Come to think of it, @silverpill this is similar to Mitra. Have you considered writing a forum, and using hash chains for transparency? (A delete or an edit is a visible break in the hash chain)

@light Mitra now can host federated groups - in the same way Lemmy, PieFed, NodeBB and other forums do. The mechanism we all use is compatible with my nomadic identity proposals.

However, nomadic identity doesn't use hashchains, it relies solely on signatures. I considered content-addressing early on but decided against it because in my opinion social data should not be immutable.

What kind of forum do you want to build? Centralized forum with a fully verifiable history is an unusual requirement.

@light

(A delete or an edit is a visible break in the hash chain)

I didn't notice that yesterday.

A traditional hash chain can't have breaks, e.g. you can't remove a commit from git history without changing all subsequent commit hashes.

@silverpill
That's what I meant. If there's a delete or an edit, then the hash chain breaks and it's visible, even if an admin tries to hide it.

@silverpill
It might not be a common problem, but I think it's an important one.

@light So, what kind of forum do you imagine? If there is a single instance, then there would be no peers who replicate the hashchain and do the verification. This means an admin can rewrite history

@silverpill
> All hashes and public keys are cached by the client[s]
Maybe a public auditing thing like IIRC WhatsApp said they were doing with key transparency as well (but not Signal; their auditors are a permissioned list of Trail of Bits and Cloudflare). But I still don't understand how those work.

@light

All hashes and public keys are cached by the client[s]

The cache of a hosted web client can easily be manipulated by an instance admin. But if clients are independent, this might be a good solution (depends on your security requirements).

public auditing

Bluesky's did:plc is a good example of this. It's a centralized server but anyone can view and audit the ledger.

@light Back to the original question: I can implement the thing. How much would it cost is hard to tell atm; not enough information.

@light
https://anagora.org/GetFediHired

@light I’m a software engineer (sort of; technically at this point I manage a team of them, but until recently I was one for 26 years). I can teach you about things like that. What do you want to know?

@randrews
I wanted someone to implement my plans (and help me specify them further if necessary) and explain as if to a first-year student how everything works and answer questions. Basically engineering-cum-tutoring. Would that be possible? If so, how much would it cost?

@light Money isn't a big motivation for me at least, but I have thought about this kind of thing before, I'd certainly be interested in talking about the problem.

I was thinking this in 2021, when news stuff was getting censored for "misinformation" a lot. My scenario was that you have a story, you want to publish it, but you can't post it to a central place (because it'll get censored) and your readers need to know it's you who wrote it.

1/

@light 2/
This also answers another problem: if the site host can't moderate the site, if they have no more privileges than an ordinary user, why are they hosting it? What do they get out of it?

I think the answer is to make it peer-to-peer. You can talk to anyone on the network and get what they think is the latest news, cryptographically attested to be uncensored / unaltered. If one relay dies more take its place.

@light 3/3
The same thing should work for discussions also: no particular relay could censor stuff because they would just stop being the source anyone pulls that stuff from.

The problem you hit though is the discussion forking, and the general speed that things propagate through the network. Also filter bubbles: if I don't follow some news then I also can't relay that news to people downstream.

Not sure how to solve those yet.