ecosistema-social-decentralizzato/protocols/gun.md

GUN

Stats

• 11K+ github stars
• 10M ~ 30M downloads monthly

Whitepaper

https://stanford.edu/~nadal/A-Decentralized-Data-Synchronization-Protocol.pdf

Stack

• ERA (economic system)
• AXE (routing)
• DAM (networking)
• RAD (storage)
• SEA (security)
• GUN (data)
• HAM (conflict resolution)

Bluesky

• Creating customizable interfaces: See Party which reuses any existing website (gmail, twitter, Facebook, reddit, etc.) for E2EE messages.
• Communities setting norms: See my article on emotionally intelligent social networks, also check out the wild Notabug experiment.
• Keeping public conversation from fragmenting: Check out "How to fix the internet" by Martti Malmi (Satoshi's 1st Bitcoin contributor) which is exactly this.

Network structure

Decentralized/p2p.

Uses data replication via message passing.

It daisy-chains, routes, & relays messages.

Think of it as doing also what the internet, routers, switches, etc. already does.

But also works over most existing transports: WebRTC, UDP multicast, TCP/HTTP -> Websocket, etc.

Identity

Iris adds a reputation system to SEA which provides the underlying cryptographic Security, Encryption, & Authorization.

The most important differentiating factor is that we support multi-device login that is cryptographically secure yet uses "normal" UX.

This technique can be extended to secure password resets (no servers)

And, password recovery using a 3-Friend-Authorization approach that we cutely call 3FA (please don't use this with your Bitcoins).

• Decentralized identity (ECDSA)
• Key management (Iris)
  • Key verification (Iris)
  • Key backup (GUN+SEA)
• Reputation, Trust (Iris)
• Account recovery (3FA)
• Privacy (ECDH, AES)

Data

• Data models (graphs, key/value, document, table, relational, hyper-graphs)
• Data availability (AP, strongly eventually consistent)

Money

• Business models (Open Source, donation, enterprise, + decentralized PaaS, dBaaS, SaaS, Marketplace)
• Payment (AXE bandwidth credits)

Filtering

• Queries (GUN, GraphQL, historical prototypes of SQL, Mango [Mongo])
• Curation (Iris, also see NAB)

Moderation

Iris and NAB (see above link).

• Protocol level (no)
• Server level (no)
• User level (yes)
• Content level (yes)

Social/Discovery

See "identity" section.

Privacy and Access Control

1. Cryptographic keys are assigned to roles, groups, or data points.
2. This information is either used to derive a shared ECDH secret to decrypt (read)
3. Or used to load collaborative multi-writer edits (signed).

For more information, please watch our Cartoon Cryptography explainer.

Interop with other systems

Via plugins, such as backup storage on centralized databases or file systems, or transport layers to other protocols.

Scalability

• We've seen a 70% cost savings on projects with 1M+ page loads a month.
• We've seen in-production deployments with 5M+ monthly active users without increasing infrastructure costs.

Metrics

See "stats" section at top.

In the wild

• Internet Archive (library meta-data)
• HackerNoon (annotations)
• ******** (popular niche alternative to YouTube, cannot disclose) (live comments)
• Meething (Mozilla backed secure & decentralized video conferencing powered by GUN)
• Iris, Notabug, DTube, others...