Nostr

Most users don't own their social profiles nor domain names or any other presence on the Internet

I'm busy listening to episode 147 Tornado of the Darknet Diaries podcast, where there was some interesting commentary about what we think we “own”, especially on the Internet.

We register a profile on X, Facebook, MeWe, TikTok, etc, and we pay for a domain name to host our website. But in fact those centralised social platforms own the profile name, like we saw X take away the profile @x when the network changed its name. Or if you as a user transgress the rules, you can be banned from a social network, and you cannot take that profile with you and use it elsewhere.

The same goes for a domain name, if you stop paying for it, you lose access to using it. The same goes for books “bought” on Amazon or Audible, or music on Spotify. At best, we are all paying for temporary access rights.

Yes, some networks offer the ability to export your posts, but tell me where else you can then use those posts?

You can buy a razor from Gillette, that is true, but mostly then you have to keep buying their blades to use it. But the digital world especially is fraught with ownership issues.

Which is one reason why some folks have been exploring decentralised networks, whether just distributed, or whether they are full-blown peer-to-peer networks. I don't really count Mastodon and the Fediverse amongst this, as you need to have access to your account to migrate it, and then anyway your handle changes as it is tied to a server. Hubzilla's nomadic identities are probably closest to this ideal as far as decentralised networks go.

The purer forms of real ownership, though, exist on social networks such as Nostr, Aether, RetroShare, Reticulum, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc where you generate a key pair — you share the public key and keep the private key to unlock and use your public key. No matter where you are deleted or blocked, you can resurface using your same public key. Your followers and friends know that public key and will instantly recognise you. Many such networks will resync your posts where they exist at other nodes or relays, even.

On the hosting and network communications side we do have networks such as the Invisible Internet Project (I2P) and communication services such as Reticulum, which connects on top of (over) a myriad of other networks from TCP, radio, UDP, RNodes, etc. Again, here you don't “purchase” any IP address, you generate a I2P address (profile or website) for yourself with the private key that you own. You can host your own I2P website with your own address, and move it wherever you want to physically (a bit like an Onion website). It will be found by its I2P address. At a more simplistic level, this is also where Meshtastic and LoRaWAN devices come in — they work on license-free frequencies and interconnect with each other to form their own mesh network with no Internet or other infrastructure required.

In some ways the Tor Onion network is similar, although it exists really on top of TCP networks, and it has no concept of a user or a social profile. It also connects to the regular Internet, whilst the I2P network normally does not do so. That said, every I2P node routes I2P traffic, so it is a gigantic-shared mesh network of tens of thousands of nodes all relaying I2P traffic.

The downside, though, of better security, privacy, and ownership is of course you have to take more responsibility yourself. Apart from a bit more configuration required, if you lose your private key access, you've lost your profile access. You can create another one just as easily, but it will be a different one.

I've spent the last few days exploring Reticulum and I2P specifically, and although the basics are quite easy to get going with (for example just installing the Sideband app off F-Droid), the understanding of exactly how the I2P network operates, has been more challenging. I'd like to get a level deeper still in understanding what and why each part of it does. And there are not a lot of YouTube videos that explain this properly. But it will be a fun project for the next month or so, I think. Hopefully, too, I can do my own video about it if I can break it down into much simpler concepts to explain.

#technology #privacy #security #I2P #reticulum