-like ledger and store their social activity content in a similar log. KERI ledgers do not need to be deployed to a distributed network because they do not need a consensus mechanism for validation. Because each identifier in the ledger is self-certifying.

So yes, Hassan's idea is feasible if we tweak it just a little bit.

I think we may be able to use cloud and/or IPFS type storage (see other note). But, we need to step back and look at all of the technologies that we can bring to bear on the problem to come up with the most practical solution.


Last update: 2022-05-04