Horcrux

And do you call it shards?

I have completely scrubbed the word shards from my app and like marketing materials.

Yeah.

And it, almost all of the code.

So I'm happy to use that term on the podcast.

What I found is that trying to have the consistent metaphor of keys and vaults.

So I call them keys in the app, which is also confusing for those of us who know who are used to having like scuttlebutt keys.

Super confusing.

Stuff like that.

But for people, I don't know, for the people I was testing with, the metaphor of needing multiple keys to open a vault landed a lot better than the metaphor of like bringing these shards together to reassemble a crystal or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, that makes sense.

I'm not convinced that I have, you know, like the perfect language and metaphor and everything.

Well, maybe that can be a shout out.

We can ask for suggestions from people who listened to this episode.

Okay, cool.

I might actually keep this part.

Okay.

Because I think that's interesting.

But before we get too much deep into interesting stuff, let's just start.

You ready?

Okay.

I'm ready.

Welcome to today's episode of solar cast.

And today we're joined by Matt Lawrence.

And Matt Lawrence has been working on a project that is an evolution of a fan favorite, one could say, back in the day it was called dark crystal.

And it became famous for being a distributed or decentralized way to get back access to your account if you lost your private key without having the need for a centralized admin of sorts.

And Matt has evolved this concept quite far in his project called Horcrux.

And today we're going to hear more about the status and the evolution so far.

Now without further ado, let's dive in.

So good to have you here, Matt.

And we recently met for the first time ever, even though we've known each other for longer at the D web camp.

And that was this summer in Berlin.

Yeah, it was a great time.

It was my first time in Berlin, first time in Germany.

And yeah, first time meeting several people that I only knew on the internet.

And it's quite interesting because your project, Horcrux, is kind of an evolution of a project that I guess you heard about from the internet.

But like, did you, were you physically in touch or were you part of the crew that was like the predecessor with like dark crystal?

Or how has that evolved?

Yeah, so I was not part of the crew.

I was just a fan of the dark crystal project back in the day when they were working on Scuttlebutt.

They had some pieces integrated into the patch bay client.

And I think that's where I first learned about this nerdy algorithm called Shamir Secret Sharing.

The idea of social backup, you know, like having your friends essentially be responsible for, or be the source of truth for which, which key on the network is yours.

But essentially who you are on the internet, you know, not having a corporation or just a single private key be the, like, the final source on that was really compelling.

So you're diving straight in. And for those who have heard of dark crystal, this might be familiar.

But for those who have not, if we take two steps back and look at like, why did it matter?

Or what was it that inspired you about dark crystal originally and what is that you're carrying with you into Horcrux?

Yeah, that's a great question.

I mean, I feel like I trace a lot of my current work back to where I was in university.

You know, I think I had just switched to computer science as my major and the Edward Snowden revelations came out.

And that was really like a fork in the road for me.

I think I got into computers and technology and programming because it was fun.

It felt powerful and a way to express myself creatively.

But that was like a, the turning point for me of like, oh, these are not just fun tools.

You know, those were the early days of like Twitter and Facebook and what did it feel like back then?

To me as a, you know, as a young man, it just, it just felt fun.

Like it was fun to learn from other people that I found interesting.

You know, back then I was all into iOS development and all these indie iOS developers, you know, kind of living this, this dream of like working on some little app that you're passionate about and finding, paying customers in this new app store ecosystem that didn't, it didn't make a lot of sense to people back then that people would pay money for apps.

But they were and people were making livings. That was kind of like my, yeah, my entry point into, into the career anyway.

Yeah. But then you kind of diverged from the path of app developer in the OS environment, so to speak.

And took a turn towards peer to peer.

What brought you there and eventually towards start crystal?

Yeah. So that, that moment led me down a path of, of, of feeling some responsibility of like, oh, like I, I need to be investigating these alternatives.

Like I need to be using them because like how, how, how, how are, you know, how is my grandma ever going to like get off of Facebook unless I first get off of Facebook and like find something, find the better thing or.

Yeah. And so, yeah, that's what led me on to these alternative networks of, you know, tent and it was app.net and eventually I found scuttlebutt and.

