Mutual aid network

[erlend-sh]

Mutualism permeates our entire project:

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/mutualism-next-generation

Mutualism has three core principles:

• A solidaristic community (muni.town)
• An economic mechanism that supports the community’s mission (roomy)
• A long-term time horizon where the economic value is recycled back to the community (steward-ownership)

Mutual-aid in a box

Roomy has some p2p capabilities, primarily via Leaf but to some extent also through tech like Iroh, Keyhive & CRDTs. The roomy.space network-service won’t run strictly as p2p by default, but it’s a great redundancy and potential cost-cutter.

Our goal is to enable community-powered p2p hosting of Roomy, functioning as a form of 'mutual aid in a box'.

Simply imagine running the locally installed Roomy-app on your home computer. As long as you leave it on, you’re operating as a node through which other Roomy sites can send and receive data.

Economics

It’s possible to create an advanced marketplace with profit-incentives for this kind of thing, like Filecoin Storage Providers. I don’t think we need that though, at least not for a long while, and likely never as a source of revenue for the Roomy project itself. Not everything requires a profit incentive to work.

In the world of torrents, massive files are shared communally without compensation (though certain sites do monetize through ads and such), driven by ‘Information wants to be free’ ideologies.

Though since even the torrent networks are not immune to free-rider problems, sub-networks of ‘private trackers’ have solved this with a few additional rules:

• Rules regarding ratio: You need to have a certain upload to download ratio, meaning you can't just download torrents and delete them—you need to seed them so others can download them too. Some sites will ban you if you have a low ratio, some just restrict what you can do on the site, like upload torrents, make torrent requests, or invite other users.

• Rules regarding invites: Users you invite reflect on you, and if they harm the community, it can harm your stance in the community as well (in some cases, you could be banned).

• Rules regarding uploads: If you upload files to the site, they need to be of a certain quality, format, and/or use a certain organizational structure. Where most BitTorrent sites seem like a hodgepodge of unorganized files, private trackers are usually much more organized and quality-conscious.

I can see this rule set working well for the Roomy Community Storage as well.

The way I’d like my personal Community Node to work:

• 50% of my capacity (storage/bandwidth) is specifically dedicated to my immediate network of friends, I.e. 100-250 people max.
• The other 50% is dedicated to the Weird Community Storage.

[erlend-sh]

Radicle has all the basics of community seeding in place already.

Via @zicklag :

It's cool, their main app repo is hosted by 68 seed nodes right now:

What I imagine with Weird is that you could "seed" other people's content that you want to help store/host just like that, but as easy as clicking a button to seed it from your instance.

(We might well be able to store git repos right on top of Leaf and do something quite similar to Radicle natively with Weird one day.)

[erlend-sh]

We wouldn’t even be limited to a native app of our own if browsers started supporting a Local Peer-to-Peer API for local communication between browsers without the aid of a server.

However in order for that proposal to move forward we’d likely have to demonstrate such a p2p web app already working in an experimental browser.

Some good candidates:

• Oku
• Agregore
• Verso

[erlend-sh]

Atomicity

Peer-to-peer mutual credit system: https://github.com/pubky/atomicity

Atomicity is a concept for an open peer-to-peer credit protocol that includes solutions for issuance, payments, settlements, and routing.

It is assumed that trust will always be the most convenient and affordable basis for currency and that the most important questions are about whom to trust, and with what.

by @Nuhvi and @BitcoinErrorLog

There appears to be some alignment here with..

Basis

https://basisproject.net/

Basis is a peer-to-peer protocol that facilitates transactions and exchanges within a network of builders and makers without the use of money, instead automatically tracking direct costs in ways that allow for environmental equilibrium.

by @orthecreedence

Sustainable Cooperation in Peer-To-Peer Networks

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07148

Traditionally, peer-to-peer systems have relied on altruism and reciprocity. Although incentive-based models have gained prominence in new-generation peer-to-peer systems, it is essential to recognize the continued importance of cooperative principles in achieving performance, fairness, and correctness. The lack of this acknowledgment has paved the way for selfish peers to gain unfair advantages in these systems. As such, we address the challenge of selfish peers by devising a mechanism to reward sustained cooperation. Instead of relying on global accountability mechanisms, we propose a protocol that naturally aggregates local evaluations of cooperation. Traditional mechanisms are often vulnerable to Sybil and misreporting attacks. However, our approach overcomes these issues by limiting the benefits selfish peers can gain without incurring any cost. The viability of our algorithm is proven with a deployment to 27,259 Internet users and a realistic simulation of a blockchain gossip protocol. We show that our protocol sustains cooperation even in the presence of a majority of selfish peers while incurring only negligible overhead.