noosphere VS orbitdb

Subconscious | Full-time | REMOTE - Hiring globally, current team is San Francisco, Washington D.C. and Brisbane

At Subconscious, we’re building new infrastructure for an internet of ideas.

Noosphere is a next generation network protocol; a worldwide content graph (no blockchain though).

Subconscious is a social note-taking app powered by Noosphere and AI.

Our founders are former browser engineers from Google and Mozilla. We are a small, funded team of four.

We're looking for a few more folks to help bring our work into the world. Specifically, we are hiring:

- DevOps: you should know the ins and outs of cloud infrastructure orchestration and its interplay with deployed applications and services

- Cryptography/Privacy: help us make strong guarantees about public and private information, and bring user legibility to content provenance and authority

Some topical links:

- Subconscious Blog: https://subconscious.substack.com/

- Noosphere Project: https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere

If you are interested, please drop us a line to introduce yourself at [email protected]

Source code: https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere

Currently we have a CLI that demonstrates multi-device synchronization in principle. You can install it using `cargo install noosphere-cli` (it installs a binary called "orb"). We also have pre-built binaries of orb for x86_64 Linux that you can find on our releases on Github (e.g., https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere/releases/ta...). We'll be expanding our pre-built binaries to include other platforms soon.

Also, we have recently released a Swift package that gives a path to easily install our project as a dependency in XCode. We're turning the corner on offering the same FFI backing implementation as a TypeScript + WASM package, too. But, as I mentioned it's early days for us, so set your expectations accordingly.

The best way to stay up to date with new things you can do is join our Discord. I make regular announcements there about our technical progress.

Plug: I'm working with the author on a decentralized protocol for networked thought and a companion browser called Subconscious. We're a very young project and just getting off the ground.

If you're interested in topics like the one in the article, all our work is open source and we love getting into it with folks on Github or our Discord (link in the README): https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere

OrbitDB is not well-funded, but there's fresh work happening recently by some dedicated volunteers: https://github.com/orbitdb/orbitdb/commits/main

I've been thinking it might be practical to build a simple decentralized database, where agents just know each other, so conflict resolution does not need to be so strong and can rely on the social layer.

I think this applies to most databases, but I'm particularly thinking of internal enterprise databases, some social networks, any federated database system, and different devices of a single user

I'm thinking of this features:

1- Append-only?, full history of operations. Deletes / edits do not remove data, they only modify the "active state"

2- Agents are public keys or similar (DIDs?)

3- Operations are signed, and receivers verify if operation is valid, and sender is allowed

4- Operations form a Merkel-DAG (similar to git, they link to the tips of current "active state", like a commit/merge in git)

So far I think I've basically described [OrbitDB](https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db)

Consensus is where things get real hard, [OrbitDb seems to use a last-write-wins CRDT](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22920204), and although I don't know the details of orbitDb, I think for many simple use-cases, conflicts can just be resolved on the social layer. But I think we need to provide agents with good tools to resolve conflicts

I'll try my best here with some ideas:

- When merging, we can order operations by their timestamp, if operations enter conflict, raise it to the conflicting agents, or someone with permission to solve them.

If an agent makes public an operation that forks its own history, mark agent as malicious or compromised, alert other agents, this needs resolution on the social layer, you have proof of misconduct, an agent has signed diverging operations

Any operation becomes fully settled if you have proof that all agents of your system have referenced it directly or indirectly through newer operations.

Timestamps can be upgraded by using @opentimestamps to get proof that an operation existed at time X (prevents creation of operations in hindsight). Though this does not prove operation has been made public

Both use OrbitDB: Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web. JavaScript. MIT license. repo

I think a wallet-agnostic memo solution is definitely the way. Having wallets that end up (partly) incompatible is only gonna hurt the UX. Maybe a decentralised DB solution like OrbitDB or GunDB can be the best way forward, although I haven't dove deeply into the docs yet.

Checkout this https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db peer-to-peer database for the decentralized Web.