And yeah, that's, that's where I encountered dark crystal and honestly a whole subculture that I was, you know, a solar punk and even just like a lot of more progressive values in general that I really.

Hadn't been exposed to in that way.

Yeah.

Yeah. So the, these ideas that, you know, that corporations should not be, should not be the ones having the final say about who gets to participate in the internet.

What happens to your data? How is it used?

And to today where now we have a whole different scale of information and essentially behavior control that has developed out of these big tech companies.

I think that's for a lot of people is what has led to this generation of P2P or self sovereign identity networks and protocols.

Consistently the biggest hurdle on these protocols for most people is key management, right? Because instead of having a email address and a password,

you can reset anytime you forget it.

You essentially have this private key, which is like a password that no one can reset for you.

And you are expected to keep it extremely safe and yeah, this just doesn't work for normal people, right? It never really has.

And so this whole space I've.

It's also the shift going from having like an account where you sign up with your email and you just press, I forgot my password and like the amount of times I've registered to get like an account and then immediately within two minutes, like lost my password.

It's like a lot.

And I mean, it's not as easy to lose your private key necessarily, but I mean, since it's stored on your computer locally.

But still, if you lose it, you lose access to everything.

And as you say, there's no central point of access.

There's no admin you can write that's like, oh yeah, retrieve your key for you.

But like before we dive into how to retrieve your key, why have that system at all?

Why why have a key based identity system digitally rather than like logins?

Oh yeah, that's that's a great question.

I mean, I think there's some consensus now that like representing people with keys is actually also not great.

Just like making making some corporation the authority on your identity on who you are and what you can do.

It's also, there are also many problems with representing one person as one key.

But I think the reason that it's that it's taken off and the reason that a lot of these networks use it despite knowing that we need to do better is because of the cryptography, like the math that exists around.

A public key cryptography allows you to prove, essentially give it some data and you can prove to others that it's from you, which means it opens up possibilities for all these other types of systems where the infrastructure is kind of separate from the integrity of the data.

And I think what that means for normal people is that like, is that we don't have to trust these particular like servers or companies or anything.

So like on Secure Scuttle, but you can you can pass, you know, messages are passed around over a gossip protocol.

So I might get your messages from someone else and I'm still able to verify that they came from me.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So why, because you mentioned that there's like critique and that there's now like a sort of the direction conversations are going is that like key pairs are not good for it entities.

And you said that that critique exists, but not exactly what it is.

I'm really curious now.

What is the current critique towards that system?

I'm not the best person to speak on this.

I wish I were.

I know I've read some really great articles by Philip Sheldrake on this and a lot of people in the Medigov community, I think, are making a big push right now towards experiments with alternatives.

I'm sure there are others too, but I think part of the critique is that keys are too reducible.

There's also, I think, a lot of energy behind people having different identities or like different contexts in which we present ourselves.

Like we do this socially all the time in person.

On the internet, it's really unnatural for kind of like this one identifier to follow you around to all these other, all these different systems and contexts.

And so even as humans, like we don't just assume one identity.

And so having one key is problematic in that way as well.

Like having an identity, like a password manager kind of situation or distributed identity.

That's possible and I think some systems do this.

Part of the reason why I think more of our decentralized protocols haven't taken this on is that the cryptography for it is really hard.

And then the UX on top of the cryptography.

Like how do you even talk to users about multiple keys in your app and how you manage them?

To my knowledge, there are no systems being used by more than 100 people that have actually done.

The thing that we all want I think which is a system of strong rotation and having morality of identities that are in some sense loosely tied to a human.

Do you think that's because the use case patterns just haven't really like fallen into place because humans aren't used to using these systems?

Or because financial incentives aren't there to make decentralized systems flourish?

Or is it a multitude of them?

I think it's probably both, you know.

And I guess one of the critiques that you mentioned earlier on was the aspect of like what do you do when you lose your key and how risky that is.

And I guess this is exactly one of the main challenge that Horcrux seeks to solve.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Horcrux is coming at this problem from the direction of like how could we incorporate more social into these kind of anti-social, anti-human, strict key systems.

So it's not a silver bullet.

It does not solve all these problems with keys, but it certainly is solving some problems in a way that I think is consistent with the values that a lot of us share.

