hmm.. i meam - this is unfunded and not supposed to be ready for being used yet.
there will be a polished user interface once it reliably works, so maybe a bit "unfair" to take a work in progress open source project 100% by volunteers.
when you say protocol over ppl its hard to understand what you mean.
so far, ppl over protocol meant sysadmins, instance operators or social network owners like musk reign supreme...
...because when issues occur, they can always interfere nad "solve the problem" how they seem fit, against the consent of users.
p2p protocols means sovereign users, the people that SHOULD have the last say on things will have the last say on things and not some "other people", like angry sysadmins ...
so protocols instead of servers owned by tech people, will empower the user people 馃檪
haha... just as i finished submitting this message, the following post was boosted and came into my mastodon feed:
if A trusts B, A places trust im B.
If it later turns out that trust wasnt justified, A learns and maybe shares their experirnce about B with others.
I think designing systems for trust is great. These are systems for people and we need them.
The p2p protocol are meant to make it a reality to have that kind of situation, because in centralized and fediverse social media, there is NEVER an A trusts B.
Because there is always a party C involved which can interfere
That party C was never meant to be part of the relation between B and A.
An example is a system administrator.
If you host your own website, you kinda implicitly trust, that you hosting company (whether Amazon/AWS) or some smaller one, wont use their power to change server logic, so that your blog readers read something entirely different than what you wrote and published on your blog.
Its an extreme example, but it is the world we live in
Yeah, that is what i hope this can do in the future. While `p2p-news-app` is a in-browser p2p app based on dat, it is also part of `dat`, which is meant to empower users to build/customize/share their own p2p apps with ease - all it takes it to know basics of html and css and maybe a tiny bit of JS.
basically, what many pupils at some point went through in school - making a static html site, but now its out of the box fully p2p functional.
This is my personal motivation and goal too.
Of course i could have chosen rust to build p2p systems, but the point of html/css/js is, that it is easy to get into and it is proven by kids being able to build some sort of basic html page in school and probably almost all generations went through that exercise at some point in their life.
javascript and the web as some sort of "lingua franka" lowers to barrier to entry to participate in creating to a minimum
This doesnt mean that you cant just purely use apps and produce content, but from customizing a theme towards more and more involved changes all the way to building your own apps inside a website and share it fully functional with others peer to peer is possible as well and you dont have to study computer science to do it
The entire premise of dat is that it is a **dat ecosytem** and people grow it together - like a garden 馃檪
The entire focus or goal is to make things simpler
dat has its own 12 year history now and a dat-ecosystem-archive on github full of compost to inspire future projects.
dat started 12 years ago in 2013 to not compromise the technical approach on any level, but has since become battle tested and mature and for the last years all effort went into working towards lowering barrier to participation.
dat started in 2013 as "git for any data".
Version Control or history is deeply baked into its DNA.
More so, dat-ecosystem focuses on p2p collaboration to allow active participants capture their activity in the process in the way they want it to inform growing the dat ecosystem together, so it can later inform distribution of any funds according to it if funds ever happen to enter the dat-ecosystem :-)
...we have a little visualization from some years ago
agree with what you wrote.
dat grew out of the open data movement.
it started with open (data) science.
dat is flexible, so the cryptography can be used for closeness and anonymity as well, but dat-ecosystem in particular is for open data and transparency.
may i add some thoughts:
there is also a distinction between "writable" and "readonly". The former often causes the need for closedness, because of spam and malicious actor (even few or a single one can cause much harm)
thats why dat heaviliy works with invite only when it comes to writability, but otherwise defaults to readonly openness.
spaces with writable openness usually need to be guarded by moderators to cleanup when malicious actors wreack havoc.
dat stack has version control for everything by default, so undo is relatively cheap, which means its more friendly towards writable openness too.
i think p2p keypair crypto enables this by users being able to self sign all their activity
also - personally, i would love to see dat and apps built with dat for "peer production" and not for "end consumers", because historically, private life was maybe for good reasons meant to potentially be private, business/professsional life was maybe for good reason meant to be transparent and documented - all the way up to informing shareholders or publishing balance sheets to companies house, or being able to see transparentcy when a company files for bankruptcy.
i would love to see some sort od "open HR".
I think this is a huge problem, that HR is sich a secretive closed sector. The ppl and their professional life would benefit enormously if this was an open system where you can easily find people to work with.
....let me also add a conspiracy thought ... kinda just kidding... but not 馃榿:
the loud focus on advertised secrecy/privacy/anonymity is mainly pushed as a narrative by "the capitalists", because they benefit from it
There are plenty of social networks out there, including bsky, mastodon and even nostr.
there is also good old atom/rss feeds.
imho there is no point in adding yet another app to this, unless it fundamentally solves some deep problems.
thats where my passion for p2p comes from.
of course i agree, that once it works, the apps built on top have to serve the people ...and we are getting close - thats why i shared the github link - even though its raw unfinished work in progress
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