Freenet .7 is designed to work through a series of connections
between individuals- When a person first joins the Freenet darknet,
they are expected to join with at least three people they know and
trust.
While this may be attainable once there are a high number of network
users, With the network in it's current small-size a new users is
unlikely to have any existing friends using the service.
While people might get their refs from their friends, I worry that
the vasty majority will join after having read about it in a
Magazine, or in Slashdot. They may add their friends afterword, but
they need a way to get started without them.
The current solution to providing people with node references to
exchange is an IRC channel, in which people can exchange their
noderefs, but I don't feel that this is an adequate way to solve the
problem-
People joining the channel are usually there seeking references, as
they are newcomers to the service. The majority of people they
exchange with are thus likely to ALSO be primarily newcomers, due to
the number of people looking at any given time.
This problem is exacerbated when a news story or new release of
freenet is announced. A Slashdot article may bring hundreds of people
to #freenet-refs, flooding the channel. Since they will be the
primary people IN the channel, they will link incestuously with one
another, but little into the existing network.
I think that one way to solve this in the short term may be to
implement a link-exchange website, which people can go to to post
that they are seeing references- The website can then hand out
references to visitors, tracking the connections it hands out, and
the ones that it has handed out in the past.
By handing out these references, it can form a rough map of the
network- While it will miss the dark nodes which don't use the
service, it at least gives a rough idea.
By doing this /very rough/ mapping, the server can decide /where/ to
hand them out, based on the number of other connections it's given
out in certain areas.
Example: the node initially knows about (and has contact
information/references for) five nodes, A, B, C, D and E.
A story goes life on Slashdot, and 20 people apply for noderefs. F-Y.
With the existing IRC solution, they would primarily
link to one
another
with one or two links from their network to the
existing base.
The website solution would give each of the next 10 a
connection to two of the existing servers (between
A-E).
It would then try to balance the new 10 connections
similarly,
using the entire set of 15 it now has.
I know it's a simplistic view- Please don't get hung up on my
semantics of HOW to try to balance.. Oskar is Smart, Matthew is
Smart, and Ian is smart. I'm sure a good algorithm could be designed
that balances better than nothing at all.
I'll admit this is far outside my area of expertise, but it seems
that almost ANY solution, even an imperfect balance, which matched
refs via a server page would be preferable to the current IRC scenario.
-Colin
