Subject: Re: ERIS over NNCP

From: Endo Renberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 07 Jan 2024 10:40:48 +0000

Hi John,

ERIS is vague and open-ended, but that is how we like it. One use case is 
for exchanging data in so called "social media" where some content is 
public and needs to be readily cachable to mitigate censorship, and where 
other data is private but still needs to be held and exchanged by 
intermediary hosts. The Spritely project has plans and some prototypes for 
this kind of scenario.

https://spritelyproject.org/

Something that makes ERIS conceptually difficult to handle is that it is 
more relateable to the capability-based security than it is the common 
file-system paradigm. ERIS data is accessed by what we call "read 
capabilities" rather than traversing a mutable hierarchy of directories and 
files or domains and pages.

Making data available without relying on a file-system namespace makes it 
possible to build applications with a security model that makes access to 
data an opt-in process rather than elective attenuation of access during 
deployment.

Experiments have been made to integrate ERIS with the Guix and Nix package 
managers, as these have functional models that where data is implicitly 
immutable. The alternative to the functional package manager is of course 
is solutions like Snap or Flatpak, which I don't think have a coherent 
vision of how to mediate between debious applications and a mutable global 
filesystem namespace.

Another use case for ERIS is for holding semantic data where data semantics 
are independent from storage location. An example of a project that 
combines RDF and ERIS would be openEngiadia.

https://openengiadina.net/

ERIS would also be easier to understand if it came with a global network 
for exchanging data, like BitTorrent. What puts ERIS in strong contrast to 
IPFS is that ERIS wants to avoid this, and ERIS protocol development 
happens with an intention of keeping the core concepts of ERIS independent 
from the medium through which ERIS blocks are exchanged.

I hope that clarifies somewhat,
E.

On Friday 5 January 2024 08:12:21 EET, John Goerzen wrote:
> I did some poking around the ERIS website and I'm wondering if you could
> share examples of projects that are using it, or thoughts on what
> situations it is ideal for?  It sounds very interesting, but I can't
> quite articulate why just yet :-)