| stories/gossiping-securely-is-the-new-email.mdView |
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| 1 … | +# Gossiping Securely is the new Email |
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| 5 … | +If you’re still using email for direct communication, you’re probably facing some well known problems : spam, provider lockin, privacy, and reliability (doesn’t work without the internet). |
| 6 … | + |
| 7 … | +I’ve helped build an app called Patchwork which sidesteps these problems. Patchwork is built on an open gossip network. Here’s how it works: |
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| 9 … | +- In the network everyone has a diary which only they can write to. |
| 10 … | +- When you bump into a friend, you can make a photocopy of their diary. |
| 11 … | +- To send a message to a friend, I leave a message in my diary and scramble (encrypt) the words using a code only that friend can read. |
| 12 … | +- When I read my friends diaries, any scrambled message I can decode must have been for me, any I can’t must have been meant for someone else. |
| 13 … | + |
| 14 … | +> That sounds a bit complicated! |
| 15 … | + |
| 16 … | +It does, but the good news is you don’t need to know any crypotogrpahy, you can just install Patchwork, and it works like email. |
| 17 … | +It looks like this at the moment: |
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| 19 … | + |
| 20 … | +_Direct messaging in Patchwork_ |
| 21 … | + |
| 22 … | +Oh, other good news is that your intuition how information is passed by gossip pretty much translates to Patchwork: |
| 23 … | + |
| 24 … | +- you gossip with friends (and sometimes friends of friends) |
| 25 … | +- you don’t gossip with people your friends don’t trust |
| 26 … | +- you gossip about mutual friends |
| 27 … | + |
| 28 … | +The major exception is that unlike people-gossip, this gossip is cryptographically 99.9999999% impossible to fake. |
| 29 … | + |
| 30 … | +> **It’s like all the good things about gossip, with all the bad things like misinformation taken out.** |
| 31 … | + |
| 32 … | +This setup eliminates spam and abusive actors, because over time no-one will talk with them, and hence their messages are not passed on. |
| 33 … | +Because the system is built on gossip, you don’t need to be on the internet to do it. Whenever you’re on the same wifi as a friend your computers will gossip. Patchwork will also swing by known ‘pubs’ (like public houses on the internet) and catch up on gossip there. |
| 34 … | +The network doesn’t need a central provider, so you can’t be locked into some corporation. |
| 35 … | +The direct messages are all hardcore encrypted by default and unlike encrypted email, no-one can even tell who you were messaging. |
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| 40 … | +_A view of the network — I’m the purple node, the others are Peers (green = gossiping). Large nodes are pubs on the net._ |
| 41 … | +## What are the downsides? |
| 42 … | + |
| 43 … | +Patchwork is currently only built for desktops and laptops (no phones). . |
| 44 … | +The setup is also such that you have one identity per device — this means you have to have different identities for each computer you have. This problem is less of a challenge, and is also on our roadmap. |
| 45 … | + |
| 46 … | +Patchwork is currently in closed beta. We use Patchwork to build Patchwork, and have a small but active social network (you can also gossip publicly). |
| 47 … | +If you’d like to help us build this future, we’d love help from storytellers, designers, entrepreneurs, and coders. |
| 48 … | +We think we could be of great services to journalists, activists, and people without internet. |
| 49 … | +Please feel free to get in touch if you’d like to join us — mix@enspiral.com |
