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Digital Space. How it should be Done
We live in the digital epoch, but we keep our data on centralized services, with vendor lock-ins and constant policy changes, where your data (including your contacts) can disappear at any time because of these changes. There are a lot of initiatives and promises to change this, such as Fediverse, Nostr, Bluesky, and various others, including blockchain-based social networks. But how can we be sure that one of the new technologies is truly different while giving users digital rights and freedom?
In this article, I formulated what kind of digital rights we can expect from new services and what technical properties the services should have to support these rights. This article is not limited to social networks but is about our complete presence in the digital world, interaction with others, trust, and how we handle our data.
Each section describes one right and one known solution. We can rate a system by checking whether it has the property that unlocks the right.
1. Permanent Links
Users should be able to reference data using universal permanent links that never expire.
Solution: The system should support cryptographic hash functions as a reference to data.
There are plenty of cryptographic hash functions. A system that supports multiple well-known hash algorithms deserves additional points in our rating.
2. Data Synchronization
Users should be able to keep and synchronize their data on personal devices.
Solution: Synchronization to a personal content-addressable storage.
Additional points for:
- If the storage can be synchronized with other services, then there is no need to manually synchronize our data by copying and pasting it across different services. This should significantly reduce the fragmentation of our digital presence. If the storage is a generic Content Addressable Storage (CAS), it can contain data from different systems. For example, Git is not a generic content-addressable storage. BlockSet is a generic CAS.
- Conflict-free, protocol-agnostic CAS synchronization. For example, while Git supports multiple protocols, Git synchronization is not…
