# Z: brainstorming thread **URL:** \ **Category:** Self-Sovereign Social\ **Created:** [August 28, 2023, 6:39pm UTC](https://forum.anoma.net/t/z-brainstorming-thread/220 "2023-08-28T18:39:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![cwgoes](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/forum.anoma.net/cwgoes/32/22_2.png) [@cwgoes](https://forum.anoma.net/u/cwgoes)\ **Post date:** [August 28, 2023, 6:39pm UTC](https://forum.anoma.net/t/z-brainstorming-thread/220/1 "2023-08-28T18:39:29Z")
(as the social network owned he-who-shall-not-be-named, but with “Z” for private 🙂 ) Basic concept: Twitter, but decentralized and privacy-preserving, with full algorithmic transparency (and no ads necessary). (name TBD and can be changed) Components: - “Follower” relationships (tracked in the DAG) - Encryption of messages to your followers - Flexible delegation of storage and compute - With some personal servers, can basically act like Twitter - For those who connect less frequently to the net, acts a bit more like SSB - Locally controlled and shareable algorithms for ranking and sorting - Full local interface control cc @apriori for your context - does this make sense? ---
**Author:** ![apriori](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/forum.anoma.net/apriori/32/1655_2.png) [@apriori](https://forum.anoma.net/u/apriori)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2023, 3:55am UTC](https://forum.anoma.net/t/z-brainstorming-thread/220/2 "2023-08-29T03:55:19Z")
Are you thinking about this application as grassroots social networking protocol? e.g., [Shapiro](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.13941.pdf) [June, 2023] > Offering a viable alternative architecture to centrally-controlled global digital platforms for social networking is an open challenge. Here we present a grassroots architecture for serverless, permissionless, peer-to-peer social networks termed grassroots social networking. > > The architecture is geared for roaming (address-changing) agents communicating over an unreliable network, e.g., smartphones communicating via UDP. The architecture incorporates > > - a decentralized social graph, where each member controls, maintains and stores only their local neighborhood in the graph; > - member-created feeds, with authors and followers; and > - a novel grassroots dissemination protocol, in which communication occurs only along the edges of the social graph. > > The architecture realizes these components using the blocklace data structure – a distributed partially-ordered counterpart of the replicated totally ordered blockchain. We provide two example grassroots social networking protocols—Twitter/LinkedIn-like and WhatsApp-like—and address their safety, liveness, privacy, and spam/deepfake resistance, demonstrating how centrally-controlled social networks could be supplanted by a grassroots architecture. ---
**Author:** ![vveiln](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/forum.anoma.net/vveiln/32/60_2.png) [@vveiln](https://forum.anoma.net/u/vveiln)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2023, 9:17am UTC](https://forum.anoma.net/t/z-brainstorming-thread/220/3 "2023-08-29T09:17:29Z")
Do you mean encrypted DMs or encrypted tweets? Feels like encrypted DMs are not enough to name the app after the privacy aspect (or is it? i guess there is more than just logic involved in the naming process but I’m ignoring everything else 😅), but encrypted tweets raise even more questions: In case of public profiles: - anyone can follow to see the content - non-followers not being able to see tweets might be the opposite from what local celebs want (saw so much angry talking about not being promoted without a paid account on twitter anymore) For private profiles it makes sense, but makes me wonder how it is combined with public profiles and unshielding: - if we don’t have public profiles at all, the app becomes an app to bring the existing audience to, no discovery - if we do have both, is unshielding possible? In that case, can the old tweets be seen after the profile becomes public? Will the old tweets be encrypted after a public profile becomes private? Might be expected (shielding is often used as a shield against bullying by hiding the hot tweets and breaking the communication channel), but I feel like it isn’t implied by the resource model ---
**Author:** ![cwgoes](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/forum.anoma.net/cwgoes/32/22_2.png) [@cwgoes](https://forum.anoma.net/u/cwgoes)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2023, 1:36pm UTC](https://forum.anoma.net/t/z-brainstorming-thread/220/4 "2023-08-29T13:36:00Z")
@apriori > [@apriori](#): > > Are you thinking about this application as grassroots social networking protocol? e.g., [Shapiro](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.13941.pdf) [June, 2023] Yes, I think the concept is very similar. @vveiln All good questions. - I mean encrypted “zweets”, not encrypted DMs. - Agreed that many profiles will be public (or want to be public). There can be a further distinction where certain zweets can be broadcast (and encrypted) to specific parties only, if people want - we don’t need to make the privacy decision at the whole-profile level. Even for fully public profiles, I still think the distributed operation, self-sovereignty, and algorithmic transparency aspects would be helpful. - I do not think we necessarily need to use the resource model to track zweets, since they aren’t linear (in any way that we care about modelling, anyways), so we could use a much simpler transaction processing function for this application, but we’d still need pretty much all of the distributed storage, compute, ordering, etc., and it would be helpful to have Z on the same platform as kudos and resource accounting to coordinate exchange of the physical compute necessary to host & serve everything. I haven’t thought about all the details regarding moving zweets between private and public or vice-versa yet.