Follow up on peer to peer social media network solution

In the last post I presented some simple ideas that can work together to create a peer to peer social network.

In this post I want to get into more details. Imagine a simple application and its interface with the user and with other instances of itself.

  • So lets imagine a simple process, an empty process that does nothing.
  • Let this process assume the current directory is the data directory that will hold all of the social feeds for the current user and his friends.
  • That means this application can manage multiple users on the same machine just by running different instances in different directories.
  • Now lets establish a sub directory for identities and simple enough call it “identities”
  • The identity is a keypair, assuming the public part is PUB and the private part is PRIV and PUB fingerprint is FP.
  • When we create an identity for current user we’ll save PUB file as <FP>.pub and his PRIV as <PRIV> without extension.
  • When we receive an identity for another user PUB1 we can calculate the fingerprint FP1 and save it in identities/<FP1>.pub
  • This structure means we can lookup an identity public key if we have the fingerprint value. so when we get any content signed by FP1 with signature SG1 we can validate the content is really signed by that person using the public key value from the file. and if we failed to find the full key we can then ask for it from another instance.
  • Now we know where to save and lookup the user identity to sign content and to validate other people signatures.
  • Now lets have an interface for this process to do basic operations that manage identities. We’ll open a port “8888” for example for local user to manage identities.
  • 8888 interface will be an HTTP server. let it accepts requests to create identity with a password. and sign text with an identity private key given the content, the identity fingerprint and the private key password.
  • It also deletes an identity given it’s fingerprint and password.
  • For identities other than the ones for the current user, we need endpoints to list, create, read, delete identities.

Now we’re done with the basic identities management. that previous structure will allow:

  • Multiple user identities as he can create as many key pairs as he wants. so he can have a work identity and another separate identity for personal use. another anonymous one.
  • The structure allow segmenting keys to groups in subdirectories. so you can group family in a directory. Friends in another. and work colleagues in another. Journalists in another directory.
  • The user can have an friend identity in more than one category by copying the public key in two or more directories. So say a friend “Sam” can be a friend and also we work together so his public key will be in “identities/friends” and “identities/coworkers”
  • Blocking someone can also be done simple by creating a directory “blocked” and add the public keys to it. so when we get any content from this keys we’ll ignore this content.

Now if we need these processes to exchange identities with each other we’ll need a public interface to ask each other for identities

  • Let the process listen on a port on external networks “8889” for example.
  • Let one process know the IP of the other one on another machine
  • One proceess can do HTTP requests to the other process asking for identities full public keys by their fingerprint. this is similar to the PGP key servers. just simpler.
  • So one process got a piece of content that’s signed by a key with finger print FP1 but identities/<FP1>.pub doesn’t exist. it’ll ask some other processes about this FP1 public key. simple. you get a bunch of content from people you know but the comments for example is from other people you don’t know. to get their public keys you ask the same user that gave you the content. over time you accumelate enough identities and you don’t have to ask for it. and we don’t have to transfer the full public key with every piece of content. that will save alot of bandwidth over time.

Now couple users can have identities on their machines and when one machine doesn’t have the full public key for a fingerprint it’ll ask the others to provide it. the advantages I see for this appraoch is:

  • You don’t need persistent servers like key servers. but still open for dedicated servers that can be used just for key exchange. a client can have a dedicated server when creating a new identity it can send the public key to a server and then that same client can ask for the full public key from another user saving the bandwidth of the users and moving it to that server.
  • Identities are still anonymous. it doesn’t hold personal information. so we separated identity from profile information. allowing the user to have multiple identities with same profile or multiple identities with multiple profiles or an identity without a profile at all.
  • We can touch the identity file everytime we use it. then the last modified date of the identity file will keep track of the outdated profiles and delete the ones that are not used for a while allowing clients to reduce disk usage.
  • When asking about the full public key for a fingerprint and the server lied and sent another public key it’s easy to regenerate the fingerprint from the key and match it with the requested then punish the server by blocking it as it’s a malicious actor in the network.

So far we have a process that listens on 2 ports one available only inside the machine for the administration and another for public consumption from another process. It uses the disk to store identities for current user and other users and can exchange it between each other.

Note that there are already an infrastructure for PGP keys exchange. that can be also utilized to exchange identities. I just want to keep it simple and limited to the features we need and not inherit a whole protocol for exchanging identities.

Now we get to the content itself. The social feed we want to share between users.

