What is DSNP?

DSNP is a protocol for distributed social networking. The goal is to allow you to host your identity in a place of your choosing, maintain ultimate control over your personal information, and interact with your friends and family in a secure manner.

The Vision

1. Create an Identity -- Start by creating an identity for yourself. You choose what name you use, where you host it, and what content you make public. Everyone is free to host their own identity on their own server.
2. Find People You Know -- Find others who are using DSNP and request a connection to them.
3. Share -- Upload content to your identity and your friends will learn about your activity. The internet-at-large is left out of the loop.
4. Explore -- You can browse your friend's pages automatically once you have logged into your own page with your own password. Your friends don't need to give you yet another password in order to let you in to see their content.
5. Organize your Connections -- Declare your connections as relevant only in certain networks. For example, coworkers go into the 'Work' network, friends into 'Social' and family into 'Family'. Information does not leak across network boundaries and connections can go into more than one network.

Security

• Each identity gets a public/private key pair. The public portion of the key is made available over SSL to be fetched by anyone. This guarantees that when someone gets your public key, they have your key and no one else's.
• When you pass information to your friends it is encrypted using their public key. This guarantees to you that the information can be viewed only by them. In RSA public key cryptography, information encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted with the corresponding private key.
• When you pass information to your friends it is also digitally signed with your private key. Your friends can then use your public key to verify that you wrote the message, uploaded the photo, commented on someone else's post, etc. Digital signatures are also a feature provided by RSA public key cryptography.
• When you become connected to someone you give them a digitally signed message that says so. They can then use this digital signature to prove to common connections that you are indeed friends. False connections can be claimed easily, but they can also be discredited easily.
• Your network of friends is leveraged for the distribution of messages. Each of your friends forwards the messages they receive to a few of your other friends. This rapidly improves the speed at which your messages get to all your friends.

The Protocol

There is an implementation, but there are no releases yet, only a subversion repository where ongoing work happens.

http://svn.complang.org/dsnpd/trunk/

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