Notes on Implementation Section

[AljoschaMeyer]

Tension between generality and assumption of rough mapping between feeds and humans. We want to be more general than "only" doing social apps where relations between feeds correspond to relations between humans. Yet this correspondence is important to justify some design decisions beyond the core log format. Include a paragraph explicitly discussing this? Is this the right section for such a paragraph?

How much should the descriptions zoom into details? Probably not a lot, since the actual details are almost always unnecessarily complicated. Also, there's no real benefit for our target reader to know the details.

Clearly distinguish between different layers of interoperability requirements (log structure > replication >? app platform).

Sooo much potential for graphics.

Rough Structure

• identities and log entries
  • sigchain
  • content
  • regular
    • json augmented with ids and hashes (via designated string encodings)
    • enforced
  • encrypted
• blobs
• ooo
• storage
• replication
  • encryption: shs + box-stream
  • (multiplexing rpcs: packet-stream + muxrpc) (value in including this? too detailed?)
  • ebt
• application platform
  • client-server model + plugins
  • longterm ambition of sandboxed plugins with capability system, distributed via ssb itself (include this?)
  • longterm ambition of data independence and language neutrality, but not there yet (wrong section?)
  • important plugins:
  • pub announcements
    • also: pubs themselves, should they be introduced here or earlier?
  • foaf replication ("friends graph")
    • the power of friendship beats game theory
  • (surprising?) effects of encrypted pub announcements and friend graph messages
  • API between clients and server

[dominictarr]

hmm, there are maybe other things with similar statistical properties to social graphs - graphs where edges attract edges - where things are likely to want to connect to things that are connected to the things they are already connected to... hmm, well most of those things are not explicitly social networks, but the things you'd likely want to make applications about (such as the citation graph) can be interpreted as social networks.