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. Our codebase is mostly Rust, but we also write a fair amount of Swift and TypeScript. In time there will be need for other language skills as well.
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
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. Our codebase is mostly Rust, but we also write a fair amount of Swift, TypeScript, Python, and others...
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
> There should be only one namespace, not many. @gordon/composability shouldn't be different than @simon/composability.
Thanks for this interesting provocation!
In Noosphere and Subconscious, we are trying to relax the tension between "I can write to any name in the space" and "I don't want what I write to be clobbered by other people writing to the same name in the space."
So, you have a personal scope where only you have write access. We call it a sphere. Within the sphere, you save files to a flat namespace. Other users can write to the same flat namespace in their spheres. And, when you follow another user, Subconscious will collide the namespaces in the UI. So, the content in @gordon/composability and @simon/composability will appear next to each other.
Hey, thanks for the anecdote. It resonates with what I have come to realize about note taking: it is a personalized activity, and whatever keeps me in the habit of taking notes may or may not work for anyone else.
Inevitably, Subconscious (our companion notebook app) will manifest some opinions that not everyone will love. But, it has some qualities that you may find appealing (given your stated preferences):
When we say "decentralized," we don't mean that your data is deliberately scattered around the network; we mean that the underlying infrastructure providers are fungible.
In other words, you own your data because you can change infrastructure providers as it suits you, and other users who interact with you on the network generally won't notice or otherwise care that you did that.
Yes, it should be possible. Wikipedia is one of the great treasure troves of knowledge on the hypertext web. We want it to be very easy for Wikipedia-like things to emerge from Noosphere.
Anytype seems to be playing in the same general space that we are. But, all I know about it is what I can glean from their website, so I can't say for sure how similar it is in concrete terms.
To offer one distinction: while both projects are at an early stage and undergoing development, Noosphere has been open source from the beginning. You can scrutinize our work and kick the cans on it today (warning: very alpha / do not use in production). We invite active participation from all who are interested, and welcome contributions to our Github projects.
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.
You're not missing something. It's a little reductive, but the protocol did start with the use case of "notes on IPFS."
One of the essential benefits of this protocol above and beyond content stored on IPFS is: you get human-readable names for your content and your peers, and you can use those names to form links that refer to other data. Memos give us a way to deliver free-form headers up-front that are also decoupled from the raw data of the content, which is very nice to have when resolving links to content you don't know much about.
Other protocols in this domain start with the premise: in order to organize thought, we should crystalize the data structures to represent thought.
In our approach we seek to develop a substrate that such data structures may emerge from, but without a rigid presumption of how they ought to form (or even that there should be only one representation).
> a substrate that such data structures may emerge from, but without a rigid presumption of how they ought to form
Are there Math theorems that "proves" this sort of "highly abstract" level of designs?
Are there Academics working on this? or is this uncharted territory?
Gordon is the better founder to ask this question of. Alas, he does not dwell on Hacker News. I'm just the resident code monkey, but I'll offer you some of Gordon's topical blog posts for consideration:
Thanks, this all looks really neat. Just getting my head around it though. I've been interested in IPFS for a long time, but still haven't dug into it.
Hi there, I work with Gordon (OP) on Subconscious and Noosphere.
This is a topic that we take seriously and think about a lot together. We've had some good discussions in our Discord, and some of our motivating goals have manifested as issues on Github: https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere/issues?q=is...
Our work is open source, and we are building it in the open hand-in-hand with our community. I personally respond to as many issues and stray comments on Discord as I can. If this is a topic that you care about, your feedback, comments and ideas would be very welcome.
> I would push the protocol authors to fully consider the ramifications of doxxing, harassment, accidental self-disclosure, etc—especially in authoritarian nations. If they don't have a story for how they'll handle this, it's not an appropriate foundation for the internet of ideas.
My personal opinion is that we need more than a story. Our users need tools that empower them to be in control of their data, and that includes being able to keep private data private, fix mistakes and execute countermeasures when they are threatened with abuse.
And it's true: immutable data is a double-edged sword. The primary benefit we seek from it is content addressing, which enables us to look up some data in a way that makes data providers fungible. This has an advantage when it comes to censorship: if censored network A can't give you your data, you may be able to find it on uncensored network B as long as your know the content address. It also presents a challenge: sometimes a user may rightly wish for data to be removed from the network; content addressing creates the possibility that an abuser may have access to data in a way that further dis-empowers users who are already vulnerable today.
Here is a strong opinion (weakly held) that I have about mutability: the "mutability" of the hypertext web has not spared us from the kinds of danger described above. We have leaned on mutability as a privacy crutch, and in turn we have excused ourselves from providing capabilities and interfaces that enable real privacy and agency for users under threat. For example, a user may think a Snap message is extra private - from their perspective, the message is ephemeral - but others will still find ways to make copies and propagate the data across the network, and Snap the company certainly has access to the data (perhaps in perpetuity). What recourse does that user have once their data escapes the mutable sandbox?
It's possible that immutable data will enable us to build better tools for taking pro-active action against abuse. For example: today on the hypertext web, the recourse for most users to head off the propagation of harmful data is to reach out to service providers individually, file abuse claims and hope that the content is eventually removed. Victims are burdened with both identifying that the data is stored with a provider, and also the clerical task of reporting the abuse over and over again. In a world with content addressing, anti-abuse filters full of content addresses may propagate fluidly from provider to provider, which suggests a far less burdensome process for the abuse victim - they don't need to know that the content has surfaced on some provider in the distance, because the provider is already aware of the abuse claim and can pro-actively refuse to propagate the data.
In the end, I think the best solutions to the problems of this kind of abuse will be social/legal ones, supported by a technical foundation that can enable pro-active countermeasures.
All that said, I'm not an expert on this topic, I just like to spend a lot of time thinking about it. If you or someone else reading this is an expert, and you have some time to spare, please come hang out in our Discord or on Github and teach us what you know!
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. Our codebase is mostly Rust, but we also write a fair amount of Swift and TypeScript. In time there will be need for other language skills as well.
We're looking for a few more folks to help bring our work into the world. Specifically, we are hiring:
Some topical links: If you are interested, please drop us a line to introduce yourself at work@subconscious.network