The Internet was created primarily as a free system for the exchange of information between people, but now it is heavily regulated and is no longer as free as it was in the beginning. I don’t want to discuss whether or not it is necessary to regulate the exchange of information between people, but I personally am not satisfied with such an abundance of regulators and the stream of bans and blocking of information they generate.
At the moment, a certain part of the Internet resources position themselves as relatively free and independent, but is this really so? Websites have long been censored and regulated, and sometimes even blocked for the most part. Some instant messengers and file-sharing networks remain relatively free, but they are also forced to obey regulators.
It seems to me that the problem is in the client-server architecture of the Internet. Namely, the client requests information stored on the server. This means that you can always find a server or group of servers, their owners, as well as those who posted information there, and regulate them all together properly. Added to this is the monopoly on application stores for different platforms, through which even the most cleverly designed clients for instant messengers and file sharing can be regulated.
To solve this problem, I propose to move away from the principle of the client requesting portions of information that is permanently located on certain servers and to do exactly the opposite – move to the principle of placing all information on the client, which comes in portions from unspecified servers.
For this, all the technologies already exist; you just need to choose the appropriate combination of them. Now the capacity of flash drives is already measured in terabytes, and with a certain approach this will allow storing locally the entire history of information exchange for a quite impressive community, comparable, for example, to. Next I will describe one of the possible implementations of this idea.
You can store community posts and comments on them in the most common way – in the form of a local folder with a directory of web page and media files that can be viewed with any browser. This will essentially be a local website, with certain rules for page hierarchy and formatting. Page files and media files will be changed and added to the folder using a special program, let’s call it SP. The joint venture can both receive updates and send its posts and comments to other community members.
SP, with certain reservations, can be compared to a file version control system, and posts and comments to them with requests to change code in the repository. You can use Email as a transport for exchanging information, since there are plenty of free or relatively cheap Email resources on the Internet. Most of them support sending and receiving messages via API using well-documented protocols with a sea of ready-made libraries in different programming languages.
The organization of a community begins with the publication in any of the popular blockchains of the name of the community, its digital signature and an initial list of email addresses of mailboxes. In the future, updates to this list of addresses signed with a digital signature can be published on this blockchain or elsewhere. The digital signature is also a key or may contain the public key of the community (this depends on the chosen encryption algorithm). An open communication protocol in the community (OPOC), also signed with an electronic signature, is also published and periodically updated. So that everyone can write their own version of the joint venture if they wish.
The list of mailboxes is periodically crawled by a bot, which extracts messages (letters) from them and determines whether they contain messages that correspond to the OPOS and processes them. After which all these messages and spam are deleted by the bot from the mailbox. Essentially, this bot works on the same principle as bots in Telegram or other instant messengers. But you don’t need a specific server on the Internet to run it; you can even run it on your laptop or even your phone. You can use several instances of this bot running on different devices, but with a common database.
Yes, a specific community will have its own owner or group of owners who will ensure its functioning: launch mail bots, maintain the community database, update lists of addresses and OPOS, etc. It seems to me that this will be much cheaper than maintaining a network of certain servers, and unlike Pavel Durov, the owners can be very anonymous and it will be impossible to influence them through blocking certain servers or the monopoly of application stores. If desired, anyone can organize their own community using the same principle.
In order to become a member of a specific community, you need to specify in the joint venture settings a list of addresses and digital signature of the community, a list of your addresses, and then send an email from the joint venture to any of its addresses, encrypted with the public key from the digital signature. The format of this message will be described in detail in the OPOS. The message will contain the bot command to register a new community member, his name, public encryption key, and a list of his addresses.
After registration, the joint venture will periodically receive encrypted emails with archives of changes from the community bot to its list of addresses, decrypt these messages, do all the necessary checks and unpack the archives into a local folder on a flash drive. Also, using the SP, you can send an encrypted message with your post to the community or with a comment on already published posts.
I don’t want to come up with a specific community structure, rules and other details and nuances right now. The post has already turned out to be long, I hope the main essence of what is proposed is already clear, if not, then I will answer additional questions in the comments. It is interesting to know the opinion of Khabrovsk residents about the proposed idea in principle, is it worth starting to develop it in more detail?
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