  • For sure we’ll need a place to save the data whatever it is. lets have a posts directory and put everything there.
  • Our data is for sure split to units, each unit is a post, image, link, video…etc the usual social feed we’re used to. so lets save each in a separate file. the file name is the SHA1 sum of the content of this post.
  • For each post we need to make sure it’s created by an identity. so when it moves from one machine to the other it should have the proof that it originated from the key pair owner. so we’ll need the post content whatever the format it to be signed and the signature needs to reside in the same post file. So the file content should hold the post content, the public key fingerprint and the signature. this reminds be of JWT format where it’s formatted in 3 parts separated by a dot. So we can have each post file formatted as follow:

    P1 = content of the post base64
    FP = creator key fingerprint
    SIG = P1 signed by the public key PUB of the fingerprint FP
    File = P1.FP.SIG
  • If we set the file modification date to the post creation time itself we then can query the file system for files ordered by the modification time and we’ll get the latest posts. so if the client want to show the last 100 posts or so it can do this easily without reading the content of each file.
  • This means we’ll need the post content to have the created at time. lets keep this in mind.
  • Now if we need to see posts only from a specific person. like when we get to his profile. we can’t do that without reading all files and check if it belong to this user. or the client can build an index for it. it would be nice if we can organize the files in sub directories each for an identity fingerprint. so lets add that. now we’ll have the structure as so posts/<FB>/<SHA1>
  • The client can still create custom indexes to make it faster to list posts. but it doesn’t have to be part of our structure. this is good enough I guess.
  • Now the content of the post itself. there are many formats we can use. I would have preferred XML but there is a stigma attached to it and most modern developers are used to something like JSON so be it. generating and parsing JSON isn’t a problem for anyone nowadays so we can go for it.
  • The attributes of this JSON should be different based on the what we need to share. so the simplist post will contain TEXT and CREATED_AT fields. a string and unix timestamp respectively.
  • If the user want to share an image we can have it in two different ways, either the a field IMAGE with the URL of the image on the web. or IMAGE field with the image content base64 encoded content. If we named the attributes with a suffix of the type we can support both. IMAGE_URL means the attribute name is IMAGE and the value must be treated as a URL. if it’s IMAGE_JPG means the value is JPEG format encoded as base64. then we can support more images and more formats IMAGE in this case would be just an identifier and doesn’t matter if the name is 123_JPG we already know the content is an image.
  • That means to support sharing a link we can just send it as ATTRIBUTE_URL and the client can read the content of the URL and display it based on the returned file signature.
  • So we can generalize it even more. if we named the image IMAGE_BIN instead of IMAGE_JPG then we can also decode it from base64 and get the file type from the magic bytes and render it based on the type. if it’s an image we render it as image. audio rendered as audio player…etc
  • Other types can be another post. like when we share a post written by someone else to our own timeline. we can do that by supporting a *_POST format where the content is another post content. with the file format P1.FP.SIG. that means I can take a post from my friend and wrap it in another post with commentary and reshare it to someone else.
  • One thing that maybe we’ll need to enforce here is the CREATED_AT attribute. As we need to know when the post was created. and to conform to the previous naming we can use CREATED_TIME where _TIME is a unix timestamp.
  • Rendering post content in clients can be a problem if we have many attributes. I thought we can enforce having the order of rendering in the post itself as a special attribute. but then that wouldn’t be fun. I mean if we left it then it would be fun to see how the designers decide to render posts based on the available attributes. and we’ll get lots of creativity out of that. so lets leave it be.

Now that we know how to save and retrieve posts. How are we gonna exchange them?

  • Assuming I have 2 users Ahmed and Basant and each of their processes knows each other IP addresses.
  • Ahmed process every 10 minutes can as Basant process for new posts
  • Ahmed knows the most recent post from Basant fro her directory on his machine so he can always ask for posts after that itmestamp
  • Basant process can do the same to get Ahmed new posts.
  • So we need our Process to do 2 things. 1 check for new posts for all users that we care for every period and when it gets the posts it will save them in the corresponding directory. 2 an endpoint that serve the user timeline given his fingerprint.
  • The fingerprint must match a public key we have its private key to distribute the content of our identity only.
  • The endpoint will take a timestamp and return the first say 10 posts after that timestamp.
  • This is like asking your friend every day How are you doing? and he respond with every thing happened since you last talked to each other. pretty simple.
  • And as the posts are signed we can make sure the posts we get are really signed by Basant or Ahmed
  • If we lifted the contraints that you can’t respond unless you own the private key we can have users distributing other users content. so we can have servers that volunteer to redistribute people public social feeds. but also that opens a door to sensorship as a server can lie about the existence of a post or two that it doesn’t like. so lets make sure we have that contraint and not open a door for sensorship. we all have seen what’s behind that door.
  • So then we need to make sure when Ahmed is asking Basant that he’s really talking to Basant not a middle man. So we’ll need to encrypt the requests from Ahmed to Basant with Basant public key. so only her can read the request. and do the same to the request. Basant response needs to be encrypted with Ahmed public key so only Ahmed can read the response. even if there is a middleman he can’t decrypt them or read the content.
  • But also we’ll need to make sure there is no middle man changing the request and signing it and passing it to the other side. sooo lets also add a nonce to the request Basant will include it in the response to make sure we’re getting the response for that request not anything else.

