Twister: A decentralized, P2P Twitter counterpart

Today I want to tell you about such an interesting project as Twister.

Twister is a microblogging service (similar to twitter) , but it is distinguished by several very interesting technologies that were used simultaneously.

Namely: Bitcoin Block Chain, Bittorrent DHT, Bittorrent Swarm .

In other words, it is a completely anonymous, decentralized microblogging service that has incorporated all the best from Bittorrent and Bitcoin.

Now there is a boom in decentralized services, Bitcoin, Bittorrent, Bitmessage , the Tox messenger , they share a common idea - to be independent from everyone, to be uncontrollable.

Creator of Twister, Miguel Freitas, believes that microblogging has provided tremendous assistance in various protests in many states. But, unfortunately, the policy of “information security” of the states runs counter to freedom of speech, and under the pressure of various structures, incorrect messages or entire accounts began to be deleted .

And of course, sometimes the state requires deanonymization - from companies - after receiving all the entries about the user's visits.

It was the idea of ​​the lack of freedom of speech in a convenient format that prompted him to create this service.

What should include a convenient way to disseminate information?
- An interface that will be understood by most users
- Mobile device support
- Protection from global control and espionage
- Normal user names (Comparison of Twister and Bitmessage)

The author of this messenger in his whitepaper compares with existing federated social networks and an application such as Bitmessage.
Unfortunately, all of these properties have not previously been found in any of the services or protocols.

Now let's talk about what Twister consists of.

What and what is used

Bitcoin block chain

A block chain from the Bitcoin system is used to store registration information, in other words, when you register in the system, data about you is sent to everyone. This allows you to protect you from theft of your nickname in the system and does not allow other people, under the guise of you, to publish false information.

Please note that the blockchain is different from Bitcoin.

Bittorrent dht

This technology is used to send your messages to the network, transfer personal messages and other content that may be online.

As soon as you write a post, it will be sent to the DHT network and stored with you for further distribution.

Please note that each member of the network does not store all network data (it is likely that if you have few subscribers, the information from your blog will not be available if you do not have an Internet connection)

Bittorrent swarm

Swarm - swarm
This technology is used to almost instantly update information among subscribers or people nearby.
It works in parallel with DHT, which allows you to solve the same problem in different ways, additionally unloading the main DHT network from requests.

New block generation

Having read to this place, you may ask, “ But wait, generating blocks in the bitcoin network requires a lot of computing resources, who does this and what is the reward ?”

You are right, by default you are not generating new blocks in the network, but you can start generating them, and as a reward you will get the opportunity to send an advertising message that will be displayed to all users of the network.

User interface

Twister - consists of two parts - a daemon and a web interface.
The web interface by the API requests information from the local daemon, the separation into two parts allows you to implement various interfaces to Twister.

The original interface looks like this:

Features and network status

- By analogy with Bitcoin - if you lose the secret key - you will lose access to your account without the possibility of recovery.
- Now on average there are about 500 active nodes in the network and about 18,000 blocks in the chain.
- Everything on Twitter is here too - user’s indication via the @ sign, hashtags, search by hashtags and users, support for account description, the ability to upload an avatar.

These features may sound funny, but do not forget - this is a P2P decentralized system , it is much more difficult to implement in it than with the traditional client-server approach.


The project is very young and is actively developing.
Now there is no ready-made, compiled version of Twister, but everyone can compile their own twister.
Assembly Instructions: OS X , Windows , Linux

References

Official site twister.net.co
Official repository github.com/miguelfreitas/twister-core
Web interface github.com/miguelfreitas/twister-html.git
Whitepaper arxiv.org/pdf/1312.7152v1.pdf

Now the interface is Russified, help and see can be here github.com/iShift/twister-html