Solving social trust with social solutions rather than solving social trust with mathematical solutions, which oftentimes in cryptography scenes, like because one's dealing with keys and security, there's so many different attempts at solving a social issue with a mathematical solution.

And that's something really beautiful that I think about this core idea.

But before we dive into talking about it too much because there's a bunch of different side aspects here, could you just like give us the rundown?

What is it?

Yeah, so Horcrux is an app that helps you back up sensitive data to the devices of your friends and family or whoever you choose.

There's some cryptography there.

There's a lot more that we'll get into, but at a root level, it's a backup tool.

Back up to what pictures, for how far does it extend?

How far can we draw this abstraction?

I mean, I think I like to say sensitive data.

So the things that I think of primarily are keys.

Some keys, not every key belongs in the system.

I've really been interested in the use case of digital wills and inheritance plans, like a...

What happens to this data or what happens to the digital parts of me when I'm gone?

And like, who's gonna do what?

You know, like there's...

Yeah, I think.

So there are also like, things like passwords, two-factor authentication codes and like backup codes that I think fit well into this.

But really, conceptually and technically, you can have a vault of arbitrary size.

WorkRx doesn't support arbitrary size yet, but...

Yeah, but this is really cool because this is completely changing my interpretation of it.

Because Dark Crystal, back in the day, the original project that both you and I knew of was specifically for keys, right?

As we've been talking about up until now.

But you're actually extending it to be really...

What was the term you used?

Sensitive data.

Yeah, sensitive data. That's really cool.

And it also makes more sense with the earlier discussion that I've decided to keep in before we started the interview.

Which, where you talked about like the use case of the terms, like shards was very common.

Way of talking about like the pieces of a private key.

And now you said that you're calling it multiple keys, which of course, as you mentioned, has double connotation for people who are in cryptography.

Is that that's kind of what you mean then, that you can kind of unlock a vault if we stick to the metaphor.

Like, how does it work? Like, let's say, okay, let's walk through a case.

Yeah, so I'm gonna walk through like my primary use case, to be honest.

I have a group of friends and we have all had this shared problem for a while, which is that we all are home labbers, right?

We have computers servers running at our house and we like to self host services.

Like, I have my password manager on my home server, you know, I have all of our family photos backed up there.

So we have kind of, we've mutually agreed, even before I started working on Horcrux, we had a mutual agreement that like,

hey, anything happens to one of us.

The others of us will help wind down, help each other's families and partners like,

tear down these servers, move the services to places that make sense and take care of that.

And so we're always like, yeah, it would be great if we had a tool to do this.

Because we don't just want to get, you know, we could, like, I would trust them.

I would give them the, you know, the root password to my Linux server.

But they don't really want, want it.

Like, they don't want it just sitting in their password manager.

Nope.

And so, and they don't want it just like on, yeah, like, I don't want to just put it in my safe or something, you know,

bury it in the backyard on a, on a piece of paper.

So, yeah.

So the way this would work in Horcrux is that I download the app.

I create a vault, I give it a name and then I, there's a text field, right?

You know, that I can put in arbitrary text.

So I might say, like, hey, yeah, my server is at this IP address.

Here's, you know, it's, it's running.

Here's where it's physically located in my house.

Here's the, the root user name and password.

And then on the server, I've got a, you know, maybe I got a document that lays out what's running here and what,

what I think you should do with these services and where you should move this data or where the data is.

And then Horcrux walks you through the process of inviting what I call stewards.

So stewards are the people who are going to hold the keys to your vault and, and let you open it.

So you get to decide how many keys to make and how many keys are required to open the vault.

And then you give one key to each steward.

So in my case, you know, I would, there are like three stewards that I would add and I'd probably set my threshold at two.

So it, this vault takes two keys to open and I'd hold a key myself.

So I make four keys. Horcrux gives you a little, you know, like invitation link that you send to your friends.

They download Horcrux. They open it up and they get asked like, Hey, you know, Matt's asking you to steward to become a steward of his vault.

Here's what that means. Do you agree? And if you say yes, then there's a little handshake between my own and yours.

And, and then once all the stewards have joined, the data is divided up.

So you can see the key is encrypted and the key is divided into four pieces. You can think of it.

