'A Distributed File System for Secure P2P Applications' by Brooklyn Zelenka (Strange Loop 2022)

The popularity of tools like Dropbox, Google Docs, and Figma has normalized collaborative software that empowers us to effortlessly manage and manipulate our data across multiple devices. This kind of multiplayer software is here to stay, but it does bring with it an implicit trust, dependence, and platform risk in the services that hold our data. To address these concerns, we've built the WebNative File System (WNFS) to extend these capabilities to a user-centric architecture.

WNFS is a novel, content-addressed, persistent, encrypted forest of blocks. To support multiuser and local-first uses cases, it forms a CRDT over encrypted data, even when the agent only has read or write access to a specific subdirectory or single file. This file system has been used to build decentralized applications, including multiuser file managers, music players, and note taking apps.

Brooklyn Zelenka
CTO @ Fission
@expede

Brooklyn is the cofounder and CTO at Fission, where her team is building the next generation of web dev tools for the future of computing on the edge – leveling the playing field for teams of all sizes. She founded the Vancouver Functional Programming Meetup, and is the author of several Elixir libraries including Witchcraft & Exceptional. She was previously an Ethereum Core Developer, where she focused on improving the EVM. She continues to push the broader web and edge space forward with standards like UCAN auth, the WebNative File System, and the Dialog distributed database.

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[fluffyunicorn]

This is pretty neat, but also pretty dense. I think I need to watch this more than once…

[allanwind]

With sufficient amount of data both cpu and bandwidth remain bottlenecks. For example, try compress, encrypt and transfer 1 TB of data to a remote host.

[franksonjohnson]

Hey could anyone point me to where I can learn more about "blind busses"? I've never heard this term before (or a lot of what she goes through for that matter), and I'm trying to learn more about every item. However, searching for this term doesn't yield very relevant results, mostly getting vision-impaired public transit accessibility software.

[christophebenz]

Awesome, I've always dreamt of this

[Dogo.R]

Performance of devices reletive to the things software companies write only starts to increase when handware performance increases outpace software scope increases.

And even then software scope increases have to have a linear relationsbip to performance cost. Yet we all know thats not how it ends up working. Increasing scope by 10% does not increase performance cost by just 10%.

And thats only the case when hardware performance increases are actually utilized for peformance.
Rather then energy usage reduction, or new features(like AI portions), or smaller die size, or composability.

So no the premise that we are moving towards software being easier to run is not clearly happening.

Seondly bandwidth is still a bottleneck.
Korea, Austria, nd many other places have companies preventing the cost of bandwidth going down in those areas.
Also the same applies here. Bandwidth cost has to outpace data size.

Lastly latency has become more important yes, but also not really.
Its been very important for a long time.
Its not like its become more important.

Also note that many many countries globally have reletively low access to bandwidth, performance, and latency.

The premise set out at the start is drasticly more situational than how it is actually framed.

[flyLeonardofly]

How is privacy achieved in a paradigm? How do you ask for content without telling everybody what content you are consuming?