I'm quite annoyed by the superficial critics that are currently overflowing the comments. Of course this is an ambitious project that is driven by (of course slow paced) academic research. This is very serious and is of course actively not giving a fuck about current mainstream trends in software engineering.<p>It is technically ambitious: no-bullshit distributed systems are hard with the current Xcoin trends. GNUnet strives to imagine and implement a networking stack that is mostly friend-to-friend, eg a network where the topology is dictated by the real life trust relationships (just as most old low-level protocol did, think bgp). It wants to support delay-tolerant and low bandwidth networks that exist outside of our privileged western world, have privacy protections on the routing level, etc etc.<p>It is politically ambitious since much of it is deeply anti-commercial, striving for local self-management (and that on several stacked levels). In particular it strives to have an architecture that defuses the network effect that comes with walled gardens. Applications built on top will probably do the exact opposite of the neuropsychology-based methods of drawing attention that is being used in almos every single mainstream private <i>and free software</i> web application. Imho there is limited value in reimplementing all these mechanisms like suggestions, notifications, infinite stream based information architecture (think mastodon) that have negative aspects on the content (superficial and intellectually aggressive content) and negative aspects as a tool (no decent archiving or information retrieval).<p>So yeah, this is very much in progress, but GNUnet as a whole is currently federating a lot of academic (and non-academic but still very much based on experimental science methods) work, it's already a gold mine of papers, thesis, experimental protocols, foundations for radically different applications, etc. Please take the time to go deeper than just the front page, it is really worth the time (this is a website, not a marketing page, you have to actually explore it to understand what it's about).
I have seen a lot of their presentations at 33C3. Its quite interesting ideas that I was quite interested in.<p>The problem with GNUnet in general that it seem very inaccessible to those outside of the university context. In their presentation they show that they did all these great test, but very little how I can run them, or achieve things with GNUnet. GNUnet is academic and has not yet found any real-world use case that I know off and thus suffers the problem of academic projects.<p>Overall they have a very interesting vision of what you can do, but its pretty far in the future and the website is a bit of nonsense. It took me a couple hours of listing to the craters to understand what they were really trying to do.
This sounds a lot like my own side project's goals, but I've made it work inside the browser using web-rtc. There's a (somewhat) usable prototype online.<p><a href="https://www.hyperhyperspace.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.hyperhyperspace.org</a>
Oh wow! I thought I disliked GNU but after all this... damn. This project made me dig deep into other GNU projects. I have to say I am extremely impressed. GNUnet, their featured and upcoming applications are intriguing. There is even GNU Taler, a privacy-preserving payment system. These projects are remarkable. I hope that they will continue working on them. They must! This is the direction I would like the future to take. I love the Secushare website, too, it is utterly informative and the design is pleasing my eyes. The content is stimulating my mind. Their goals are restoring my faith. Please make this a reality! I am so excited about this!<p>Thank you so much! If someone can afford to help them (Secushare, GNUnet) financially, please do! I will dig even deeper and try to contribute as much as I can as I have some knowledge in C and cryptography.<p>For anyone who is interested in contributing to <i>Secushare</i>: <a href="https://secushare.org/introduction" rel="nofollow">https://secushare.org/introduction</a> (especially the "How can you help?" section)<p>For anyone who is interested in contributing to <i>GNUnet</i>: <a href="https://gnunet.org/en/engage.html" rel="nofollow">https://gnunet.org/en/engage.html</a>
Last commit to <a href="https://gnunet.org/git/secushare.git" rel="nofollow">https://gnunet.org/git/secushare.git</a> is from 2017:<p><pre><code> commit 4fbc224f25d71c30b16a2f5aa45cb1f2954d2d38 (HEAD ->
master, origin/master, origin/HEAD)
Author: t3sserakt <t3ss@posteo.de>
Date: Wed Sep 20 22:15:53 2017 +0200
deleted test
</code></pre>
Is development still going?
Decentralized social network: a customized phpBB with a good OpenID module would be enough. Host your own, authenticate yourself to other instances, use RSS feeds to create your own composite timelines.
This page uses a lot of words to explain almost nothing, the linked “introduction” page is similar.<p>Is this a thing I can sign up to? How does it make my life better? All I can tell so far is that it’s secure and some kind of social network<p>Compare this to the WhatsApp landing page: <a href="https://www.whatsapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.whatsapp.com/</a><p>Edit: looks like it’s a framework for building apps, still unclear to me if it’s usable or any apps exist for it yet
Cool idea: Looks more like building blocks than a complete application.<p>I'm curious how a system like this is resilient to SPAM.<p>Specifically: The (cough) power of centralized systems is that they have an economic incentive to police themselves. (Although we can disagree about how well they do it.)<p>Example: I don't get a lot of SPAM on Facebook, but I get a ton of SPAM emails and phone calls. Likewise, LinkedIn is mostly SPAM, so I don't use it very much.
It sounds cutting edge to me but the last time I tried to install GnuNet on Windows and Ubuntu I gave up after awhile because it seemed like, if I recall correctly, it wouldn't run on Windows anymore and something was broken with the Ubuntu build/install I was trying to do.\<p>It seemed like I would need to debug a broken build in order to use any of it for anything.
Who are some people who will use this and what does one get for taking the risk to associate with them? It seems superficial, but for a social network, it's the only question that matters.
for those wondering if there are more tangible alternatives, check out the “social” apps on Blockstack (sadly there's no way to filter/sort).<p><a href="https://app.co/blockstack" rel="nofollow">https://app.co/blockstack</a><p>EDITED: fixed to use a public URL.