gnu:net and IPFS: integration possible or desirable for social networking app development?

[Brendan Miller]

Hi, all. I am a web/web3 developer interested in helping to build open source, private, decentralized alternatives to social platforms like Facebook, WeChat, etc. I am coming from a technical starting point of IPFS, Ethereum blockchain and secret contract platforms like Enigma and Oasis, but I am not yet committed to a certain tech stack, and I certainly don't want to reinvent any wheels.

I am starting to recognize that some of the privacy protecting architecture I was envisioning layering on top of IPFS, for example, was not really at the right networking layer - it should be handled at a lower layer. As a part of that realization, I have recently found gnu:net, reclaim:id and related projects and am excited about the attention you give these layers.

I was imagining that the apps I would like to build would be mobile apps so that they could be accessible to the majority of users, be able to protect the user's private keys, and also be able to run in a fully decentralized/mesh situation when needed/desired.

Textile (https://textile.io/) on top of IPFS interests me because they are open source, and provide useful functionalities that I would need. And they are set up for mobile apps. As an example of what can be done with Textile, you can take a look at this functional photo sharing/messaging React Native mobile app: https://github.com/textileio/photos

I have also been looking at open source decentralized identity systems like https://github.com/uport-project/uport-connect, https://github.com/iden3 and https://github.com/jonnycrunch/ipid.

Fundamentally, I am an app developer, but one who cares about ensuring decentralization and privacy by default, with the ability to safely share identity claims, user groups and content/media/files when desired. My goal is to build on top of as much existing, reliable, maintained open source code as possible so we can show users the full functionality they expect from existing social networking apps to make it attractive to switch over.

My questions are these:

• Does anything similar to Textile exist in the gnu:net ecosystem?
• Can gnu:net practically operate in a battery-sane manner on Android and iOS devices? Is there a guide for how to do this? What tradeoffs are necessary to operate on mobile?
  
• IPFS uses a modular infrastructure. Would it be possible to swap out some lower-level networking layers of IPFS with gnu:net modules for greater privacy? (Reference: https://github.com/ipfs/specs/blob/master/ARCHITECTURE.md)
• Would it be possible to somehow make the gnu:net and IPFS ecosystems operationally compatible, perhaps using gateways/bridges, so that their content/data can be shared? If so, how hard would that be?

Thanks for any insights into these questions, and for your work on gnu:net.

Best,

Brendan

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanmiller/