Are you thinking about this application as grassroots social networking protocol? e.g., Shapiro [June, 2023]
Offering a viable alternative architecture to centrally-controlled global digital platforms for social networking is an open challenge. Here we present a grassroots architecture for serverless, permissionless, peer-to-peer social networks termed grassroots social networking.
The architecture is geared for roaming (address-changing) agents communicating over an unreliable network, e.g., smartphones communicating via UDP. The architecture incorporates
a decentralized social graph, where each member controls, maintains and stores only their local neighborhood in the graph;
member-created feeds, with authors and followers; and
a novel grassroots dissemination protocol, in which communication occurs only along the edges of the social graph.
The architecture realizes these components using the blocklace data structure – a distributed partially-ordered counterpart of the replicated totally ordered blockchain. We provide two example grassroots social networking protocols—Twitter/LinkedIn-like and WhatsApp-like—and address their safety, liveness, privacy, and spam/deepfake resistance, demonstrating how centrally-controlled social networks could be supplanted by a grassroots architecture.
Do you mean encrypted DMs or encrypted tweets? Feels like encrypted DMs are not enough to name the app after the privacy aspect (or is it? i guess there is more than just logic involved in the naming process but I’m ignoring everything else ), but encrypted tweets raise even more questions:
In case of public profiles:
anyone can follow to see the content
non-followers not being able to see tweets might be the opposite from what local celebs want (saw so much angry talking about not being promoted without a paid account on twitter anymore)
For private profiles it makes sense, but makes me wonder how it is combined with public profiles and unshielding:
if we don’t have public profiles at all, the app becomes an app to bring the existing audience to, no discovery
if we do have both, is unshielding possible? In that case, can the old tweets be seen after the profile becomes public? Will the old tweets be encrypted after a public profile becomes private? Might be expected (shielding is often used as a shield against bullying by hiding the hot tweets and breaking the communication channel), but I feel like it isn’t implied by the resource model
Agreed that many profiles will be public (or want to be public). There can be a further distinction where certain zweets can be broadcast (and encrypted) to specific parties only, if people want - we don’t need to make the privacy decision at the whole-profile level. Even for fully public profiles, I still think the distributed operation, self-sovereignty, and algorithmic transparency aspects would be helpful.
I do not think we necessarily need to use the resource model to track zweets, since they aren’t linear (in any way that we care about modelling, anyways), so we could use a much simpler transaction processing function for this application, but we’d still need pretty much all of the distributed storage, compute, ordering, etc., and it would be helpful to have Z on the same platform as kudos and resource accounting to coordinate exchange of the physical compute necessary to host & serve everything. I haven’t thought about all the details regarding moving zweets between private and public or vice-versa yet.
)
), but encrypted tweets raise even more questions: