Alright so I've been thinking about this for a while and I think I've finally got it planned out. The TL;DR is, imagine a set of privacy respecting services, out of the 14 eyes, all encrypted, with minimal data stored on servers, is censorship resistant, and more. This is what I'm going to be trying to build if I can get enough funding and support for it, which at the moment isn't looking great - if any of you would like to support this, I would greatly appreciate it!
Thank you all so much!
@ParmuTownley I don't want to pitch it that way, if it was viable I would not even have anything like that, but hosting services requires you to buy VPSs, VPSs cost cash and a lot of it. I can't dump money I don't have into a project that I don't know if will succeed. I may go into more detail on my ideas for the project in the coming days, but I'm just trying to gauge support and maybe try to see if I can get enough to get the whole thing off the ground.
Thank you so much for your input!
@ThreeBadgersInATrenchcoat do you think a peer to peer approach world be more secure than servers? Servers can always be seized, and it's a 1 point of failure setup.
@Wetrix While P2P is certainly nice, it has a myriad of disadvantages, not the least of which is the fact that many applications, file storage for example, just aren't viable on a peer-to-peer setup. P2P is also much harder to achieve in web clients and most of the time will require someone to download a program or app. If I end up building services then it will certainly be something to look into, but if I'm using established ones, then it might be next to impossible.
1/2
When you say seized, you could mean compromised unknowingly to the owner, or shut down -- and while yes, either of those situations are possibilities, as long as you're picking trustworthy VPSs, then the concern is minimal. Also storing minimal data allows for a setup that few other hosts have, where even if let's say the server gets compromised, they would get almost no data, and the data they would get would all be encrypted.
@ThreeBadgersInATrenchcoat i don't think "if I can get enough funding" is a nice pitch. OpenSource projects have to started without much of anything and once they prove to be useful, a community comes around and funds.