Scalability & Paranoia in a Decentralized Social Network

I’ve been spending a lot of my time dissecting issues with the current web architecture through the lens of the many protocols that are in the wild today, both privacy-focused and otherwise. The authors of PSYC2 had released a paper that touched on several key principles of a desirable protocol.

  • Protect the METADATA
  • Run servers not physically under your control (VPS’s)
  • Scale both signaling and data distribution

Since we have to rethink our architecture from scratch it isn’t very helpful to stick to suboptimal protocols with legacy requirements and implications, we can however leverage existing deployments and social structures by upgrading the underlying technology.

http://secushare.org/2011-FSW-Scalability-Paranoia (5 page PDF)


From their site:

As we discussed in the paper, we think privacy is best achieved using a distributed network of agnostic relays such as GNUnet, Maidsafe, A3 or Tonika. In the last years we have integrated a PSYC implementation into GNUnet.

SECUSHARE - Architecture

5 Likes