But in this special way, using some cool math where only two are required to reassemble the whole key and decrypt the vault.

And then those keys are pushed out onto these relay servers and your stewards download them onto their devices, along with the encrypted vault payload.

And then you're, then you're backed up. So then you're in a steady state. And when the time comes to recover, there's, there's a recovery, you know, wizard and process whereby somebody, any steward actually can initiate recovery,

which I think this is another difference from, from Dark Crystal, but someone initiates recovery and then all this, every steward gets a push notification that says, Hey, this person's trying to open the vault.

So you're requesting your key, including the main owner gets a push notification in case they're not like, and there's a section in there. You can, as the owner, you get to write instructions that everyone sees.

So, you know, you might put something like before you, you know, open the vault, like, please get on a video call together, like with all the stewards or, you know, or, you know, meet, or, you know, check with my partner and like make sure that this is legit or something.

Or, you know, only open if I am dead. So things like that. And so then each steward has to make that decision. You know, this is, you're trusting these people to, to honor your wishes in some sense, although you get some redundancy there, right?

Like, if two people want to collude against you, but you set your threshold to three, then you're still safe.

This is so great. Yeah, when, whenever start that recovery session gets all the keys back, then, then they're able to decrypt, decrypt the contents.

First of all, immediate thing that pops into my mind is there was actually an issue. A heist was used that I talked about it with Kate, who was on the podcast earlier.

And it was a heist in like Southeast Asia of like 50 million. I think it was Singaporean dollars or something.

And it was done via a video call where a bunch of people had to confirm that this transfer was supposed to be done, but every person in the video call was a deep fake of the executives of the company.

And I'm thinking like already there, like, Horcrux solves that issue.

Like, this is already an issue of like, for example, for large transfers of money that has not been solved by even banks or like multinational corporations yet Horcrux is solving it in a way that improves the already existing social protocols at place.

Because I guess even if you have the deep fakes, you would not have access to everyone's apps at the same time as having the deep fakes.

For example, that's true.

Steward impersonation can be a problem with Horcrux, but yeah, I think by itself, like in this sort of situation where the confirmation was consent on a video call, you're right.

Like they would have also needed access to enough of the keys to the vault and the vault data as well as the consent of a bunch of parties.

And yeah, as I've worked on the project, it's interesting you mentioned banks because somebody recently told me that like they knew of banks in France that actually do manage some of their cryptographic keys using Shamiya's secret sharing, which is the underlying algorithm.

Yeah.

So I need, I want to learn more about that, obviously.

I haven't done my homework on that yet.

But yeah, it's a, it's a common problem, I think, and it's only going to get more important maybe as we, as we continue marching into the information age with AI and.

Yeah, all the impersonation methods that are unlocked there.

Yay!

Another reason to love AI.

Sorry.

I'm sorry.

Sarcasm, of course.

But the other thing that I said that I did not want to lose track of in my own brain was, oh yeah.

So when we were at DWebCamp, we had a conversation because I was super thrilled because it's been a reoccurring conversation throughout my years of being in the peer to peer spaces or peer for peer spaces.

And that, the challenge of like, what do you do when you lose your private key and, and Dark Crystal kept being brought up.

And the reason I was told back in the day by someone, and I don't know where this started, it was from the grapevines, you know, was, I told you this at DWeb as well, was that the reason Dark Crystal stopped being used or stopped being developed was that they couldn't figure out the issue

of how to get the keys back to the people who lost the keys.

Because what it was then was like, you had a network that was most likely peer to peer and you wanted to send the keys back over the network that you had lost the keys to.

So then if you have lost the keys, you can't get access to the shards anymore.

And then how do you solve that without giving also emails or whatever.

So how A, how have you solved that and B, you told me something really interesting at DWeb Camp last, which was that there's actually a whole other issue which has to do with a sense of responsibility and not trust, but yeah, you can fill us in on that one.

But first off, how do you access the keys or the secrets or the sensitive data via the app?

Like, do you log in normally? Like email, how does that work?

I think to answer your first question, I have totally sidesteped the problem that Dark Crystal was having, or rather I think I'm solving a slightly different use case, where I have not tried to solve the problem.

So I think to solve the problem of how do you, yeah, then get the key back to the original owner when the only method of communication of secure communication that you have is the protocol itself.

