Zooko: Decentralized, immutable and uncensorable microblogging

This is “uncensorable” in the same way that “sovereign citizens” are immune from prosecution. Once someone uses it for something which is actually illegal, they’ll learn how useful blockchains are for prosecutors.<p>The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game where you can make up rules for the government to follow. What actually happens is one of two paths:<p>1. You’re outside their jurisdiction, so anything will work because your local police don’t care. Maybe you have to avoid traveling to certain places or doing business with certain companies but you can almost certainly live a full life with minimal impact unless you’re doing something like leaking the secrets of a drug cartel or Russian oligarch.<p>2. You’re subject to their authority, which gives them a rich suite of tools ranging from arresting you, having ISPs filter DNS or network connections, launching denial of service attacks on your infrastructure, etc. How much effort they’ll expend depends on exactly what you’re doing and how authoritarian the government is, not the technology.

Handshake has been co-opted by the same person who took over Freenode. That handshake has become toxic should come at no surprise.<p>I feel for this dev, I had a similarly unpleasant experience with the Aragon team and decided the community was not for me.

Anyone interested in this field should also check out Freenet, a distributed, encrypted and censor-resistant platform that&#x27;s been around for 20 years.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenetproject.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenetproject.org&#x2F;</a>

I think this is the most interesting part:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;publiusfederalist&#x2F;why-i-quit-handshake" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;publiusfederalist&#x2F;why-i-quit-handshake</a>

I guess this is addressed to whoever lives in the crypto bubble. I don&#x27;t understand what a handshake is, why it passes dns records and if it can be used to publish twitter like messages who is going to read them and how.<p>Also from the little i know about this current fad:<p>If you&#x27;re attaching your tweets to a blockchain and 5 million users do that a couple times daily, how long till said blockchain becomes unmanageably large? Do they plan to truncate it so older tweets are lost?

Ah an immutable blog! A feature literally no one wants and no one has asked for!

&gt; Zooko was named after Zooko Wilcox O&#x27;Hearn, one of the few remaining, original, Cypherpunks.<p>It&#x27;s super weird to name a project after someone who&#x27;s not dead, and in this case not even that old (Wikipedia says he&#x27;s 47).

Since it isn&#x27;t really clear, Handshake protocol is an attempt to create an alternative DNS without authoritative root name servers, where instead users auction names priced in Handshake coins, the initial bulk of which were gifted to various FOSS developers and organizations to try and keep rich people from hoarding everything. Instead of querying root servers for TLDs, you query a blockchain to get the records.<p>This guy figured out you can stuff Tweets into DNS TXT records, and chose to do it on Handshake DNS instead of regular DNS, since this one is on a blockchain, which I guess means even when a name record is sold to someone else and the current record is changed, the old record is still there in the blockchain history, so you can now never delete or edit a Tweet.

I stopped reading after<p>&quot;Handshake is an incredibly secure blockchain. While many other chains are easy to abuse, Handshake is not one of them.&quot;<p>The claim that Handshake isn&#x27;t easy to abuse lacks proof.

&quot;Uncensorable&quot; if all nodes go down it&#x27;s down. It&#x27;s like that torrent&#x2F;magnet you really want to have but it&#x27;s at 0&#x2F;0.

Recent and presumably related:<p><i>Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29513547" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29513547</a> - Dec 2021 (186 comments)

I&#x27;m excited to try this out, I was toying with the idea of creating something similar.<p>I see a strong need for a microblogging framework where users have control of their data. Mastadon is great, but I think Zooko goes farther in the right direction.

I don’t understand the popularity of immutability and uncensor- ability.<p>What if someone posts naked photos of their girlfriend on this?<p>Furthermore it says you can block access to the chain completely do it doesn’t even do what it claims.

Maybe all these projects that have typical Discord chats talking about blockchains, DAOs, NFTs, etc are full of kids given that some users can get easily upset and hate your pet project and they don&#x27;t give any reasons other than character attacks. I always see this when someone attaches their own identity to a technology or project that once someone criticises the project (but not you directly) they feel <i>&#x27;personally attacked&#x27;</i>.<p>Unfortunately they gave reasons and that is somehow toxic? At the end of the day, if you cannot prove them wrong with a counter argument, then it is difficult to side with the merits of this project. I don&#x27;t see any character attacks on the user from the project devs.<p>In fact it is the other way round, and by quitting they seem to have &#x27;won&#x27;.

&gt; These children remind of me of Lord of the Flies.<p>I think most people in blockchain Discord &quot;servers&quot; are actually children. There are no other forums that I go to, where I get the same palpable feeling that I&#x27;m talking to teenagers. It&#x27;s odd.

People keep using immutable like it’s a good thing. Any of y’all who still want to fully stand by the things you said, did, and thought 20 years ago might need to reflect a bit.

How much does this cost to use yourself as it is on a blockchain?

Naming this after Zooko is a nice hat tip. I remember back when he was interleaving his last names to form O&#x27;Whielacronx.

I understand the very basics of blockchain technology, but I guess I&#x27;m missing some context or background that would allow me to make the mental connection between &quot;blockchain&quot; and &quot;unblockable microblog&quot;. Does anyone have a good pointer to something that would explain this more in-depth&#x2F;like I&#x27;m 5?

i wonder how the handshake protocol compares with the hypercore protocol or scuttlebut and if there are other similar suitable protocols for social media. for example iris.to uses hypercore <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hypercore-protocol.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hypercore-protocol.org&#x2F;</a>

Something I always like to figure out in any decentralized system is where it is stored.<p>Here it is stored on a blockchain. (yay) But where is this actually stored?<p>Is it expected that N users will store it for everyone else?<p>Will everyone have a copy of the entire thing?<p>If this were to become popular I presume it would grow pretty big.

So you pay to post, otherwise who will pay miners to post blocks? That will surely disincentivize too much posting and solve inherent scalability issues. This service is a no go.

This already exists. It&#x27;s called Usenet.

Oh dear. Another allegedly censorship resistant platform, and where do they put their code? On the most censored and censorable place possible, github. It&#x27;s just one DMCA complaint away from being taken down, or Microsoft may decide to just lock out some or all of the developers.