How many of you are planning to leave behind the clearnet and rely on SAFE for all your internet needs as much as possible? I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I thought it would be good to discuss some ideas here.
Here are my thoughts on what will and won’t be possible to do through SAFE Network at launch.
Anything related to interacting with institutions such as government and banks will probably have to be done through clearnet for the time being. You could theoretically hire a proxy, but you would have to trust them with a lot of sensitive information.
Online shopping should pose less of a problem to use a proxy. You could pay them in crypto, and all you’d need to trust them with is a delivery address. If you use something like Amazon lockers, it doesn’t even need to be yours.
Videos and media shouldn’t be a problem. There will probably be plenty of uploads, and if you can’t find the particular video you want, you can pay someone to upload it for you. But you might have to use clearnet to support the original creator.
Games are a mixed bag. While there will undoubtedly be plenty of uploads of single player games and multiplayer games developed specifically for the SAFE Network, you might have to go to the clearnet to find your favorites, especially if they have an online component.
In terms of research and information, I have no doubt that someone will find a way to mirror Wikipedia on the SAFE Network fairly quickly, and probably other major sources or information too, but if you’re looking for something specific, you’ll want to search both the SAFE Network and the clearnet.
Social media shouldn’t be a problem. I’m sure there will be plenty of good platforms. But they won’t have your friends, initially. As soon as SAFE goes up, someone should launch a service that provides a directory of leavers. To this, you could submit all your old social media handles and connect them to a SAFE identity so all your friends can find you as soon as they’re ready to adopt the SAFE Network. Ideally, this service would verify that you own those social media accounts, even though that would require centralization.
Any other potential difficulties you can think of with leaving the clearnet entirely?
Probably related to a couple of the cases you already wrote about: every time you fill out some sort of application or form they have a spot for email address. They’re not going to know what to do if you provide your SAFE WebID, so I think it will be pretty hard to get away from using email.
Hm, I didn’t think of email. While it wouldn’t be hard in theory to set up an email service you can access through SAFE, that would be centralization and thus not in the spirit of SAFE. Plus, without the giants involved it might be hard to find one you can count on to stick around as long as you need it. That’s why I gave up on XMPP.
But yeah, in theory you’d only need it to access clearnet services anyway.
Lets face it there will be a lot of services that we will need to access post SAFE launch.
How many will depend on personal usage. SMTP, NNTP, NTP, shopping (food, goods, major stores etc), Government Services, Banking are just a few of the things.
After a couple of years of operation, well hopefully it will be a different story.
In any case it is not much use having “gateways” to these sorts of things because clearnet works better than gateways since the data is still stored in their servers and gateways slow things down and introduces further complications/security issues.
The clearnet will have to change and I think SAFE will make it more transparent. I really hope it raises the bar on it. But its a server based system its fundamentally flawed.
“Gateways” can at least protect anonymity, at least in the cases where the service doesn’t require you to provide identifying information. Admittedly, that wouldn’t be the case with government services and banking, but a certain amount of shopping could be done that way.
Not really because I give them my name address anyhow. How could they deliver my food anyhow. Also cannot buy things online without the old card either. So these were the cases I was meaning and why I clarified it in my post.
If you noticed all the points in the post were conditioned and not totally general. But more to what people might typically do.
I think some of the first use of SAFENET would/should be use of its backbone by individuals, corporations etc for decentralized storage component. I expect a lot of easy storage Apps/UI interfaces being developed that work like Box.com etc but use SAFENET in the backend. That will build familiarity and use cases by the tech community - imagine if every corporate data is moved over to SAFE. Then start off with a simple App like email - very easy to use customer experience - no extra downloads - nothing but only with simple guarantee of security. Remember the Hotmail days? …things will slowly grow from their automatically.
Once adoption of the SAFE begins/penetrates and becomes popular and go to product for decentralized storage, email etc, everyday use things, - brand recognition, comfort level etc will all help users to transition other services from clearnet to SAFE slowly and gradually. It is a domino effect after that.
If we go all in, do everything here etc type message day one…it will scare away folks and dry adoption. People dont adapt to transformational things day one. It is a gradual process.
And again I set the parameters of my statement. And YES I agree there are other ways to do these things.
And for me those parameters are what I would want. To have food delivered to a store is not home delivery. To have my electronics delivered elsewhere is not desirable. So yes until those stores go onto SAFE I will use clearnet until they do.
Agreed that early adoption will be for digital uses and by those who have experience until the APPs make it easy for more people to use it for what they typically do. (social media, photo storage, communication etc)
I suspect it’s going to be a long road moving from the clearnet.
I agree strongly with that statement. I will try to separate my hardware devices to different networks though, if only to facilitate my personal sanity. So my android will remain a clearnet device, one desktop for general clearnet use, and a second desktop for the Safe Network.
The global societal movement away from the clearnet though, is going to take ten to twenty years and that assumes nothing better comes along (I’m skeptical that anything will, but ya never know). The low ball of ten years is assuming governments do their worst and really attempt to fully crush free speech – they are moving pretty fast at the moment in my opinion with so many being blocked from any mainstream means of financial support (which is basically a kill switch for most as few supporters use crypto ATM).
For me it can’t happen soon enough, but we need to be realistic about how quickly people move to it.
Also - just a question - one of the current popular use cases is that when a shopper shops at a store, the store keeps track of your $ spent, sends you email confirmation of your purchases, and tracks your points for future rewards etc. Is this all going to be possible on the SAFE internet?
Depends on how the APP is written. They need a copy of the order and the details of address etc, so sure they could keep and accumulate that information. Also they could keep the info in your data and signed by their app sot hat it can be verified.
Thanks Neo - another question - can SAFE serve as a good replacements for AWS and google cloud ie without anyone having to use the safebrowser or anything. If the entire world just continues to use the existing UI browsers, development tools etc, can SAFE network be leveraged purely as a replacement for AWS cloud and google cloud and Azure?
As a compute platform - Not at this time, SAFEnetwork has no compute in initial releases
As a site platform then Yes alpha 2 shows that it can be done for many classes of sites and “backend” database functionality in some/many cases can be done in alpha 2. But some database functionality at this time is (too) difficult to achieve but some here are working on things which will make it easier.
As a storage platform (eg dropbox) - Well that is what underlies the safenetwork.
Abandoning Clearnet completely will feel like it felt like trying to use a Mac in the (wintel) office environment 20 years ago. Using Safenet as nfs server, or for C-3 compatible object storage however, could be a nobrainer.