Flutterby™! : Anyone else considering 2014-01-14 01:45:08.979524+00

Anyone else considering

2014-01-14 01:45:08.979524+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

Anyone else considering Twister? Anonymized distributed P2P chat: http://twister.net.co/

I am very interested in this. So I clicked through. It looks to me like it might work, but it is WAY too painful even for an experienced developer right now. For example, you have to deal with two separate build systems.

In fact it is almost like the inverse of your typical just-launched open source project: barely hacked together code-wise, but fairly well documented. Especially interesting: the documentation seems to indicate you could do a lot more with this than a distributed Twitter clone. In fact, with a distributed key/value store you could pretty much make a distributed anything.

Only you would have to be careful what you stick in there -- the way it is currently designed. Even with a 140 char per message limit you are going to hit some size walls quickly if you scale up to a million users. It would be better if it did sharding of some kind instead of replicating the whole store everywhere. Still, sharding could be added.

The most interesting bit of all is the use of Bitcoin verification algorithms for anonymous identities. That is something I've thought we needed for a long, long time: verifiable anonymous identities that could only be used by one person. No impersonations. Otherwise how can you have truly free speech? At least on the part of whistleblowers and others who might be silent under their own names.

In any case, I'm just as prey to the network effect as anyone else. If enough people I find interesting enough to follow on that kind of service were there, I'll grit my teeth, follow the build instructions, and go along for the ride.

But that would require the opposite of anonymity! You can't create the network effect with naught but anonymous identities. People will have to be on there as themselves too.

In the meantime, maybe I'll be an anonymous early adopter. I haven't had a handle since I gave up on Usenet! :-0

#Comment Re: made: 2014-01-14 17:52:08.771799+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

I started to build it, and then ran into various "oh, wait, the cognitive load here is gonna be..." and stopped. Maybe I'll try again.

But to your point about anonymity and identity: I don't really need to expand my social network. I've got too damned many contacts on FaceTwitSpacePlus already.