Welcome to Absistence!
This is a work in progress.
Absistence is a fully distributed social and news sharing application. Key words are freedom of speech, human rights and privacy.
Absistence is not a network,nor a business, simply a tool, the content is yours and the sharing happen between users.
Highlights
- Fully decentralized. Servers are easy targets and week point, the only real advantage of the server-client model is monitoring and/or control.
- File based data storage
- Keep your data with you Stored on your device, not on a server.
- Never loose contacts or messages by getting inexplicably locked out of your account.
- Having your data with you and not on a public server means there is no arbitrary authority of censorship. Feeds only contains what comes from your contacts. See future documentation for more details on how unwanted content is managed.
- Unified don’t need to load your content in cache memory, which is why it use very little memory on your phone (RAM). Thanks to a document based content storage allowing to load headers ans previews only.
Presentation
Absistence is a bit old style, users does not connect to the app. It is not a client accessing a server but a standalone application with sharing capabilities between a user and it's contacts or between groups.
How it works
To start using Absistence by create a profile on your device, those are not to be confounded with users which can have many profiles. Behind the scene they are files stored on the device so as will be your content.
When one of your contact access your profile, he will directly reach your device ans ask for the latest content. When the device is not reachable the visitor device will look through it's contacts to see if the content is available through someone else that might already had visited recently, this the concept of peer-to-peer networking. This is one advantage of [groups], [circles] and [communities]. Having multiple devices such as mobile and desktops also provide redundancy to your content.
Guidelines for a truly free network.
- Does not belong to an organization. Organizations do not have human rights, they are subjects to many laws and oversights.
- Serverless Decentralized is not serverless but rather multi-server, for more information see this article. Distributed is serveless, connections goes from peer to peer, no content is stored anywhere else then the users devices wether it is the author device or the reader's.
Position on Censorship
The internet, wether it's World Wide Web, the so call "darknet" or any of the kind are no different then our cities. Of course anyone can adventure to dangerous places, the physical possibility of going to a fire arm or an adult store always have been. Just like the one of soliciting prostitution. That never meant that you should do it. It's the responsibility of the user to choose not to do criminal activities, outside like on internet.
Availability
While Absistence is build entirely with the Python language and is compatible with all types of devices, distributing an application is different for nearly all of them. The first platforms maintained will always be the open source ones, starting with Linux then Android. Contributors are welcome to add to the list.