cryptocat media gets insanely backing to

It's not going to be hindered at all in that sense. Basically the way that this would work is he'd be able to set this up or get someone to set it up really easily - I think Capsule is going to offer automated deployments as also a way to make revenue, by the way, i.e., for a bit extra we deploy the server for you and then you're self-hosting but we also make a margin off of that - but it's going to be open source, you can set it up yourself as well and that's perfectly okay. 'I always imagine Glenn Greenwald when I think of my user,' he says on the usability point, referring to the outspoken journalist and Intercept co-founder who recently left to launch his own newsletter-based offering on Substack. But that's the bar Kobeissi is setting himself here. Albeit, it's a lot easier to say you want to design something that 'just works' versus actually pulling off effortless mainstream accessibility. He also invokes Apple's 'design for usability' philosophy. But he's vocal about not wanting any 'bloat.'Īutomattic pumps $4.6M into New Vector to help grow Matrix, an open, decentralized comms ecosystem He talks about Capsule having the same level of focus on social media as Signal does on private messaging, for example - albeit intending it to support both short-form 'tweet'-style public posts and long-form Medium-style postings. Kobeissi argues that existing options for decentralizing social media are either: (a) not fully P2P (Mastodon is 'self-hosted but not decentralized,' per a competitive analysis on Capsule's pitch deck, ergo its servers are 'vulnerable to Parler-style AWS takedowns') or (b) not focused enough on the specific use case of social media (some other decentralized protocols like Matrix aim to support many more features/apps than social media and therefore can't be as lightweight is the argument) or (c) simply aren't easy enough to use to be more than a niche geeky option. So given how many protocols already offer self-hosted/P2P social media services it seems fair to ask what's different here - and, indeed, why build another open decentralized standard? Then, for the mesh federation thing, we're just doing HTTPS calls and then having decentralized caching of the databases and so on.'Īmong the Twitter back-and-forth about how (or whether) Kobeissi's concept differs to various other decentralized protocols, someone posted a link to this XKCD cartoon - which lampoons the techie quest to resolve competing standards by proposing a tech that covers all use cases (yet is of course doomed to increase complexity by +1). And that is so self-contained that it's embeddable everywhere, that's migratable - and it's really quite impossible to get this level of simplicity and elegance so quickly unless you go this route. 'There are no other files - and then once you have it running, in that folder when you set up your capsule server, it's just the Capsule program and a Capsule database that is a file. It sets up a server, it contacts Let's Encrypt, it gets you a certificate, it uses SQLite for the database, which is a serverless database, all of the assets for the web server are within the binary,' he says, walking through the 'really nice technical idea' that snagged $100,000 in pre-seed backing insanely fast. And you get that binary and you deploy it and you run it, and that's it. 'When you deploy Capsule right now - I have a prototype that does almost nothing running - it's basically one binary. 'That is kind of terrifying,' he suggests.Ĭapsule would seek to route around the risk of mass deplatforming via 'easy to deploy' P2P microservices - starting with a forthcoming web app. court seeking damages and injunctive relief from Apple for allowing Telegram, a messaging platform with 500 million+ users, to be made available through its iOS App Store - 'despite Apple's knowledge that Telegram is being used to intimidate, threaten and coerce members of the public' - raising concerns about 'the odds of these efforts catching on.' He also points to a lawsuit that's been filed in U.S. But he says he is concerned about giant private corporations having unilateral power to shape internet speech - whether takedown decisions are being made by Twitter's trust and safety lead or Amazon Web Services (which recently yanked the plug on right-wing social network Parler for failing to moderate violent views). Kobeissi also takes that view, while adding the caveat that he's not 'personally' concerned about Trump's deplatforming. President Donald Trump's access to their megaphones - a demonstration of private power that other political leaders have described as problematic. Interest in the space has been rekindled in recent weeks after mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter took decisions to shut down U.S.

Cryptocat media gets insanely backing to