[Cryptography] The Truth Social Network: A Decentralized Social Network

[Howard Chu]

btc_joe via cryptography wrote:
> I’ve been working on a new system for engaging in decentralized social media using an open-source protocol.

We already had that, it was called Usenet on NNTP.

> The paper is available at: https://www.thetruthsocialnetwork.com/White-Paper/
> 
> Some context:
> 
> You can find a very raw proof of concept of the idea at my other site www.beateasyjoe.com <http://www.beateasyjoe.com/>. Take it with a grain of salt, much of
> what’s in the paper was worked out in recent weeks/months, and will require a lot of work to implement (thus why I figured I would share and hopefully raise
> some intellectual capital). A little over a year ago the idea began as a way to prove ownership of various traditional social media accounts from my personal
> website. Then it evolved into how I could tailor content from my site in a manner similar to social media using digital signatures. Then I realized I had to
> incorporate a way to enable interactions. Then I realized I needed timestamps and some type of protocol. And eventually the goal became to not only enable
> decentralized social media, but further, to enable the creation of historical records. There are also some potentially huge ideas that could be created on top
> of this thing.
> 
> 
> Abstract: A decentralized social network would allow participants to engage in social media directly without relying on trusted third parties. The need for
> permission-based access to various walled garden platforms would be eliminated. Recreating the vast majority of social media functionality largely depends upon
> solving the problem of decentralized, pseudonymous identity. We propose a solution to the above by utilizing the cryptocurrency Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).
> By choosing a single public address, participants can create censorship-resistant historical records of content. Content is provably linked to an identity
> through the creation of digital fingerprints, which are timestamped and committed to blocks (which are themselves timestamped). Participants can reference their
> own and others content by simply including it’s unique fingerprint within their message. Any file that can be hashed (audio, video, zips, pdfs, etc) can be
> included within messages. While files themselves are not stored in these identity blockchains, a record of them is, as their hashes are committed to fingerprints.

A fully permissionless network will rapidly be overwhelmed with spam if it achieves any degree of popularity.

Also not sure that there's merit in retaining social media posts forever, as on a blockchain. It's nice to have
a few Usenet archive sites for historical reference, but for the majority of use cases periodic expiration is
preferable. Most social posts are only relevant for a brief span of time, and a lot of stuff deserves to be
forgotten.

There's certainly some merit to the notion of decentralized identity. I.e., we pretty much never care that your
identity has been verified by some 3rd party authority, or that some authority granted you permission to operate
with a particular account. We only care that you have an identity uniquely associated to you, so that no one can
impersonate you. The cryptocurrency ecosystem seems to have solved this problem, yes.

> Full Paper available at: https://www.thetruthsocialnetwork.com/White-Paper/
> 
> 
> btc_joe

-- 
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/