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Sarah Jamie Lewis 2018-07-13 18:43:17 -07:00
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@ -21,10 +21,13 @@ How we design systems to defend themselves from emergent centralization is, I th
Protocols such as [Ricochet](https://ricochet.im) and [Briar](https://briarproject.org) provide some of the answer, relying on strong peer-to-peer models that are difficult to directly exert any kind of control over. This kind of design comes with the downside of making certain desirable features very difficult.
[Cwtch](https://cwtch.im) is built on Ricochet with the aim of making many of those desirable features possible. However, one the risks of such designs is that emergent centralization becomes entrenched. As such Cwtch Severs can be seen has having built in defensive decentralization - the more peers/groups using a server, the greater the anonymity set. However, servers don't scale, so performance suffers as the number of connected peers increases, triggering the peers to move to another server.
[Cwtch](https://cwtch.im) is built on Ricochet with the aim of making many of those desirable features possible. However, one the risks of such designs is that emergent centralization becomes entrenched. As such Cwtch Severs can be seen as having built in defensive decentralization - the more peers/groups using a server, the greater the anonymity set. However, servers don't scale, so performance suffers as the number of connected peers increases, triggering the peers to move to another server.
Like a slime mold model, I can imagine peers in Cwtch transitioning from clustering around a few larger servers, to being spread out among many smaller servers, and back again.
There are a few open problems around designing such a mechanism: How do you tune peer behavior to optimize for both anonymity set and decreased latency? Can we tune server behavior to encourage defensively decentralization (e.g. by deliberately decreasing overall performance)?
It is something I hope to explore in further depth soon.