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Introduction
Welcome to trsst.
The first non-ephemeral, secure, encrypted, distributed, social platform - the last social platform you will probably ever need!
You can all the technical goodness at the whitepaper here.
(Ripped from whitepaper - will probably need rewrite with more user-friendly terminology, pictures/diagrams? and a simple explanation on how it differs and is superior to other social network models and why - privacy, security, anonymity, resilience, etc and why they should and can start using trsst before their other friends and family are :) )
A user is a person who reads or writes blog entries. Users create accounts to follow other users' accounts to read their entries, and some users create entries on their own accounts for other users to follow.
An account is a persona created by a user for the purpose of authoring blog entries. Entries belong to an account, and an account belongs to a user. A user can have multiple accounts, but a typical user will only need one. The relationship between an account and a user is hidden by default, preserving the user's anonymity.
A nickname is a optional human-readable text string used to describe an account. A nickname is required to be unique among all nicknames for all accounts managed by a server, such that an address of the form [email protected] and/or nickname.hostingprovider.com is globally unique. The globally unique form of the nickname becomes an alias for the account public key.
A tag is a short text string usually comprised of a single word and used to categorize entries. Often they are preceded with a hash symbol; for example: #cats, #dogs, and #alpacas. In RSS parlance, this is a category.
A mention is a reference to an account or nickname that is embedded in an entry. A user mentions an account in a blog entry to bring that entry to the another user's attention.
To follow is to subscribe to a feed of a user's blog entries. Users follow one or more other users to receive a stream of entries from all of those users.
A feed is a document retrieved over a network connection, usually over a web protocol and usually in an xml-based format, that contains header information about an account and one or more entries or summaries of entries from a blog.
A client is the software running on the user's computing device to read and write and store entries. A client can be a native software application, or a software script downloaded to and running in a user's web browser or other execution environment.
A server is taken to mean a single physical server, a collection of servers residing on a cloud infrastructure, or a company providing servers in either of those two contexts.
A syndication network is a federation of servers that all agree to adhere to protocols of sharing feeds such that users' entries are propagated across the network for efficient retrieval, fault-tolerance, and resistance to censorship or suppression.
A keypair in terms of public-key cryptography is the pair of a private key and its corresponding public key. Each user's account corresponds to a keypair, and the public key is the account's unique identifier. The keypair is generated as a valid payment address in a crypto-currency system such as Bitcoin. The account's private key is held by a user in secret and kept in a keystore.
A keystore is an encrypted file that contains all of a user's keypairs: one for each account, and possibly more that are directly associated with individual entries or additional crypto-currency payment addresses.
A blogchain is a chain of entries linked together such that each digitally-signed entry contains the digital signature of the entry that directly precedes it. In this way, the integrity of the chain can be validated, and any missing or modified entries can be identified. Entries created on an account are added to the blogchain for that account.