The Lamfada Project
The quest for a fully decentralized social media protocol
Motivation
I could certainly fill pages with recent examples showing the appaling status of free speech in our modern times. By modern times I understand the times starting with ubiquitous communications. Today it is more difficult to not to be connected to the network/grid than to (one way or another, voluntarily or not) be connected to it. Things have gone awry. Why and how are interesting stories but I am not going to adress them here. It is not the place nor the right time to do it. Here is a place of action.
Crypto and decentralized technologies have made enormous progress in the last decade. It is arguably almost the only place where things have fundamentally changed during the last decade. The best startup of the 2010's was built under a pseudonym, and has reached a market value of almost 1 Tera$, starting from scratch. Satoshi Nakamoto changed the world with an idea: decentralized consensus. There is no equivalent in the history of humanity of a market of this size over which people are not fighting like mad to get a bigger piece of the pie. A lot of things can be said with relation to Bitcoin. In my opinion the most important one is that it has withstood the test of time despite...almost everything and everyone. People, from hackers to political leaders passing by powerful bankers, had huge incentives to break the system over a decade and yet they failed at that task.
This text is not a call to independance. Independance is the cherry on the top of the cake. You can declare independance, as John Perry Barlow famously did it 25 years ago, after having won the war. This war has not yet been fought.
This war is just starting. Crypto and decentralized tools will be our weapons. Recovering freedom of thoughts and of expression will be our goals. This fight can be seen at many levels. At the highest level I see it as an invasion of the world of ideas by materiality. Ideas have to fight back. There are many theaters of this war: philosophical, religious, cultural etc. I will fight on the one on which I can make a difference: information technologies.
The situation is vaguely reminding me the celtic mythology. After all this is the aim of all mythologies: to capture archetypal truths that instantiate in multiple areas. Tuatha de Danann Gods lost the fight versus Milesians and had to take refuge on the sidhe. You can read the Lebor Gabala Erenn (it is always a good idea to read mythologies with an open mind) or not. Anyway, you know where to look for if you want to get where the strange names appearing in the Lamfada project come from.
Philosophy of the project
Language is a technological product, like roads, TCP/IP protocol etc. The Lamfada project aims at providing a protocol and a network for social media communication. The heart of the project is to build a completely neutral platform for social communication. The word neutral may be misleading. In this context it means that it is going to be as neutral as a road for instance. While it can be argued that having roads is not neutral in many ways (it changes culture, has an impact on pandemics etc.) there is nothing within the road technology itself that favours good guys versus bad guys, political party A versus political party B, democracy vs authoritarian regimes etc. The Lamfada project is intended to be available to anyone from the Chinese Communist Party and its farms of trolls to the Anarchocapitalist hackers.
A natural question is: why would we need a specific protocol and a specific network for social media communications? After all we already have a working internet over which there are many social media platforms. Here are some of my answers:
Social media platforms are centralized. It is a security issue in the sense that your data is hosted by companies that may change their minds over what "acceptable speech" is in a glimpse of an eye. The job, which is not an easy one, of a social media platform is to show you relevant and interesting data. The data is not theirs. They (and litteraly no one on earth) shouldn't be able to remove published material from the network.
The data is not yours either. When you post something on the internet it should be seen as an equivalent as posting a physical letter. It is no longer yours as soon as it enters the mailbox. A tweet is essentially an open letter to the world. Once published it becomes an idea: at the end of the day you have no control over it, you cannot withdraw it, you do not have special rights on it (except the claim that you are the author). You have to accept that. We need to digest this as a society: on the one hand by being more careful on what we publish (trash talk is going to stay forever), on the other by being more kind and more forgiving (everyone say stupid things one day or another: it should not be taken as an eternal proof of evil).
On social media communication *who* talks, and *when* are paramount. This is not the case for standard internet communication for which the only thing at stake is the accuracy of the information. If I am looking for the size of the radius of an hydrogen atom, my first request is that the data is correct, not who and when this was published. On social media those informations are almost more important than the content of the message itself. This is clear, for instance, when waiting for a candidate to publicly acknowledge its defeat in an election: the content of the message is almost useless, what matters is the fact that it is the candidate that has published the statement, and when he did it.
Social media is just talk. Sticks and stones may break my bones etc. I am not saying here that there is no problematic speech. What I am saying is that as long as it stays virtual, it is not comparable to violence on the material world. It needs to be recognized at a societal level. Speech are just bits in computer memories and pixels on screens. If it leads to concrete actions, then the laws adapted to the concrete world will apply. We need to stop invading the world of ideas with laws that do not belong there.
A direct implication of (4) is that in the virtual world you only exchange under pseudonym. You can always choose your *social security name* if you want to. In the virtual world your identity amounts to your reputation. Your reputation is essentially the list of the interactions you had (and remember you cannot delete anything). If you behave badly your track record will record it, and accordingly the reach of your influence will be severed. Reputation is very asymetric: it is long and painful to build one but very easy to ruin. This is the tool used to tamper all sorts of bad behaviors in the virtual world.
