Some notes toward a fully distributed, serverless socnet/communications network using CouchDB.

[Bryce Lynch]

This is a dump from one of my desktop note-taking apps.  It's not fully
fleshed out, and in fact a fair amount of discussion needs to take place
before it will be.  As always, if we can re-use and extend an existing
application, we should so we can apply time and energy toward making it do
exactly what we want rather than potentially reinventing a wheel:

CouchDB (https://couchdb.apache.org/) is a distributed NoSQL database which
stores JSON documents rather than information in rows and columns in tables

documents are managed with MVCC (Multi-Version Concurrency Control), and
the network is designed for eventual consistency

automatic conflict resolution

CouchDB nodes can connect to one another to replicate data very easily

designed to operate offline - do what you want with your local copy of the
data, and when you reconnect it'll automatically resynch with the rest of
the CouchDB network you set up

designed for ad-hoc connections - whatever connection it has, when it has
it, it can use it to connect to the network

lightweight - the proof of concept Twitter-like app (Toast) supported
thousands of transactions per second while running on an older Macbook Air

accessed in the fashion of a hash table, i.e. with key/value references

queries are done with JavaScript

the API is bog-standard HTTP(S)

can be interacted with using wget, curl, or a web browser

runs on everything from Windows to Android

because it includes its own HTTP(S) server, it is capable of hosting apps
within the database itself, so you don't need an external framework (like
PHP, Rails, or Django)

apps are written in HTML5 and JavaScript, stored as documents in the
database

apps are trivial to deploy

book is online, free to download and read, can be found on Github also:
http://guide.couchdb.org/

we can conceivably use CouchDB to implement Network25 (and whatever other
information storage solutions we will eventually want to use)

installation can be a single installer for every platform - download this,
double click on it, when it's ready it'll tell you

every document can have its own schema, which is simple to determine
because it works just like a hash table (key/value)

public profile document (gets replicated)
{
_id: "Bryce A. Lynch",
_interests: ["long walks on the beach", "moonlit nights", "massively
distributed systems"],
_friends: ["friend", "friend", ...],
_publickey: "<public key>",
...
}

private profile document (doesn't get replicated, stored on machine,
optionally encrypted and must be unlocked with a passphrase when the
Network25 app is started)
{
_id: "Bryce A. Lynch",
_publickey: "<public key",
_privatekey: "<you no can haz>",
...
}

dump the list of keys and sort through their associated values one at a time

because there is no central server - every client is also a server - this
also means that we could, in theory, protect arbitrary volumes of data in a
given Network25 user's account with public key crypto

for every user of Network25, there is a document containing the public keys
of that user's friends

documents can be encrypted to the public keys of only a subset of that
user's friends, such that only their private keys can (automatically)
decrypt them:
{
_id: "<SHA256 hash here>",
_post: "<cyphertext here>",
_encrypted: "yes",
_authorized_accounts: ["<somebody>", "<somebody>", "<somebody>",
"<somebody>", ...],
}

-- 
The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS (MED)]
https://drwho.virtadpt.net/
"I am everywhere."

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