[liberationtech] Trsst: An Open and Secure Alternative to Twitter

[Michael Powers]

Yep, the bitcoin stuff seems to be a distraction for whatever reason.

The only connection with bitcoin is that each blog gets a keypair and the public key is also the guid.  Now if the keypair generation happens to adheres to bitcoin's scheme, then your blog id happens to be a payment address too, which could be useful for micropayment content monetization.  

I've had some people ask me if this is going to make them wanted by the feds (or the Fed for that matter) so I'm considering just taking the whole thing out.  But there it is.  

The "blog chain" is merely bitcoin-inspired.  Each entry contains the message digest of the previous entry, hence the "blog chain" ala block chain, so you can prove against censored messages or tampering.

All we're doing is extending RSS to support self-signed and/or self-encrypted entries.  Your public posts remain public and search-indexable but the private posts you encrypt with the recipient's public key (aka their blog id and -ahem- payment address) so that it shows up in your rss feed as encoded text.  Existing RSS reader can read your feed; you can follow any existing RSS feed.  

(I've been reading the client-side/javscript encryption stuff here with interest.)

White paper is here: http://trsst.com

If it's not clear by now, I'm the project founder.  

Happy to answer any other questions and generally would love feedback.  

Thanks.

-----

> I came across this project in kickstarter. Subscribers of this list may
> find it interesting. (Btw I am not associated with them)
>
They lost me at bitcoin. Why???

> --
>
> *Welcome to Trsst: An Open and Secure Alternative to Twitter*
>
> Post your thoughts, share links, and follow other interesting people or
> web sites, using the web or your mobile or any software of your choice.
>
>    - All of your private posts to individuals or friends and family are
>    securely encrypted so that even your hosting provider - or government -
>    can't unlock them.
>    - All of your public posts are digitally signed so you can prove that
>    no one - and no government - modified or censored your writings.
>    - You control your identity and your posts and can move them to
>    another site or hosting provider at any time.
>
> Think of Trsst as an RSS reader (and writer) that works like Twitter but
> built for the open web.  The public stuff stays public and
> search-indexable, and the private stuff is encrypted and secured.  Only you
> will hold your keys, so your hosting provider can't sell you out.
>
>
> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1904431672/trsst-a-distributed-secure-blog-platform-for-the-o/description
>