Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by o8r3oFTZPE 1753 days ago
"Unfortunately they're solving the wrong problem."

Heres the description of Rumble:

"Rumble enables the spread of messages in an epidemic fashion using automatically formed and opportunistic local ad-hoc network. Every message sent or received with are stored on the local database and pushed to every other device it meets. By doing so, messages naturally propagates throughout the network using social links as the underlying infrastructure. Because it doesn't rely on any fixed infrastructure like the Internet, it is naturally resistant against censorship."

"About

Rumble allows the sharing of messages and pictures without relying on the Internet, in a Delay Tolerant Fashion following the Store-Carry and Forward paradigm"

Question: What problem is Rumble solving.

Option #1

Answer: Requirement for fixed infrastructure in order to exchange messages. Censorship resistance is just an incidental benefit.

Option #2

Answer: Censorship. Formation of ad hoc network infrastructure is just implementation detail.

The problem with #2, the parent's interpretation, is that formation of ad hoc infrastructure, i.e., non-reliance on fixed infrastructure, has multiple benefits besides censorship resistance. Its quite possible someone could use Rumble to solve a problem other than censorship.

1 comments

If the network only forwarded/spread information that is linked with [friends],[near-friends], [distant-friends] as selected by the user, this would create a social network that more closely the uses actual social network.

If the chain of in-person interactions for a [distant-friend] becomes broke (for instance, because a friend connection link drops out) that information is trimmed from the user’s network.

Perhaps this incentivizes direct social interaction rather the false social interactions of legacy networks.

such thing already exists : https://scuttlebutt.nz/

it has the same expectations you mentionned ; it is supposed to encourage ppl to form close-knit community