There is no free lunch. Freedom is not given, it is conquered and it has a price. Using the Lamfada network will not be free. You will never end up as being the product though. Either you will need to pay your fees with governmental money, crypto money or you can directly help the network by providing computation and/or storage resources (anyone having a phone or even a running browser will be able to contribute, even if you have no bank account it will be possible to be part of Lamfada network). You can also help with the development of the network by programing evolutions etc. The Lamfada project will include a crypto coin and a market to balance the prices linked to publication fees and rewards linked to provision of resources like node running, storage space, bandwith etc.
White paper
It is easier to present the Lamfada project indirectly since it has yet to come to inception.
What Lamfada brings:
Communications that are solely done under pseudonym. Lamfada requires no phone number, no account on any platform, no email, no nothing. Essentially a pseudonym has to be seen as a crypto wallet. The "not your keys, not your account" applies in full. Your pseudo amounts to the knowledge of a private encryption key. Period.
No pseudonym can be removed from the blockchain. Period. You just cannot ban on Lamfada network. You can choose not to see what has been published by a pseudonym, but there is no mechanism to block a pseudonym from posting as long as he pays the fee for publication and registration within the blockchain.
A ledger of all Lamfada pseudonym/public encryption key is publicly accessible.
A ledger of all published message is publicly accessible. It records who publishes what and when.
Every published content is digitally signed, and has an integrity code that is an integral part of the message. No message is ever deleted.
You only pay per publication and registration: how many times a content is accessed, refered to etc. is already included in the publication fee.
Everything is public and auditable by anyone. Access restriction is solely managed through encryption of published content.
Lamfada ensures a total privacy of communications: every request and every publication are done through a mix network. Meaning the publication cannot be linked to a specific IP adress for instance.
Lamfada is essentially a norm: anyone can freely build his own node software as long as the norm is respected. There is no copyright. The only proprietary part of Lamfada is the list of pseudonyms published in the Genesis block (essentially used to manage the coins and the market associated with network evolution).
What Lamfada is not:
It is not a file system: a published content cannot be edited or deleted.
It is not a social media platform: it is possible to build platforms on top of Lamfada to help people to search for interesting content in the same way that http protocol is just a communication standard on top of which you can build browsers and search engines.
It is not a crypto-currency. Though Lamafada project includes a coin and every pseudo is, at the end of the day, a wallet for this coin, it is going to be mostly used internally to manage resources required by the network.
What Lamfada could be:
It could replace email. Email is just a particular, one on one, form of social communication. Lamfada network comes with a lot of interesting features when seen as an evolution of SMTP. Unlike SMTP, in Lamfada the following properties are baked in: authenticity, privacy and non-repudiation.
It could replace corporate chats: it is easy to design groups of pseudos by sharing encryption keys using public keys. At this point it is not clear to me if it has to be baked in the protocol or built on top of it.
It is firstly aiming at asynchronous communications. It is not aiming at replacing livestream: having to record publication in a ledger is a hard limit.
What Lamfada should be:
It should be quantum resistant. It has to forecast the possibility of quantum computers and use quantum resistant mechanisms for the public key cryptosystem (definitely not RSA, maybe elliptic curves or NTRU).
It should use open source standard crypto tools (AES,SHA-256, etc.).
Roadmap
This text is the starting point of Lamfada. Everything is left to be actually done. What’s next on the agenda ? I am personnally starting to have meetings with computer scientist researcher (it is the easiest part since it is my job).
I am going to document the progress of the project, refinment on this text and ideas around it mostly through this newsletter.
What I can foresee is not much but looks like something along those lines.
Setting up a dedicated server for the project.
Opening of a website, git repository, forum, etc. on the server.
First phase will be dedicated to have a clear descritpion of the Lamfada functionnalities and specifications.
Second phase will be focused on the technical architecture.
Fourth phase will see the first sofware productions (code for nodes, clients etc.).
Fith phase will be the deployment of a closed beta version of the network.
Hello world.
Support of the Project
If you want to support the project you may either directly participate in building a strong community around Lamafada or indirectly by financially supporting it. Do not hesitate to contact me for further comments/explanations/talks at Lugh.Dagda@protonmail.com
Any comments, remarks are welcomed. Two caveats though :
I am not going to discuss the philosophy of the project and will ignore all remarks about the fact it is not eco-friendly, that it could promote hate speech etc. The door are wide open for participation but this is not the case for the philosophy behind the project.
I am not going to pay any tax to stupidity. Nothing personal but the aim of this project is not to do popular science. So if you don’t understand something that is of technical nature the onus is on you to fill the gap. This project is about doing something that works not commenting on comments.
Intriguing concept. How far has it gone now? Any prototype node(s) running somewhere?