This is a chaptered version of our most recent public call, where we explain the topography of the system, PKDNS details, community updates, and our intended roadmap for the rest of this year.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPl4ngNy_cl-LGQ9oPdrNXItjCv42ISLX
This link has only the roadmap, broken down by each repo/sub-project:
https://pubky.app/post/gujx6qd8ksydh1makdphd3bxu351d9b8waqka8hfg6q7hnqkxexo/0033SP9JAKR0G
Our blog has great posts about the censorship resistance of PKDNS/PKARR/Mainline:
To answer your questions:
1. Can we run our own homeservers?
Yes, that is the github.com/pubky/pubky-core repo.
2. ... and have them work as a "part of the larger network"?
I guess this requires nuance in that there is no "larger network" aside from Mainline DHT, used in place of ICANN DNS. Your identity key is used to create your own signed DNS record that tells anyone that knows your key where to find whatever you want them to find. I will assist and reframe your question as...
3. "when will data from my homeserver show up in your app?"
The Pubky.app beta only reads from our single homeserver and indexer right now. Part of coming out of beta (Q4) is updating all aspects of our homeserver, indexer, as well as our own Pubky.app product, to support external homeservers, and to provide basic apps anyone can run to mirror their data. But please note that people can already use all of these things without relying on our infra, if they run it themselves, and some already are, (despite us warning them that it's still a bit early!).
4. Can I easily point the clients at my own home server?
Yes, the pubky-client, sdk, etc, and ALL working aspects of Pubky are already open source and being experimented with by others. Some are using our homeserver for their own app. One is feeding directly from our indexer. Iroh doesn't use any of our app-level stuff, just pkarr and mainline repos. Now... "easy" is of course subjective, and I'd say that we are at the stage where you would need to be particularly motivated to use our code, mostly because we are rewriting a lot of it, and we have a lot of work to do in docs.
Before the end of the year, things will look much better, we're just grinding through the roadmap and trying to scale our team from 20 to 30 people (includes a wallet app team).