@serapath A draft post on this https://hamishcampbell.com/real-world-tackling-the-geekproblem/
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@hamishcampbell
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...
@hamishcampbell
...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
@hamishcampbell
haha... just as i finished submitting this message, the following post was boosted and came into my mastodon feed:
@serapath As I talk about a lot all good societies are based on trust, all bad society are based on fear. Q. how can we socially create paths that data stays online?
@hamishcampbell
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
@hamishcampbell
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
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@hamishcampbell
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.
@hamishcampbell
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
@hamishcampbell
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
@hamishcampbell
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.
@hamishcampbell
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
@hamishcampbell
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)
@hamishcampbell
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
@serapath yep that's true, more programming alone is not fixing much, what we need to more social structures building from the grassroots "commons" paths, coding for this is core to what is needed.
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