So now we have processes that can exchange social feed with each other. note that there is a format and specification for social feeds called ActivityPub that could be used. I rethought that in this post to develope the idea based on the reasoning in my head.

Now that we have posts exchanged between users. how about replies to posts. where one is commenting or replying to a post.

  • One thing I want to avoid is the number craze that’s associated with commenting and reacting to posts (likes, fav, love, care, sad) and all these things that drive people mad and makes thme stupid to drive more of them. At least avoid having these number propagate. so I don’t need to know a post got 1M likes to appreciate it’s content. So I will avoid propagating numbers from the user to another user.
  • So You’ll see a post from a friend. you can send him a comment, telling him you appreaciate it. if the comment text is just an emojie we can display it in a different way. so that means we can have only one type of replies. a comment
  • This comment send from Ahmed to Basant so it needs to be also signed by Ahmed like any post.
  • The comment as creation time and text like a post
  • It can also include an image or attachment.
  • So what makes a comment special? we can make the comment is just a post with a parent post.
  • We can have comments are just posts that are directed to a specific person on a specific post. so we’ll need to indicate that in the post. a special attribute with TO_FINGERPRINT that has Basant fingerprint in it. and REPLY_POSTSHA is the SHA1 of the post we’re replying to.
  • That means we can comment to a comment, and the comment can have any content we want like any post. and we have endless comments on comments.
  • Now were do we save these posts. I say save them like any other posts in posts directory. that means we’ll propagate the comments like any post. and the client doesn’t have to show the comment unless he has the original post.
  • That opens up the discovery a bit by getting the fingerprints of users from comments TO_FINGERPRINT and looking up their full public key and their profiles (we didn’t talk about profiles so far).
  • Clients can restrict posts with TO_FINGERPRINT to the user with that fingerprint leading to less discoverability but more privacy and less bandwidth.
  • Also if Basant want to send comments of the post to Camal for example we have 2 options. either return Ahmed comment to Camal or not. I think this is up to Ahmed to decide not Basant so I would say NO Basant shouldn’t broadcast the comment. the comments was meant for her and if Ahmed want to broadcast it he should do that himself. so If Camal already knows Ahmed. Ahmed can choose to broadcast comments to Camal while syncing posts. then Camal can see the comment on the post.
  • That leads to people distributing only their content. so no freeloading or piggybacking on a friend to distribute videos or images. if you want to tell someone something you tell him not Basant in this case.
  • Also that opens the door for private messages. As you can by extension create a post with TO_FINGERPRINT attribute but not REPLY_POSTSHA to send a post to a specific person not a reply to a post. the client can separate posts from private message like that. and as the posts doesn’t propagate then the message won’t be sent to anyone else.
  • How about messages to multiple people? well then we can generalize that TO_FINGERPRINT attribute. we can say any post with a _FINGERPRINT attribute is meant to be sent to that user. and while we’re at it any _POSTSHA attribute is meant as a reply to the post with this post SHA1 value. and in this case you can write a comment/post/message and send it to multiple people. that will do it for group chat. people send posts to each other with their fingerprints in the message so the private message will have the same capability of a post.

Now we get the the profiles. people pictures and names and other basic information they want to share with each other that’s persistent. how do we deal with them?

  • So the profile is like a document or a post that special because it’s more persistent.
  • So why it’s not just a normal Post, with image field, text field, phone field. an other fields. maybe we can just have special types to signify that this image is a profile picture? like a data type? and the user name as another type _PROFILENAME and another for _BIRTHDATE and another for _WORKPLACE and so on.
  • That will allow users to have a public profile that’s addressed to everyone and a more private one with _FINGERPRINT list in it to address it to specific people.
  • Also that means when you get a request from a new person you can choose which profile post get sent to him. the client can copy that profile and change the _FINGERPRINT to that person giving the user a finetuning for who sees what.
  • The special types like _BIRTHDATE will allow clients to have a list of birthdays or friends phone numbers which other features can built on like reminder of birthdays or a phone book, or address book

That’s basic usage. I guess. that covers basic usage. next we’ll have the issue of discoverability. how to know the network routes to each other. probably we can use mDNS for the same network. probably we can use webRTC infrastructure servers like STUN servers. The whole ICE will be useful in this case.

Let me know if I missed something or something can be taken out of this concept to make it simpler. it’s easy to add more stuff. but what I would like to do is a small consistent concept that as minimal as possible.