I have both my own non-identifiable domain which I use for email - and a domain of my own name which I picked up when the original owner let it expire. I had to bid to get it from a broker who squatted it but it didn't cost much.
My namesake was a famous (in some circles) wealthy person and I did start getting his emails. Quite a lot initially, and I replied to let the senders know.
That was probably twenty years ago and I'm still regularly invited to galleries for viewings as he obviously collected art. I gave up trying to get off those gallery mailing lists and now just bin them.
I have one too, but realized that it’s kinda pointless. If it’s only you receiving emails at your domain, it’s clear that if you sign up for a Facebook account and a Google account and a shopping website, that it’s always the same person.
The advantage of big email providers is that it could be anyone. I just wouldn’t use Google.
Fastmail offers email redirects like the iCloud anonymization service.
I agree that's a possibility, but I'd rather the chance some of those accounts get linked than give my data to Google.
The reason I did that wasn't privacy in the first place, so any privacy benefits are a bonus.
I did it so I can easily block spam from a business, easily 'unsubscribe' to any list without jumping through hoops, and can also see which businesses are not playing nice by sharing my data.
I agree. I would use protonmail or something else for signing up for websites, as a domain would be linked to me (unless I buy dozens of domain names anonymously).
For Git commits or communication tied to my real identity, then yeah I'd use my own domain name. But for anonymity, nope.
p2p does not necessarily imply the limitation you describe.
I don't know how Quiet uses IPFS but a truly decentralised storage system such as the design of Safe Network can hold data locally (eg using CRDTs) and/or in a decentralised, always accessible p2p network of nodes.
Chunking and redundancy ensures data is always available without the need to centralise.
(Quiet founder here.) The OP's edge case is an interesting question and one we've given a lot of thought to!
For privacy reasons Quiet does not use the global IPFS network and instead gives every team their own network. This provides a clearer story around metadata privacy protection and (most importantly!) ensures that timed deletion of messages is practical and meaningful. Disappearing messages are a must-have for many threat models, and deletion is much more meaningful when you're trusting clients within a community you trust to delete the messages, rather than trusting every peer on a global network anyone can join.
So there are advantages to having an organization-specific network, and the problem the OP highlights does come up if there are no other devices online. Here's how we think about that edge case of "No other devices are online and I need to send this message before I sign off and know someone will see it as soon as they sign on":
1. If a team is worried about this, a computer under a desk or an Android device in a corner running Quiet is much easier to set up and maintain than a server, and it is trivial to add as many of these as you want in diverse locations until you are confident in the uptime, e.g. that any one of these devices could get unplugged or suffer an internet outage and it probably won't correlate or matter.
2. When running a server that does something important you need to have some separate monitoring setup like Pingdom and have someone on pager duty if you want to achieve respectable uptime. With Quiet, we can build that monitoring into the p2p app itself. We haven't done this yet, but picture a feature where the app shows you the uptime stats of your network and you designate nodes that should always be online. The network itself could notify you of any disturbance that threatens uptime, e.g. if one of your designated always-on nodes starts misbehaving.
3. People who don't want to worry about this can pay us or someone else to run a server for them and we'll make this easy. But it's better than depending on a centralized service because in most cases everything will still work if our server goes down, and they won't be dependent on us the way people depend on cloud SaaS, because Quiet is easy to fork and the fork will work pretty well out-of-the box in most cases with no infrastructure required.
4. It doesn't take many Android phones in full-p2p mode to give you a lot of often-online nodes, so continuous liveness could emerge organically in larger communities and it becomes more about showing metrics to give people confidence that this is the case (and making the experience on Android really nice--optimizing battery life, exposing choices to the user, etc.)
5. A small Quiet community without enough resources or participants to have enough always-on nodes could designate a larger, busier, more infrastructure-stable Quiet community as a trusted helper. The other community wouldn't see the plaintext of messages but it could support message syncing and provide other helpful resources. What I like about this is that well-resourced or tech-savvy communities could support other aligned communities without the hassle and responsibility of running a server.
I get this is a popular view, and justifiably so. The project is not a get rich scheme for the founder, you will see that if you look at how it was created and the structures that support it (which include a Scottish Charity that owns the company MaidSafe which is building the first version, but then aims to remove itself from control in favour of decentralised development funded by the network itself).
And there is good reason why they chose an ICO over alternatives. You don't say what you favour, but what this project has achieved by this route is complete independence to deliver according to fundamental principles.
They have no VC investment, nobody has control who is not aligned with the goal to create a fully autonomous, decentralised network and the "fundamentals" of Safe Network which you can read up on if you want. So the project continues to aim at a hard target regardless of many opportunities to get rich along the way.
It was I think the first ICO, so if getting rich was the aim it could have happened many times by now.
As things stand it is a shame that people are turned off from even looking into this project because of that association. Once it emerges I think the value it provides rather than captures will change minds.
https://SafeNetwork.tech is thoroughly p2p and doesn't reveal IP addresses because it's designed from the ground up to be decentralised, anonymous and censorship resistant.
