cryptocat author social gets insanely fast

Completely insane.'Ĭapsule is just the latest contender for retooling Internet power structures by building infrastructure that radically decentralizes social platforms to make speech more resilient to corporate censorship and control.

The list of decentralized/P2P/federated protocols and standards already out there is very long - even while usage remains low. Extant examples include ActivityPub, Diaspora, Mastodon, P2P Matrix, Scuttlebutt, Solid and Urbit, to name a few. Interest in the space has been rekindled in recent weeks after mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter took decisions to shut down U.S. President Donald Trump's access to their megaphones - a demonstration of private power that other political leaders have described as problematic.

Kobeissi also takes that view, while adding the caveat that he's not 'personally' concerned about Trump's deplatforming. But he says he is concerned about giant private corporations having unilateral power to shape internet speech - whether takedown decisions are being made by Twitter's trust and safety lead or Amazon Web Services (which recently yanked the plug on right-wing social network Parler for failing to moderate violent views). court seeking damages and injunctive relief from Apple for allowing Telegram, a messaging platform with 500 million+ users, to be made available through its iOS App Store - 'despite Apple's knowledge that Telegram is being used to intimidate, threaten and coerce members of the public' - raising concerns about 'the odds of these efforts catching on.' He also points to a lawsuit that's been filed in U.S. 'That is kind of terrifying,' he suggests.Ĭapsule would seek to route around the risk of mass deplatforming via 'easy to deploy' P2P microservices - starting with a forthcoming web app. 'When you deploy Capsule right now - I have a prototype that does almost nothing running - it's basically one binary. It sets up a server, it contacts Let's Encrypt, it gets you a certificate, it uses SQLite for the database, which is a serverless database, all of the assets for the web server are within the binary,' he says, walking through the 'really nice technical idea' that snagged $100,000 in pre-seed backing insanely fast.Īnd you get that binary and you deploy it and you run it, and that's it. 'There are no other files - and then once you have it running, in that folder when you set up your capsule server, it's just the Capsule program and a Capsule database that is a file.

Cryptocat author social gets insanely fast