New safenetwork app - Safelists

Reminds me of

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This looks like the first app to be addressing torrent replacement. Such are really going to drive SAFE adoption. Count me in, when the network goes live.

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Actually, the referral system is quite cool. It ensures that development and curation continue and gives incentives to refer the app to others.

The seeds are sprouting!

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Now all you need is a pyramid structure of payments… wait, no that’s not a good idea :smile:

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Yeah I predict that referrals will be one of the huge earning methods on SAFE. I like @DavidK’s implementation of it and am glad to see it’s been noticed by others. I’m excited to share what I’ve been working on once vaults/safecoin are fully implemented in the network.

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This is a great concept, and targeting the torrent market with the benefits of Safe is brilliant & makes a lot of sense.

However, in my mind this use case highlights a potential weakness in the economics of the the Safe network: anyone using this without being a farmer / paying SafeCoin is getting something for nothing, and if there are enough free riders, it may skew the price of storing data on the safe network upwards, possibly to the degree that storing data on Safe becomes uncompetitive for all but niche uses.

However, I can’t see a way around this unless people were required to sign & pay SafeCoin in order to download above a certain speed / capacity.

Anyway, good work & I look forward to seeing it on the Safe network proper when it’s launched soonish, and hope my worries about getting something for nothing are unfounded :smiley:

(edit - catching up on this discussion to see if there’s an explanation for my concern: Free GETs aren't going to fly).

@DavidK

If this is simply a repository and curation system then why use zip files? Why not have a list of files using text, html, xml or javascript. Actually javascript would make the most sense for something like this given how it can be arranged into arrays and functions. All this is basically is a repository of lists that one is currating for the user. So why the zip file? There’s nothing to compress but text.

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You don’t need any browser addons (whole soft is 12MB zip), + the website can change. You can have safelist that indexes files from 1000’s of different websites and every file can have several mirrors.

Yeah, this too, you don’t need website owner’s permission, you can just simply create safelist out of links you’ve found.

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I thought about this too and wanted to make it pay for all from the start, but I wanted average mom and pop who have no idea about the safe network to just be able to get safelist and download it’s contents without any payment, I want to drive adoption of safe network this way.

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Safelist is not a zip, safelist is an sqlite database (you can open any .safelist file with sqlite3 command line tool and operate on it’s contents). Json and XML you cannot manipulate easily, you have to code logic by hand. If I didn’t use sqlite3 whole software would be quite bigger and I’d have to think how to implement so and so safelist manipulation operation but now I can just write few lines of sqlite3 queries and be done with it.

Sqlite is quite widespread as a file format for this convenience, more on that here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvmMzI0X7fE

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I think you could set up either file sharing (like you have!!) or a site/app such as https://yts.ag/ fairly easily.

Having the files hosted either on the site and receiving every time someone stops by to download or having the users share their files from their own personal private data (also receiving for users) I think could work as well…zips not needed. (my biggest pet peeve is when zips are false, malicious, or broken down into multiple further archives…) :frowning:

I thought about making something like pirate bay for safelists but I’d rather not deal with lawyers and stuff like they needed, I hope someone else makes safelist sharing site (hopefully, using safe network) so they wouldn’t need to deal with that either :smiley:

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The neat thing about SAFE is (if someone chooses) they can set up a piratebay type site without anyone knowing who hosts it and no servers/central location to raid…if someone so chooses that would be much less headache than the current options…lol!

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I really don’t see it that way. The ability of people to access data for free is one of the key things which GIVES the SAFE Network value. That, amongst other aspects which give it value, are what make it worth contributing to and receiving safecoin for putting it there.

Same principle here applies as does why there’s no transaction fee for safecoin usage (aside from complexity of tracking, etc.). The fact that safecoin is transaction free is a HUGE value that makes the network attractive to users, and thus makes safecoin valuable, thus makes it worthwhile to contribute resources in exchange for the safecoin.

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I completely agree that being free to access is critical, but my worry is that a large proportion of people downloading and not contributing may make it very expensive to put data on the Safe Network, as many farmers would only be able to contribute a fraction of their available storage resource before available bandwidth becomes a bottleneck.

My post here asks what levers could be used to address this if it became an issue. How could more people be encouraged to participate by farming, not just downloading even if farming rewards are not economically viable for them, so we don’t end up with a bandwidth constraint that may limit the usefulness of the network & centralise farming towards bandwidth-rich farmers?

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If there is high demand for content (free or not) then there will be more incentive to farm my friend, people including me will gladly answer to that call. The network balances reward to farmers so I believe this would be covered.

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What if your internet connection became saturated after sharing 100gb on the Safe Network?

You may not be able to increase your contribution to 200gb without installing a better internet connection if that’s an option.

Farming rewards may not cover the costs of second broadband line in your area as the safecoin reward finds an equilibrium that works for those with beefier internet connections.

I also hope this won’t be an issue, but the higher the ratio of download only users to farmers, the bigger the chance of the network being constrained more by bandwidth than storage space, which would make it less widely used for data storage as it could otherwise be.

Saying that, in this scenario, those in bandwidth rich areas would have an incentive to provide more storage to utilise their bandwidth advantage, hopefully reducing the price of puts to a level that allows for less bandwidth intensive use of the network, so those in slightly less bandwidth-rich areas can increase their contribution, and so on until the situation is diffused.

I guess we really will need to see how it goes once it’s launched, but I’d be disappointed if the average farmer could only contribute a fraction of their hard drive space due to bandwidth constraints.

Don’t forget how the network works though; not all data will be popular, by a long shot, and the popular data gets cached and comes from multiple sources, and the less popular data doesn’t and is easier to hold etc.

Different levels of data popularity will level this Problem out in Real time Automatically 24/7

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Hopefully that’ll be the case. But if things are more skewed towards popular data than expected, along with many users who are not farming, it could remain skewed as small farmers are unable to balance things out by contributing their spare storage due to bandwidth constraints, so the price of puts doesn’t drop enough to encourage more casual use for less popular data.

However, if every user has to install the Safe launcher to access Safe content in the first place, and if they’re all nudged towards offering a bit of space & bandwidth, this shouldn’t become an issue.

I still think it’s worth considering how to escape potential downsides of a bandwidth-constrained network in case one ever develops. However likely or unlikely, it is surely a real risk given that it will cost to put data on the network, but not to download it.

@DavidK I don’t know how I missed this but have only just seen Safelists and not tried it out, but I like the idea a lot and think it could be big.

It’s quite similar the viral file sharing app I’ve been hoping someone might create, so I hope you’ll continue to develop this.

To be extremely popular, application functionality doesn’t have to be particularly clever or original if it just makes something people want, simple to understand and quick and intuitive to do. And if you can include a viral element in such an app or could really take off because everyone likes and needs to share.

If you’d like feedback on these issues or help refining UX I’ll be happy to review things etc. Would you be open to others joining you in this? Not me as I don’t have much spare time - but having more than one person with good insight into UI and UX might help. There are several things that need to be just right to creating a viral effect, and much harder to get right than many people realise, and being able to talk through ideas, plus the manpower to trial different approaches might help. Good luck! :slight_smile:

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