Last time it was featured on HN the top comment accused it of being another crypto currency scam. Unfortunately there didn’t seem to be any consensus one way or the other on the technical merit, but clearly some people are not fond of it.
Yes folks, take a look at git-bug, Michael has done a brilliant job of adding issues and comments into your git repos, and for a pre v1 project it works really well already, and you can import from / to github, gitlab and JIRA.
git-bug is a pleasure to use so I'm attempting to get it running in the browser using wasm, to create a decentralised github on p2p storage. I'm targeting Safe Network but the same approach could be used on anything with a storage backend, from NextCloud to IPFS, even [cough] AWS.
After thinking about this for a couple of years while helping the Safe Network (a decentralisation project worth getting to know) I began my own effort to decentralise github based on Safe, just last Sunday!
Even before Friday's censorship, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of support and offers to help I received in mastodon. People there are aware, skilled and ready.
BTW I've got ideas on how to handle the issue/comment spam and other problems rightly highlighted by @cjbprime in his reply to the OP. But first I have to get git-bug (really worth of support too) compiled to WASM and running in the browser.
Mateo, I'm very interested in primo and look forward to putting it to work once it is open source. So very pleased that you are heading that way! I'd like to sign up to the forum without using github (as I'm allergic to anything leaking data, esp to corporations / Microsoft).
I realise it may be needed for some primo features, but is there any chance we can use email to auth with primo's Discourse?
I'll be building test sites and deploying to SAFE Network as soon as I can. Svelte is my favourite so again I'm please that you've chosen to use it to build primo. Good luck.
Thanks for the interest! I’m in the process of stripping the tool out of the online service so it can easily be self-hosted or run locally. I’ll make sure to enable email auth in Discourse once the source is published.
1. This is a fair point right now but it is only temporary. There's a SAFE Network App which will be the key to the network, providing a single point of contact, installing other things, seeing up a vault if you want to farm, create a wallet, updates etc. Most people will just download that and go from there.
2. Is also a reasonable point to make, but the nature of the goals here means it has to do a lot more than just sit on top of the existing protocols. It's a secure, decentralised, autonomous network/platform, which needs to be built from the ground up in order to solve the many problems we have with the existing web.
I'm not sure what you mean by monolithic. The ideas are new and can take a while to grasp but it's worth it.
3. The community have had long discussions about this so many will agree with you. But the best response I've heard to this point was from Tim Berners-Lee when he and David Irvine were at the Decentralised Web Summit in 2018. Someone said something similar to your point 3 to David and Tim jumped in and answered that it wasn't necessary by saying: and what was the killer app when I invented the web? Or something along those lines.
I'm not dismissing your point and many of us aren trying to come up with ideas for such killer apps.
Personally I suspect we already have some - take a look at the SAFE fundamentals for example. But it may well be something nobody anticipated. It's fun thinking them up though :-)
Podcasting has the vibe of the early DIY web. It's largely independent and isn't "owned" by an oligopoly unlike social media. Indie podcasters sometimes struggle with distribution if they get popular. Lastly, it has a major vanishing content problem when old orphaned podcasts disappear from podcast hosting services but may still be interesting.
It would also be fairly easy to write a web-to-SAFE bridge server that allowed people to add podcasts hosted on the SAFE network to regular RSS podcast players. People could run this themselves or run open ones on the web, with the latter amounting to a community run CDN.
I ‘know a guy‘ who decided to build a music platform for the network and podcasting would be an easy addition. ;)
Although a dedicated and native recording and podcast publish app would be better and that idea has rolled through my head a few times. Have a good idea on the branding and interface already. Excellent suggestion and reaffirming for sure.
Great suggestion. Podcasting would definitely be a great and feasible use case. Given that SAFE provides a perpetual web, it could very well be a killer app.
Maidsafe don't market aggressively, it's not their way so I think you are mistaken. They did attend a could of bitcoin type conferences in person in the early days but I very much doubt they paid anyone to promote their coin.
IMO they are an outstanding team both technically and ethically. In fact it was the latter that got me interested in the project in 2014 and my impression then has been confirmed many times since.
This was in about 2015. Somebody was telling me how great is MaidSAFE and I should check it out, but when I wanted to ask her about technical details, she wasn't able to tell me anything specific.
It was before Ethereum launched, I really liked how passionately Vitalik was speaking on the stage about the altcoin he was making, and what kind of contracts can be created with a few lines of code, it was much more interesting to me than an altcoin with no technical information to tell you the truth :)
My namesake was a famous (in some circles) wealthy person and I did start getting his emails. Quite a lot initially, and I replied to let the senders know.
That was probably twenty years ago and I'm still regularly invited to galleries for viewings as he obviously collected art. I gave up trying to get off those gallery mailing lists and now just bin them.