[Freedombox-discuss] Establishing Communication between Freedomboxes

[ian at churchkey.org]

On 07/02/2011 11:22 AM, Marc Manthey wrote:
> 
> On Jul 2, 2011, at 4:14 PM, Lukas Nagl wrote:
> 
>>
>> There are various ways to do this. Some centralized, some
>> decentralized, some require people meeting each other and some don't.
>>
>> What possibilities do you see, and what do you propose?
> 
> an  idea.
> 
> 
> Every freedombox has some unique identifier or even a profile whitch
> could be so " annonymous"  as the user  want,
> it could be like a Vcard, avatar/profilepict , with public keys, tags,
> information about the user what he "likes" or is "interested" in.
> Remember it should be social !! ....;)

I think the best way to do this is through something like a dynamicDNS
centralized service. Currently, the network effect is on the side of
intermediated social networks because having everyone's contacts in one
place makes it much easier to find each other. Same logic behind the
phone book.

We can do that without having to actually store all your content on
someone else's server or route all communication through that foreign
server. The basic idea is:

"A server running our new extension would be called something like a
“friend finding service” or perhaps “FrienDNS”. People could create
accounts with this FrienDNS server just as they do with dynamic dns
servers, picking a user name and putting in directions on where to find
the machine with their stuff, but this time they give the server a
little more information about themselves as people. Not too much
information, this is a centralized service after all, but just enough
for people to recognize each other in a search and ask to “friend” or
otherwise connect. Maybe that’s just a name, picture, and where you’re
from; the kind of things you found in old college facebooks before the
term got trademarked. Maybe you give more information than that to the
business community FrienDNS service or to the dating one. You decide in
each context how much information to give other people before agreeing
to connect with them.

Once someone finds you and wants to connect, the FrienDNS service gets
directions to your machine from the dynamic dns service underneath and
sends the request over to you for approval, just like we expect social
networks to do. In addition, I’m going to say we should have the friend
finding service keep a unique token from us, some little bit of machine
data we give it so that, when it sends us a connection request, we know
it really came through the service. So when you get a request to connect
with someone, you see who they are from their FrienDNS account
information, which service they found you on, and a token from the
service confirming that the request really did initiate there."

I wrote this last year, with more detail, here:
http://churchkey.org/2010/03/17/dynamic-dns-facebook/ (also part of the
new freedombox planet feed: http://planeteria.org/freedombox/)

-Ian