Hello everyone, I'm Olie. I found this project fairly recently and I think it's absolutely incredible. It solves many problems I've found with what the docs call the "legacy internet", and adds piles more stuff that I never thought I'd want. Even just in alpha, I think there is some seriously amazing work happening with this project.
I spent today reading through https://docs.gnunet.org and learning about what I'm able to grasp at the moment. I must say though, I finished reading having more questions than I had when I started. I'd love to be able to learn as much as I possibly can about how it all works and fits together and eventually be able to start contributing wherever I can. As I have a lot of questions, I'll try my best to keep them organised here. I'm not expecting anyone to go through and answer everything, just the odd thing when someone has time. If I'm asking about something that I might've missed when reading docs and watching videos then do point me to where I can learn more. ### 1: How might I "serve" files? At the moment, I have a little 1GB VPS on which I host a personal website and a project website. What I'd like to know is what the equivalent to this sort of thing would be with GNUnet. I heard it mentioned in a few of the videos I've watched that GNUnet isn't really supposed to be used with a browser. Would it be a more "GNUnet way" thing to have my "site" be a set of more traditional documents that are made available using the file-publishing systems? How might I collect them together into a coherent group and make them accessible using a tidier and more memorable URL than some of the gnunet://fs/* links I've seen with entire public keys? Would it simply be done with GNS and some form of file path? ### 2: How might I chat with friends? I've read the document section on the "Conversations" program that uses a phonecall-esque approach, and I've also read that protocols like SMTP haven't been implemented "yet". In a hypothetical GNUnet which is more developed and actively used by a larger population, what would be "the" way of doing Email-style communication, IM-style communication, and any of those and voice in groups with multiple members? Would there be additional protocols and components in GNUnet that would manage these kinds of communication? How do/might they look/work? ### 3: How might I make use of my "ego"s and GNS zones from multiple machines? I have a desktop at home, a laptop, a work computer, and my VPS. If I were to connect all of them to GNUnet and had made myself a couple of "ego"s for say personal use and public use (with a pseudonym) and had a personal GNS zone, how might I be able to act as any of these "ego"s from different devices? For instance, I might be using "Ego1" on my desktop talking to a friend and need to go somewhere. When I get to my destination and take out my laptop, how might I be able to continue the conversation still as "Ego1"? Or would having a separate ego or group of egos for each device be how I'd do it? ### 4: How can I make sure data is still available when my machines are powered off? If for instance I have files hosted on a machine or have my GNS zone on my computer and I turn my computer off, would the files and GNS records still be available to other machines? Can they still resolve my GNS records without my machine being on? If I host a file rather than just indexing it, will it be available via other peers at all? If not, then would it be reasonable to run most if not all of my GNUnet content from my VPS which will be on all the time? ### 5: How are public keys linked to specific machines? As a machine's address is given as its public key, how can one machine look at a public key and know how to figure out what exact computer that means? What's the logical process from a computer being given a public key either directly or via GNS to getting data to the specific machine that key refers to? Would a better understanding of how "legacy" IP addresses achieve the same task answer my question here? ### 6: How might an organisation manage a presence on GNUnet? Say there is some Company C that runs an online shop and that company wants to make its service available over GNUnet. How might that be done? Would the website be hosted in a similar fashion to any other website just accessible over GNUnet and with transactions managed using Taler? What might the key differences be between such a site on GNUnet and on legacy internet from a user/customer perspective? ### 7: How might "local networks" work? Or would they exist at all? The systems I work with in my job might have a handful of internet-facing servers, but - like a lot of environments - most of the servers live within LAN and never exist outside. Would this be similar with GNUnet? Would there be a different system for managing localised connections and controlling access? ### 8: If I setup my machines to use GNUnet, how can I have them try and use GNUnet for all traffic, but fall-back to legacy internet when the service I'm requesting isn't reachable over GNUnet? Is this the kind of setup that might be considered "default"? The documentation described ways of using GNS to access the legacy internet with Virtual Public Networks, and using "Ascension" to convert legacy DNS tables to usable GNS tables. How much of a cross-over is there between legacy internet and GNUnet at the moment? ### 9: What sorts of applications might I write for GNUnet considering what systems already exist? If I want to write an application that uses GNUnet to communicate with other users or access things like software repositories for checking for updates and the like, what would be the approach to this? Or say I wanted to create a social network, is the idea of GNUnet that everything work on the protocols and systems that are part of GNUnet and really integrate with it as a platform? Or might an application use its own protocol instead? Also, with what systems are already part of GNUnet and what logical additional systems I might anticipate in the future, would there be much need to write applications for it at all? The only exceptions being clients to these existing systems? ### 10: Where does my key come from? Is it my existing GPG key pair that I use for emails? Or are new keys created for every host, ego, and GNS zone? ### 11: Last one. What chat rooms and systems can I start participating in right now? Are there any? I think it would be amazing to see it working and be talking to people with it and browsing content others have already made? Is there anything doing a similar job of the IRC channel but on GNUnet? If not, are there docs that would allow me to - once I'm more familiar with how it all works - to setup my own "room" that I can invite friends to and chat in? I know that was a lot so I'm very grateful to anyone that took the time to read through all of my rather naive and maybe over-excited questions - and sorry if this isn't the best place to be asking all these questions or if my wall of text isn't really appropriate for this list. Again, from all that I've seen so far, I think this is genuinely incredible and I would really like to be able to contribute to this project in the future. Thank you all, Olie. _______________________________________________ GNUnet-developers mailing list GNUnet-developers@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnunet-developers