Or the key that you're trying to restore.

So I assume that you have out of band communication, like the invitation links.

So you know, they're safe to like just text message, even unencrypted email to your stewards.

So you leave it kind of agnostic. People can choose to communicate however they want outside of like the application itself.

That's right. Yeah. And so, you know, that's a strength and a weakness, right? Like in some ways you're, then if you choose insecure methods of side channel communication, then you're decreasing the security of the overworld.

But that's what I think I didn't see away. Like it would have been easy for me to add encrypted messaging into the app because because I've built on the nostril protocol, which which has support for that.

But I chose not to for that same reason. If you're backing up your key that you use for the app, then yeah, you're presented with kind of this intractable problem.

Is this the two generals problem? You can't authenticate the other person until you have a secure method of communication or something.

I may be totally butchering that. I'm looking it up. The two generals problem is a computer science.exferium.

Two generals trying to agree on this exact time to attack when they can only communicate by sending messages through an unreliable enemy held area.

It seems like it. There's more to it. But something like that. Because messages and their confirmation is going to be good.

Something like that. Cool. So maybe this dovetails into your into your other question, which is, you know, how is your how do you get into Horcrux?

And the answer is with a key, of course. I already mentioned I'm using the nostril protocol. The nostril protocol uses uses public private keys.

And I don't talk a lot about key management. So this is, I guess you could say an experiment that I'm doing where when you join the app, especially if you're a steward, like I do offer you the option to log in.

I call them accounts even, but to log in with an existing account or create a new one. If you tap login, then it says some words about nostril.

But I've tried not to make the protocol like part of the UX as much as I can avoid it. And so if you create a new account, it actually will then offer as your first Horcrux vault to back up your private key in a vault.

And it walks you through walks you through that process. So can you then save your private key? Do you get prompted to like save your private key for your Horcrux account as soon as you create it?

Like, do you know what I mean? Like, how does that work? Like if you know, I guess that then we're back at the two generals problem. If that's what it is.

Yes, so the current flow is not ideal. And I know what I want to build and haven't had the time to build this flow nicely, like a nice UX into the app.

So right now I think when you onboard, it asks you pretty early on, like, why are you here essentially? Like, are you here as a steward? Like, did somebody invite you? Are you here to create a vault?

There's an option for, like, I lost my key to Horcrux. And what it currently does is it takes you to like a wall of text. That basically explains like if you backed up your key in Horcrux, you need to have a steward restore it.

And then somehow securely send you the key. I'm thinking back on a conversation I had recently. I was talking to ADZ about Pyjapanda and more like the general concepts.

And a nostril was mentioned there and specifically like the data types of nostril, which was different than a lot of other protocols.

But I think my question is more general. Why did you choose the nostril protocol and how tied to the nostril protocol is it? Like, it sounds like it's quite agnostic. You could use it for pretty much sharding any, or not sharding. I'm using old terminology.

We're pretty much distributing keys towards any sort of vault or a secret.

Yeah. The main reason I chose nostril is because, like, sitting back and thinking about this as a tool, especially the digital will inheritance planning use case that's been my primary focus is one of the main features of this kind of system is that it should still work.

In like 50 or 100 years, which is kind of a silly thing to think about because obviously technology is going to look much different, I'm sure, in 50 to 100 years.

But if we were going to have some software that you could still run, and maybe more importantly, some data that you could still read and interact with in that sort of timeframe, it should be really simple.

It should use as many standard, widely used conventions and protocols as possible.

And that's sort of what nostril is. It's like, I think the founder called it the simplest decentralized protocol that could work, or censorship resistant protocol that could work or something like that.

But, you know, nostril is essentially for those who understand these terms, it's JSON arbitrary, more or less arbitrary JSON signed by keys.

And they're like, the keys format is the same as Bitcoin, which is like pretty popular.

And JSON is like the most popular data format of the internet.

And then the transmission of these signed JSON blobs are these really simple relay servers that are just, you know, store and forward servers.

It's just a plain server on the internet.

There's a small query language for like getting the events that you're interested in that you can implement in an afternoon.

Like you could write your own relay server.

And so, yeah, these pieces seemed appropriate for this type of tool.

