Re-Cap: Are We Building a P2P Network?

Communication about Re-Public has been lacking for the past few months, but I'm actually more excited than ever about the short and medium term future for our little project that could.

Here are some quick updates for now and expect some more in-depth roadmap explanations in the coming weeks.

Gather

From December to March was consulting with a very values-aligned company called Gather, which you should go and check out right now. They're starting as a Chrome extension that pulls in your data from an ever-growing list of sources.

Gather: All your data at your fingertips

Your data, your insights, your control

Gather

Re-Pubic Cloud ... Re-Public OS?

After trying to do everything we want on each device we own, it's become clear that Re-Public users will need some sort of cloud where they can aggregate all their data from all their different devices.

We've got an internal prototype for this that looks promising and will hopefully have a way for you to hook up your phone via the mobile app in the coming weeks.

Don't worry, the cloud/server is designed to put you in complete control. Once the Re-Public software sets everything up for you, it's yours to do with whatever you want. Including destroy it. There's nothing Re-Public can do to stop it or recover it for you.

A Peer-to-Peer Network

With the introduction of a cloud server that manages all your data, we are starting to look a bit like a peer-to-peer network. That's because there's no central Re-Public data storage, so it's really just a collection of nodes that can opt-in to sharing data or not.

For those who do decide to share, either for money or other reasons, Re-Public will provide a decentralized coordination layer to allow people to pool their data together to make it more valuable and impactful. More details to come.

Where's the Community?

Many of our initial members came over from the Streamr community, during a time where Discord was the default place to congregate in web3. We also did a fair amount of coordinating on Twitter at that time.

Now that crypto markets are down and Twitter is not a place where we feel comfortable anymore, our community connections have suffered a bit.

Discord is still a good place to connect, and we could use some help keeping it lively in there. Here's the invite link if you need it:

https://discord.gg/ZQRpKdmkrK

We have a Mastodon account here, which will serve the purpose that our Twitter account used to before the Elon takeover:

Re-Public DAO (@[email protected])

9 Posts, 11 Following, 13 Followers · Re-Public is open-source software that allows you to collect data from all your devices and use it to power new experiences and insights. Find the uses for your data that are valuable to you, not a third-party that needs your data to run its business.

Mastodon

But again, we can see that my split between building and communicating has veered heavily towards the building side in the past few months.

This quick update is partially anticipating more exciting things to talk about in the coming weeks so stay tuned.