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I've been trying to get my head around the idea of smashing SSB (the underlying networkable append-only log store, rather than the social network) together with

by frio 8y ago

I've been trying to get my head around the idea of smashing SSB (the underlying networkable append-only log store, rather than the social network) together with some of the concepts from Camlistore, IPFS and Tim Berners-Lee's SOLID stack. I'm imagining a personal database that exists on my phone, on my desktop, and on some agent somewhere in the cloud (or even a Raspberry Pi at home). Applications -- local or networked -- could request access to append certain messages to the SSB queue, and provide a series of reducers/schemas to reify those messages into a collection of views useful for the application. It'd mean that my digital life would effectively belong to one replicatable, content-addressed database, instead of the current thing where we have a mix of files and online services that hold my data in their private databases. It's a personal database that's offline-first; it's backed up; it's distributed, and it means I'd be able to interact with my data as I see fit. It seems like an impossibly vast and intimidating project. I think the main takeaway from this ramble is that I think the new tools emerging to re-decentralize the web are really, really cool :).

crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
I'm in. Gonna start researching the stack while waiting for my firstborn to arrive. What's next for you?
- frio 8y ago
  Hope that someone builds it for me ;). I can't really do anything with that concept, because life is very full for me currently and is likely to remain so for the next year. It's just something I've been scribbling down on paper and prodding at occasionally. I suspect it's a semi-natural idea that'll occur to a lot of people when they start looking at Dat, IPFS, SSB, SOLID, ActivityPub etc. and trying to find where commonalities may exist.
Vendan 8y ago
SSB's root is just "hash chain + signatures", and is relatively trivial to implement. Most of the actual protocol is flawed in several ways, and there's tough issues they are still trying to solve. I'd say something based off of IPFS for bulk storage (SSB suffers from bloat, and there's multiple proposals to move actual data off the append only log and into "blobs", which are already WAY better implemented in IPFS, IMHO), with some form of "here's the bits that make up my profile" thing, possibly similar to SSB, but with a cleaner implementation. A few things that should be high priority, IMHO: - Allow for profile "compaction"/data removal (SSB says you should never delete anything, which is frankly untenable, IMO) - Allow for multiple devices/apps to manipulate your profile concurrently (Complex, but SSB has been criticized multiple times for vigorously arguing against this capability) - Use a data protocol that is well formed and structured (SSB uses "node.js formatted" json serialization, and then verifies signature after deserializing and reserializing, meaning you must match node.js's serialization perfectly to interact with the rest of the ecosystem)

by frio 8y ago

crawfordcomeaux 8y ago

I'm in. Gonna start researching the stack while waiting for my firstborn to arrive. What's next for you?

frio 8y ago
Hope that someone builds it for me ;). I can't really do anything with that concept, because life is very full for me currently and is likely to remain so for the next year. It's just something I've been scribbling down on paper and prodding at occasionally. I suspect it's a semi-natural idea that'll occur to a lot of people when they start looking at Dat, IPFS, SSB, SOLID, ActivityPub etc. and trying to find where commonalities may exist.

Vendan 8y ago

SSB's root is just "hash chain + signatures", and is relatively trivial to implement. Most of the actual protocol is flawed in several ways, and there's tough issues they are still trying to solve. I'd say something based off of IPFS for bulk storage (SSB suffers from bloat, and there's multiple proposals to move actual data off the append only log and into "blobs", which are already WAY better implemented in IPFS, IMHO), with some form of "here's the bits that make up my profile" thing, possibly similar to SSB, but with a cleaner implementation. A few things that should be high priority, IMHO: - Allow for profile "compaction"/data removal (SSB says you should never delete anything, which is frankly untenable, IMO) - Allow for multiple devices/apps to manipulate your profile concurrently (Complex, but SSB has been criticized multiple times for vigorously arguing against this capability) - Use a data protocol that is well formed and structured (SSB uses "node.js formatted" json serialization, and then verifies signature after deserializing and reserializing, meaning you must match node.js's serialization perfectly to interact with the rest of the ecosystem)