But to answer the second part of your question, it's very, it's pretty agnostic.

Like, so the Horcrux protocol you could say, because Horcrux is open source, it's free.

There's a draft sub spec, essentially, that details how the data model and the data transmission work, so that somebody else could write their own app or for Corecrux.

And it would still be fully compatible with Horcrux.

Like I could even own a vault and you could be a steward and you could be using a separate app.

Like if we spoke the same language, right?

So the Horcrux sub protocol is really also, I've tried to keep it a simple, stateless, not 100% stateless, but stateless system of exchanging data.

And if I wanted to exchange that data over Iro or P2Panda or Willow, like it wouldn't be that hard.

It's really the transport layer is completely separate from the data layer.

And in fact, that's something I've been thinking a lot about because Horcrux is not really a local first app exactly because by default,

it's going to take your data and put it on the nostril relay servers that you choose.

And it's going to sit there for a while.

And at the end of the day, like that's how all these P2P protocols work is like even Iro, you know, you're going through other people's computers.

The point is that the data and the metadata as much as possible is hidden from those infrastructure providers passing the data to the people you actually want to get it to.

But Horcrux is local first in the sense that if you get a signed piece of JSON into the app, it doesn't really matter how it got there.

It is not relying on any like there's no privileged third party server or like piece of infrastructure that you need.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, I think so.

There's one follow up here.

I think I remember was it the data types that nostril uses?

Is that like grow only sets?

No, nostril doesn't use grow only sets.

In fact, so the data model, the JSON is similar to very similar to the scuttlebutt data format, but it's missing the sequence number.

So instead of all these signed JSON blobs being in a chain, they're just free, free radicals floating around the interwebs, which is kind of nostril strength and it's core weakness.

Yeah.

So I have yet to look into nostril so much because I heard all these bad rumors about it.

But I'll ask you more into it after this interview or if this conversation.

But I'm curious to hear a bit.

I'm happy to talk about it on the partners in fact.

Maybe I should because that's the community that has developed around, especially the public.

You know, nostril is an acronym for notes and other stuff transmitted by relays.

And notes is the name for the data type.

It's essentially like a tweet, like a micro block.

A public and public text that you've published that you want everyone to see.

And so, yeah, so there's a community and a culture that's heavily populated by Bitcoin maximalists, which was not a term I was.

I knew before I got on nostril.

Is this anonymous with crypto rose?

So they would be very upset if you called them crypto bros.

Because I think what it means to be a Bitcoin maximalist is like Bitcoin is the only good cryptocurrency.

Everything else is like some worse fork of Bitcoin.

And Bitcoin is like the primary tool through which we can achieve the sorts of social revolutions that we need.

Or that they want to see in the world, which when I say social revolutions, probably the things that come to mind are not.

I'm hasn't yet unconvinced.

But maybe I'm going to see the big picture.

I am with you there.

And so nostril is a community is problematic and has been problematic.

It's widely acknowledged now even by the core community that their Bitcoin maximalism is an issue for nostril.

Because the technology I think is very interesting.

In many ways, it's the JavaScript of nerds.

It's the JavaScript of decentralized protocols.

JavaScript is a horrible programming language.

And everyone knows it.

And it's like, was made by someone, I guess the initial version was made in like a day or two or something.

And it shows.

And yet it's the most popular language in the world.

So nostril is similar by glossing over a lot of the thornier issues that a lot of the more mature and strict protocols have.

And it's allowed a high degree of experimentation and flexibility that I think is interesting.

You know, I'm not here to say that like this is the best decentralized protocol or that it's going to take over the world.

But I do think like it's, you know, for projects like Horcrux, I honestly think it's like the best protocol out there right now.

I'm not going to debate you on that one.

And I think you know best as the one who's developing the protocol.

And if someone wants to debate you on that one, how do they reach out and get in touch?

Yes.

The easiest way is probably my personal website, mattlarens.com.

And I have links there to my other, you know, my nostril profile, my mastodon, my blue sky.

Is there a space like we're talking about this or is it like in the repo of Horcrux?

I have not set up like a community space for this yet. No. No, I would like to though.

That's a good idea. So I've just released 1.0 like a few weeks ago.

