Usable usernames

[taoeffect]

Kloak is unlikely to be used by very many people if to grow your network you have to create a card, post it somewhere, and then scan it. That's just not going to work if being a usable and secure twitter-like social network is your goal. I personally won't be using it until I can tell people, "Follow greg on Kloak."

So, what are the challenges and obstacles to getting usable usernames?

[daviddahl]

The design of Kloak - right now - is fully white-listed. There is no way to "follow" anyone. You have to choose who follows you. This is how it achieves real privacy. This concept is in no way a copy of twitter or facebook, rather something new, something actually private. This is a system for when DMs are just not private enough and the barrier to entry is pretty low. I do not anticipate anyone using this for thousands of followers or to follow thousands. Basically, the model of "I am david on kloak, follow me" does not fit with a private system - for your public feed.

However, once we implement DMs I think we can allow 1 or 2 DMs through if alice knows bob's handle. I've been thinking about an introduction message for untrusted contacts, which would be an encrypted message from 'alice' to 'bob' which is clearly marked as an unconfirmed contact. Once they each scan, (completing an out of band fingerprint check) they will be trusted fully.

We literally have potential users who will not use Kloak until it can be "anonymously" installed via the app store (cough cough). They don't want to send an email through our beta form.

Its Ok - this is anti-social-networking. Frankly, the card scanning is an easier UX than getting into some slack channels.

[taoeffect]

I sense severe cognitive dissonance here.

• Kloak responds to my tweets about a "twitter alternative", yet you claim it's "in no way a copy of twitter"
• You say Kloak "is anti-social networking", yet your homepage copy describes it as "social networking" and your UI is a very close copy of Twitter's interface:

If I wanted something extremely private to the standards you're describing here, I would use something like Ricochet or Signal/TextSecure or Pond.

The web, believe it or not, already has extremely private communications tools.

What it doesn't have it is a secure, decentralized, usable twitter alternative. And it badly needs it.

[taoeffect]

If that's a direction Kloak would consider exploring, I'm happy to help. Even volunteer some time brainstorming how this can be done.

[shibacomputer]

The point here is to question some of the shortcomings inherent in our current models of social media networking. Kloak above all else is an experiment in what happens when users are given full control over what they publish and who can read it, which makes it both an alternative to the Twitter model and an experiment to see how people respond to the card concept.

There have been other examples of 'Twitter clones' that follow the exact same model and most of them aren't compelling. Some of these are centralised and some aren't. Kloak exists primarily to prevent data mining and advertising, two of the biggest abuses of current social media. Just being decentralised in nature does nothing to address this.

[taoeffect]

There have been other examples of 'Twitter clones' that follow the exact same model and most of them aren't compelling. Some of these are centralised and some aren't.

I'm not aware of a single usable decentralized twitter clone.