[p2p-hackers] Distributed identity, chat, publishing, and sharing

[Michael Rogers]

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On 15/01/13 06:27, Sean Lynch wrote:
> Hi, Michael. You're right, it does implement pretty much everything
> I was talking about, though its UI is a mess. As others have said,
> pasting or otherwise having to get one's hands dirty with the key
> is pretty much a nonstarter. Also, it's a little annoying that you
> can't do anything with it at all before getting your friends
> involved, unless I just need to wait longer before forums and chat
> lobbies start to show up.

Yes, that seems to be an adoption barrier for darknets in general -
they're hard to try out on a casual basis.

> The main things I would change would be:
> 
> 1. Use Ed25519 keys, and have them always be URIs. They should not
> ever be visible to the user except when it's unavoidable, like
> sending contact info via email.

I agree that replacing keys with short strings would be an
improvement, but I'm not sure it would require switching to Ed25519
(or elliptic curves generally). RetroShare has a DHT, so the key could
be referred to by its hash, which would be used to retrieve the full
key from the DHT.

(I believe you can join the DHT before adding any contacts - but I
could be wrong about that.)

> 2. Hide any settings or stats related to the network. People
> should either be connected or not.

If the P2P connections could be made to work seamlessly then I'd
agree. But my experience with (IPv4-based) P2P connections is that an
informed user can generally make them work better than an uninformed
user, by forwarding ports, setting up dynamic DNS, etc. So exposing
some of the networking details may be a reasonable pragmatic
compromise with the godawful state of the internet.

In general I'm quite pessimistic about the possibility of creating
IPv4-based darknets that work well for uninformed users.

> 3. Use a modern UI paradigm not decended from the old all-in-one 
> internet browsers like Netcruiser and AOL.

Agreed! The abundance of (overlapping?) features is the thing I find
most off-putting about RetroShare.

By the way, I've just found out that the RetroShare team has a
fantastic development blog:

https://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/

Cheers,
Michael

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