And...

Exciting!

Yeah, congratulations.

Thank you. It's been a huge milestone in a lot of ways. It feels like the beginning.

Like the end of phase one. But there's so much work still to be done to make this...

At the stage you'd like it to see?

I want to say.

Yeah. To help it live up to what it could be.

Yeah. I mean, it sounds like it can be a lot. And it sounds like there's so many different now, like, implementation options for it.

Which is sometimes a blessing and a curse, like knowing what to focus on.

But it sounds like you've also focused in on like wills and things of that nature, which is a really interesting use case as well.

And something that's unresolved as up to you yet.

Yeah, I think one way that I think about it is it's a social layer for a bunch of systems that didn't have one before, right?

Yeah. I'm super excited and keen to follow the project and the progress of workworks.

So if you do end up creating a channel, I'll want to lurk.

I don't know if I'll sign up on the nostril one, but...

Exactly. Where would you like the channel to be?

Tell me, where do we even gather these days?

That's actually... I think that's one of the reasons I started this podcast, actually.

Because we stopped having a space together in the same way.

Like, there's a lot of different gathering points, I think, right now.

But something that was as much of a hub as Scuttlebutt was back then, I haven't encountered.

But I mean, there's a lot of group chats on DeltaChat that I'm seeing, and DeltaChat is moving in the peer-to-peer direction.

Bonfire is pretty cool, but that's more federated.

But there also, I heard talks about moving in a peer-to-peer direction.

Let's see. I mean, Mastodon in general is a big space.

And now there's a spacious, which we tried out, which might become something for more like...

More akin to maybe Discord or like Asynchronous Voice Chat.

Let's run over peer-to-panda.

But yeah, honestly, I think there's a gap to be filled.

I've been missing it myself.

And I think in general, people are missing it right now.

But that's for the peer-to-peer enthusiasts.

I've been noticing that in general, like, people who are coming from like Facebook world or Instagram world

are feeling similarly about Mastodon, as maybe people felt about like Scuttlebutt.

But yeah, the prepper in me does not see it as enough to just be federated.

Yeah.

What do you think?

Is that the sense... Have you got the same sense as me there?

Yeah, 100%.

But we'll wait. I feel like the protocol developments are going so fast right now.

And things are happening at such a speed that I don't think is going to be long until there's...

There's a new space for us to gather.

If you hear something, let me know.

I'll join in.

I'll be listening here to find out.

Alright, alright.

We'll see, we'll see.

But thank you so much for joining that.

And it was so lovely meeting you in person for the first time.

Yeah.

And I really... Where do people follow what's been happening?

If there's not a space to gather and talk about it, where do people follow? Updates.

I've been posting updates on Blue Sky, Mastodon, and Nostor in Scuttlebutt.

So find me on your preferred...

Yeah, the major project updates are going on all four of those.

Awesome!

There's plenty of spaces to keep up to date then.

And last but not least, and this is a bit of a boring question to end on,

but I want to ask it because it's a tradition that I always ask about this,

because it's a challenge everyone in the open source spaces dealing with,

how are you funding this development?

Yes. Great question.

I received a grant a year ago.

We were just finished actually from a foundation called OpenSats.org.

And they are a private foundation that is mostly interested in funding open source Bitcoin tech,

which I don't have.

Horcrux has nothing to do with Bitcoin, but they have a like Nostor-focused fund.

And that's who funded phase one.

I'm looking for more funding right now actually.

I'm planning to reapply with them.

And I'm also looking for collaborators.

Like, I don't want this to be just my thing.

And I wish that I could have done phase one with a larger group of collaborators.

But as I'm sure you know and have discussed, like,

the shape of the funding absolutely influences the shape of these projects.

And yeah, I'll also stay tuned for when we get that figured out.

I heard some very interesting about some very interesting experiments at DWebCamp this year.

Yeah.

You know, people are always trying things.

So I'm looking forward to the day when we can find ways to pool our resources and distribute them.

Yeah.

That more aligns with our values.

Yeah, definitely.

Very cool, very cool indeed.

And that will be a conversation for the future.

I don't know when and I don't know where.

But until then, have a great one, Matt.

And talk to you later.

You too.

Bye.

So you can ask.