Very useful overview, thanks!

I appreciate your thoughts on this and wasn’t aware of this lack of encryption for keys. I’d imagine logic can be made to prevent a DHT record from being propagated (like only accepts changes for a set of keys I care to show? or some sort of blacklist like with BitTorrent)?

I find communal storage to be more and more important outside of the West because of its durability and recentering the people instead of the cables as the thing that has to be stewards of the data.

Thank you for the writeup!

Personally I have a pretty low risk tolerance for [nasty/illegal media files] randomly existing on my PC or phone, even temporarily and in an encrypted form (since my device has the key).

Yeah, that’s bad. I can see why they say this is unavoidable: even if you required E2E encryption for files, how do you prevent someone uploading an “encrypted” file that’s actually unencrypted? Although the only reason to do that would be to deliberately spread illegal/compromising content, and it wouldn’t be exactly obvious or easy to find.

To some degree you accept this risk whenever you host an online service that accepts arbitrary data, but the risk feels elevated in the context of software that is explicitly designed to provide anonymous data sharing with onion routing.

Yeah. I long since gave up on the domain of P2P social software with unlimited reach, for similar reasons. A lot of these problems go away if the only peers you exchange data with are members of the user’s direct social circle; although of course it exacerbates connectivity/discovery problems.

I’ve read a fair bit about capabilities. But they’re a very broad technology! I don’t get the impression Veilid is a general purpose capabilities platform like E or Spritely; the website says it’s focused on storing data for social networks.

This is a pretty fair POV, actually. I never thought about it this way. I’m used to network protocols and cryptography in a more academic and formalised format. I see the appeal in doing it this way now.

But I still hope they do put out a formal-ish whitepaper eventually.

They aren’t using CapnProto’s “native” RPC mechanics, they’re just using it for serialisation/deserialisation

I see. That makes sense. I found this veilid chat app demo for python in a fit of rage. Just couldn’t believe there wasn’t any examples. The location wasn’t obvious.

I autogenerated this possibly semi-working pseudo code from chat example code on how to write to and read from veilid’s DHT. The chat example was little too much stuff going on for me to parse:

import logging
import os
import veilid

LOG = logging.getLogger(__name__)

KEY_TABLE = "veilid-demo"

# Retrieve connection details from environment variables with default values.
API_HOST = os.environ.get('VEILID_API_HOST')
API_PORT = int(os.environ.get('VEILID_API_PORT'))

def store_key(conn: veilid.json_api._JsonVeilidAPI, key: str, value: str):
    """Write a single key to the keystore."""
    tdb = conn.open_table_db(KEY_TABLE, 1)
    key_bytes = key.encode()
    value_bytes = value.encode()
    LOG.debug(f"Storing {key_bytes=}, {value_bytes=}")
    tdb.store(key_bytes, value_bytes)

def load_key(conn: veilid.json_api._JsonVeilidAPI, key: str) -> str:
    """Read a single key from the keystore."""
    tdb = conn.open_table_db(KEY_TABLE, 1)
    key_bytes = key.encode()
    LOG.debug(f"Loading {key_bytes=}")
    value = tdb.load(key_bytes)
    LOG.debug(f"Got {value=}")
    return value.decode() if value is not None else None

def main():
    # Connect to the Veilid API using environment variables
    conn = veilid.json_api_connect(API_HOST, API_PORT)

    while True:
        choice = input("Choose: (w)rite, (r)ead, or (q)uit: ")
        if choice == 'w':
            key = input("Enter the key to write: ")
            value = input("Enter the value to write: ")
            store_key(conn, key, value)
            print("Data stored successfully!")
        elif choice == 'r':
            key = input("Enter the key to read: ")
            value = load_key(conn, key)
            if value:
                print(f"Value: {value}")
            else:
                print("No data found for the given key.")
        elif choice == 'q':
            print("Exiting.")
            break
        else:
            print("Invalid choice.")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG)
    main()