Cryptocat Author Gets Insanely Fast Backing To Build P2P Tech For Social Media (techcrunch.com) 63
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The idea for Capsule started with a tweet about reinventing social media. A day later cryptography researcher, Nadim Kobeissi -- best known for authoring the open-source E2E-encrypted desktop chat app Cryptocat (now discontinued) -- had pulled in a pre-seed investment of $100,000 for his lightweight mesh-networked microservices concept, with support coming from angel investor and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, William J. Pulte and Wamda Capital.
The nascent startup has a post-money valuation on paper of $10 million, according to Kobeissi, who is working on the prototype -- hoping to launch an MVP of Capsule in March (as a web app), after which he intends to raise a seed round (targeting $1 million-$1.5 million) to build out a team and start developing mobile apps. For now there's nothing to see beyond Capsule's landing page and a pitch deck (which he shared with TechCrunch for review). But Kobeissi says he was startled by the level of interest in the concept.
"I posted that tweet and the expectation that I had was that basically 60 people max would retweet it and then maybe I'll set up a Kickstarter," he tells us. Instead the tweet "just completely exploded" and he found himself raising $100,000 "in a single day" -- with $50,000 paid in there and then. "I'm not a startup guy. I've been running a business based on consulting and based on academic R&D services," he continues. "But by the end of the day -- last Sunday, eight days ago -- I was running a Delaware corporation valued at $10 million with $100,000 in pre-seed funding, which is insane. Completely insane."
The nascent startup has a post-money valuation on paper of $10 million, according to Kobeissi, who is working on the prototype -- hoping to launch an MVP of Capsule in March (as a web app), after which he intends to raise a seed round (targeting $1 million-$1.5 million) to build out a team and start developing mobile apps. For now there's nothing to see beyond Capsule's landing page and a pitch deck (which he shared with TechCrunch for review). But Kobeissi says he was startled by the level of interest in the concept.
"I posted that tweet and the expectation that I had was that basically 60 people max would retweet it and then maybe I'll set up a Kickstarter," he tells us. Instead the tweet "just completely exploded" and he found himself raising $100,000 "in a single day" -- with $50,000 paid in there and then. "I'm not a startup guy. I've been running a business based on consulting and based on academic R&D services," he continues. "But by the end of the day -- last Sunday, eight days ago -- I was running a Delaware corporation valued at $10 million with $100,000 in pre-seed funding, which is insane. Completely insane."
It's almost like (Score:5, Insightful)
It's almost like people have finally, at long last, figured out that aggregating all online social activity onto 3 corporate platforms was a fabulously terrible thing to slouch into.
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But not that distributed services never work.
Re:It's almost like (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. My email doesn't work. Neither does my DNS. What were we thinking??!
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Those aren't decentralised, they both rely on servers. Decentralised in this context means no reliance on servers.
Think Freenet and the like.
Re: It's almost like (Score:2)
Or XMPP (Jabber). People always forget it is federated. Exactly like E-Mail.
And that WhatsApp and Signal are just XMPP with some custom extensions. As are almost all recent messengers. Except from Signal, they just completely block federation. Which by its very definition is anti-competitive, and IMHO a crime that sadly is not prosecuted yet.
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Bittorrent - central trackers are still the norm, DHT doesn't scale well
Freenet - Went nowhere
Tencent - What distributed stuff do they have? It's all servers in China
Windows Update - Served from Microsoft's central servers, only file distribution is possible between local nodes but the server is needed for all metadata, certificates etc.
If these are the models you think are being suggested then this is going to fail again because someone will have to pay for those servers, and the more you encrypt the fewer
Re: It's almost like (Score:3)
/usr/bin/finger was just fine as far as I'm concerned...
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.plan file all the way. I miss those days
Re: It's almost like (Score:2)
Who doesn't?!
Re: It's almost like (Score:2)
Meeting people physically.
I miss those days.
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It's almost like people have finally, at long last, figured out that aggregating all online social activity onto 3 corporate platforms was a fabulously terrible thing to slouch into.
The 'problem' is that these kind of things only really work when they reach a critical mass of users.
You can create the most amazing social network program on the planet, but it's completely useless if no one uses it.
This is the same reason that ebay is pretty much the only big auction site around: The sellers are there because it's where the buyers are at, and the buyers are there because it's where the sellers are at. Chicken and the egg.
Even Google (with literally billions of dollars to throw at i
The spirit of the internet (Score:1)
Information wants to be free!
Re: The spirit of the internet (Score:2)
Informatiom IS free.
DRM tries to act like it breaks the laws of physics. Imaginary property wants us to think it can override causality.
But they can't.
If the entire planet shared "your" song behind your back withoit telling you, you would never know. I can evem prove that I can share something outside of your light cone of cause and effect, making it literally physically impossible to find out.
The only way you could find out, is because that information is free too, and will leak later. Which does not preve
but sometimes it takes a while (Score:4, Insightful)
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"
- John Gilmore
Hopefully this will also be open-source (Score:2)
Because it has the potential for being a gold mine... to security services.
It seems like an interesting concept, in any case. If it's ad-free, it might catch on.
You mean like this? (Score:3)
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The article lists quite a few. (Score:2)
Paragraph FTFA:
Thanks (Score:2)
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What is a "Pre-seed" investment? (Score:2)
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I always thought the first dollar you raised was called a seed investment. What could come before that?
Well you see, when a VC and a Founder love each other very much....
Re: What is a "Pre-seed" investment? (Score:2)
VC: Dalek do not have such emotions! EXGERMINATE!
Re:What is a "Pre-seed" investment? (Score:5, Funny)
Are you asking what would precede it?
Careful (Score:2)
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Apparently the first dollars that people throw at you without you asking. In seriousness, I think "seed" etc. have moved from connoting generation of investment to scale of investment. But I could be wrong.
Pretty sure this called a twinkle investment (Score:2)
Before he was even a seed, he was a twinkle in his parent's eye.
Re: Pretty sure this called a twinkle investment (Score:2)
Precum investement?
Foreplay investement?
Drinks investement?
First-fur-down-there investement?
Ends well (Score:2)
A tweet, $100k seed capital for a website and cashout for $1m in two months. This will end well.
Re: Ends well (Score:3)
On the plus side, he never asked for this. Not even a startup guy.
It is like with bodyguards for a musician. Pick the ones that *don't* like your music. They will do their job instead of watching the show.
We already have two good P2P solutions for this!!! (Score:2)
https://retroshare.cc/ [retroshare.cc] has been around since XP SP3 was a thing
If folks embrace these free, non-profit tools, they can already have an Internet where individuals (not corporations) decide what does and does not fly according to their own sense of right and wrong, just like in the meatspace known as real life. Both work in ways which can't be easily censored, as there's no true central point of control. Both are also open source, so
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Yeah, the problem isn't the P2P architecture. The problem is, how did they solve the spam problem?
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Well, looking at /., you have the options of trusted account registration, moderation, and a community of common interests. Other examples include web of trust based moderation. I would say the real challenge is avoiding an echo chamber.
Re: We already have two good P2P solutions for thi (Score:2)
All of those being crap.
You solve the spam problem with trust relationships. Webs of trust.
Only people you know can communicate with you. Or if you choose, people that those people know. Let's generalize to "depth of trust (in levels)".
That also solves anti-social behavior.
It breeds filtee bubbles and circle jerks though.
I know how to solve the latter too, but cannot speak freely due to ongoing projects.
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Just like /.’s moderation system does not create a complete monoculture, you can structure other systems with permitting dissenting opinions that can maintain some norms of the community to manage spam and trolling. /.’s system is also so basic and one dimensional that it belies what is easily possible today—but it still works.
