product angles

[dominictarr]

After my talk yesterday I met several people who had product ideas for ssb.

1. pure replication - just adding reliable replication into their own product. ssb may be overkill for this?
2. Auditable - I spoke to one person who had worked for a large engineering company, and there where legal ramifications of emails. One time, they had inspected a building and declared it unsafe, informed someone about it, who later claimed in court not to have received that email. However, he had actually replied to that email, and since email is somewhat decentralized and they had their own copy of the reply they where able to prove that he had infact received the email, and ignored the warning (making him liable)

I have a feeling there may have been a third, will post when I remember

[pfrazee]

1. if you dont want a decentralized system, probably yeah.

[No9]

Any workflow where non-repudiation is a thing.

I seem to remember talking to someone who thought this would be useful in the creation of legislation?!
Solicitors communications
Pharmaceutical Production (Facility sign off/maintenance checks/delivery)
Healthcare - Specifically health care records (Actually I might have an idea of a friendly face to talk to)

[marcelklehr]

I would be interested in taking marcelklehr/r-string to the next level by creating an etherpad-like scuttlebot app with your help.

[pfrazee]

@marcelklehr there's one started at https://github.com/pfraze/textedit.pub, needs updating and some work though. Happy to give you the domain if you want to take it over

[ahdinosaur]

overheard from @rdbartlett and is a better way of saying what i think the product angle should be:

SSB is Heroku for decentralized secure web apps

so the target audience would be web app developers interested in decentralized secure systems but don't want to have to boil the ocean to develop and deploy such an app. this also includes being able to slowly stepwise migrate their existing app(s) to SSB without negatively affecting the user experience, which is something i want to make possible for the many apps within Enspiral.

[rdbartlett]

Yeah! 💥

I think the "target audience" frame can be a really productive way to have this conversation

[pfrazee]

@ahdinosaur @rdbartlett yes that's a good angle. Just wrote #183 (comment) about deployment

Another angle I've been considering

A crypto social network, for end-to-end private messaging

SSB distributes public keys and Phoenix uses the social graph to validate identities, so it's a modern take on web-of-trust PKI.

[ahdinosaur]

@pfraze the reason i pitch SSB as a tool for app developers instead of an app is that i'm wary of the SSB product being an app that competes with the app i'm working on and other apps i'm aware of (e.g. i met the founder of identity.com last night who's loosely involved with Enspiral), when i think there's a huge potential to be the underlying infrastructure that allows others to build an ecosystem of social network apps that each focus on a part of the overall problem space and inter-operate through a common protocol.

[dominictarr]

We need to have a more detailed discussion on how you would build these
apps on top of ssb.
On 19 May 2015 15:44, "Mikey" [email protected] wrote:

@pfraze https://github.com/pfraze the reason i pitch SSB as a tool for
app developers instead of an app is that i'm wary of the SSB product being
an app that competes with the app i'm working on
https://github.com/open-app/holodex and other apps i'm aware of (e.g. i
met the founder of identity.com http://inflection.com/products/identity
last night who's loosely involved with Enspiral), when i think there's a
huge potential to be the underlying infrastructure that allows others to
build an ecosystem of social network apps that each focus on a part of the
overall problem space and inter-operate through a common protocol.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#146 (comment).

[ahdinosaur]

mm, agreed. my intuition says the best way to figure out how to build apps on top of SSB is to build apps on top of SSB. we can look to how sandstorm targets app developers as an example.

to throw more spaghetti at the wall, i think the most useful use case of SSB is as a common social data protocol across a wide ecosystem of apps developed and deployed autonomously. maybe i wish SSB was a crypto social private kappa database i could use in my apps. i imagine each database has delegated access to many feeds, and might defer writes to a remote database.

[dominictarr]

@ahdinosaur if only someone wrote another app on top of ssb... 😉

[marcelklehr]

I'm not really familiar with scuttlebot, so: how does it relate to efforts like GNUnet?

[pfrazee]

Yeah thats a good question, I think there are two things I'd point to. The first is SSB is a relative simple. It does user JSON feeds and (almost) nothing but that. No DHT, no names registry, no consensus algorithm, no proof-of-work. So, think twitter, but with no hosts, and you're free to publish your own json. It's relatively unfeatured compared to GNUnet. KISS.

The second is that SSB distributes keypairs, so it's focused toward PKI, and it creates a social network around public keys to identify people. So you look at someone, and you look at who follows them, and you say, "ah, this must be bob, because my friend alice is following him, and alice knows bob." Then you can do things like end-to-end encryption because you've identified the right pubkey. That's the focus.

So the difference is part engineering, part endgoal. The engineering differs in the properties of the network. The endgoal differs entirely - we want to build a log database and a PKI, and GNUnet is more about filesharing and anonymity.

[ahdinosaur]

Be good if ssb was this easy http://zeronet.io/

[ahdinosaur]

more spaghetti: ssb as a content sharing network that supports community on top of torrents.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.