In meatspace, my Mom knows who in her circle of friends for the past 60-75 years she needs to push to move away from politics (or she will physically leave). Her mea
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https://www.detritus.org/spam/... [detritus.org]
Diaspora Project? (Score:1)
How is this different from what Diaspora was trying to achieve? Unless significant buy in from Google / Apple / Microsoft (and maybe Amazon) occurs any social networking effort is mostly dead in the water except for small subgroups who want to lock out others (i.e. Parler refugees).
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How is this different from what Diaspora was trying to achieve? Unless significant buy in from Google / Apple / Microsoft (and maybe Amazon) occurs any social networking effort is mostly dead in the water except for small subgroups who want to lock out others (i.e. Parler refugees).
I was typing this same question...
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Diaspora hasn't reached version 1.0 yet.
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PompousRumpus (Score:2)
https://github.com/BenKucenski... [github.com]
I've set up PompousRumpus to be a distributed social network where your posts and comments stay on your server but with simple key sharing, you and your friends can share data to build complete feeds.
https://pompousrumpus.com/ [pompousrumpus.com]
The current test is whether it can run on a mini pc in which case, it can be a pre-packaged appliance appliance and the end user just has to forward ports 80 and 443 to it.
I'm using PHP as the language so the source code is plainly visible so anyone can
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How are you planning on solving the spam problem?
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Well, in order for someone to link to you, you or they have to generate the one time GUID:Domain key which you give to the other person outside the system. You have to email them yourself or print it and hand it to them if you're a masochist. They log into their account, paste in the key, and the servers do a handshake and exchange a key-pair and the original GUID:Domain key no longer is recognized.
So you can't just spam users with requests to link to you. If a server goes rogue and starts returning endl
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Thank you, I'm really interested in this.
Currently doing some PhD research in decentralised data sharing. My particular use case is for users to have their own feed, where third parties post data to concerning that individual (it is a healthcare application). The users can then dynamically share that to others as and when they like.
Could your application support this use case? Or do you know others that might. I've spent a long time exploring holochain but the barrier just seems too high.
tent.io (Score:2)
WT Social (Score:2)
This sounds a bit like WT Social [wt.social], a Wikipedia founder project. The issue with these kinds of social networks is that they are not particularly "viral" insomuch as the P2P architecture does not lend itself to mass consciousness about particular posts or issues. Is this a bad thing? Not in my opinion, but it means that they don't "catch on" very well and so aren't particularly successful.
Rampant capitalism essentially means that we'll do whatever will produce the most profit, regardless of the wisdom of do
I'm doing it wrong... (Score:2)
I guess I need to use a bunch of buzzwords (cryptocurrency, social media, microservices, etc.) to get lots of people to throw money at it without the slightest idea of how it might actually work....
Re: I'm doing it wrong... (Score:2)
Your error is that you adopted a begger attitude.
You do not come to them.
You do things that make them to come beg you.
Like make them believe it is what they need the most. Classic advertisement 101.
This guy just used twitter to peacock his feathers, and then fell into a Flappy Bird effect (Which starts with just pure luck.)
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Surely it would have attracted others and gained some momentum naturally if it really had potential?
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I guess I need to use a bunch of buzzwords (cryptocurrency, social media, microservices, etc.) to get lots of people to throw money at it without the slightest idea of how it might actually work
There's two possibilities here.
1) that's not the thing that's holding you back, because if it was, either you've already done it or you would have already done it seeing as you profess to 'know' what what you need to do
2) you're too principled to do it, but it but you enough to you that you need to whine about it her
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*bugs you enough
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Juuust great. ... I had suggested that! ... Well, (Score:2)
Years earlier. Many times. On many sites.
But great to see, that he cargo culted the ideas to something half-assed that almost completely misses the point:
I explicitely set out to kill the core problems of "social media", which would also kill what people call "social media" these days. While here, it seems to breed even more "social media" (read: Its inherent anti-socialness and circle-jerking filter bubbles and attention whoring and meme growing).
It seems closer to Diaspora, which, as you never heard of it
Reinventing Retroshare (Score:2)
features? (Score:1)
Anonymous?
Moderated?