Comrad

Comrad is a socialist network. It seizes the means of digital production.

Why another social network?

Is a 'socialist network' possible? Although the internet began with anarchic design principles, it quickly consolidated into the hands of a few of the largest corporations in the world. It has effectively recreated the capitalist mode of production within itself: the means of content production (social media platforms) are privatized while the work of production (posting) remains socially distributed. Exploitation inheres in that relation, whether in the industrial factory or the digital platform, because the value you produce is taken from you, concentrated and privatized.

But a digital network can be redesigned. The technology behind these social media platforms is actually quite simple. We can easily build our own social network, one which is secure, insurveillable, and unmonetizable—one which would give people the security they need to communicate about whatever they want, including protesting against capital and the state..

Core principles

Confidential

All of your data are strongly encrypted end-to-end: only you and those you write to can decrypt and read it. To anyone without the right decryption 'key', the data is nonsense.

Untraceable

All network traffic is routed through Tor, a "deep web" of computers so dense even the FBI can't follow you through it. Comrad's "Operator" or central server is accessible only from Tor. It's impossible to tell who is sending what to whom, or even who is using the app at all.

Unmonetizable

What's untraceable is also unmonetizable: your data can't be harvested by technology companies and used for advertising algorithms. You're protected from both surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state.

Democratized

Group accounts or 'collectives', like @portland or @socialists, grow as existing members 'vouch for' new ones, forming webs of trust. Other comrades can see how many times a given person has been vouched for, both within a group and overall, but not who has vouched for them. In order to join a group, at least one member must vouch for you; this minimum (or 'quorum') may grow as the group grows.

(Semi-)decentralized

Data is deleted as soon as possible from Comrad. Comrad's "Operator" simply sorts and holds the mail temporarily: as soon as users log in to download their mail, the messages are deleted from the server and network forever.

Anti-profit

Not just non-profit, we're anti-profit.

Open-source

Information wants to be communist.

Social media features

We present a simplified set of social media features drawn from everything that's out there:

Profile

• Curate a profile with photo and posts (e.g. Twitter)
• Show profile to world (e.g. Twitter)
• Show profile only to those you trust (e.g. Facebook)
• Show profile only to your local area (e.g. Nextdoor)

Posting

• Post up to 1 image and/or 1000 characters
• Post to the entire world (e.g. Twitter) ✔
• Post to those you trust (e.g. Facebook)
• Post to your surrounding area by a distance radius (e.g. Nextdoor)
• Anonymously up-vote or down-vote posts (e.g. Reddit)

Organizing

• Host events and invite others (e.g. Facebook)
• Host events like protests anonymously (new)
• Anonymously pin on a map sites of danger, like police (e.g. Waze)

Messaging

• Message securely with encrypted contents (e.g. Signal) ✔
• Message with untraceable metadata via Tor (new) ✔

How is this different from...

Comparison table

Other cool thing	What is it?	Kind of like...	Decentralized?	Anonymous?	Confidential?	Data persistence?	Identity verification?	Need invitation/server?	What data can user find?
Comrad	Social network	Twitter	No (central server on Tor)	Yes (everything routed via Tor)	Yes (100% E2EE)	Minimal server (deleted ASAP)	Yes (central public key repository)	No (works like twitter)	Mixed (global feed; hashtag search only)
Secure Scuttlebutt	Social network	Twitter/Facebook	Fully (P2P)	No (P2P reveals IP; friend networks public)	Partly (private E2EE, public unencrypted)	Distributed across friend networks?	Yes? (federated key exchange?)	Yes (need initial pub)	Limited (search friends-of-friends' data)
Diaspora	Social network	Twitter	Partly (federated)	No (unless via Tor Browser)	No (unencrypted?)	?	?	Yes (need 'pod' server)
Mastodon	Social network	Twitter	Partly (federated)	No (unless via Tor Browser)	No (unencrypted?)	?	?	Yes (need 'instance' server)
Matrix	Group chat	Slack	Partly (federated)	No?	Yes? (100% E2EE)	?	Yes (?)	Yes (invited channels only?)
Briar Messenger	Messenger	WhatsApp	Fully (P2P)	Yes? (Tor)	Yes (100% E2EE)	None (needs 24/7 listener)	Partly (public keys traded IRL)	Yes (need initial contact?)
Cabal Chat	Chatrooms	IRC	Fully (P2P)	No (P2P reveals IP) 1	Mostly (shared key, not E2EE)	Distributed Hash Table	No (?)	Not really (public chat is open)

Sources:

^1. Cabal FAQ: What kind of security is involved with Cabal?

In words

1. Secure Scuttlebutt? SSB is probably the most impressive alternative social network out there. It's truly P2P, not just federated like Diaspora or Mastodon, so the content you see is coming to you via your friends and their friends: you download it directly from them. It has a great user base...

Progress

Animations from mobile/desktop app

As of the 23rd of August.

Animations from terminal app

Connecting through Tor

Register/Login

"Meeting" (exchanging public keys)

Messaging

Posting

Usage

Install

In one line:

bash <(curl http://comrad.app/run)

(That's a shortcut to this auto-installer script.)

Using pyenv, it installs Comrad in a virtual environment with the correct version (3.7) of Python attached. It doesn't override your existing Python configurations.

Run

Install as above.

For the terminal client, run:

comrad-cli

For the mobile/desktop app, run:

comrad-app

Or to run the server or Operator (for development only):

comrad-op

Details

Frontend

Mobile/desktop

The mobile/desktop app is made with KivyMD, a variant of Kivy, a cross-platform app development framework in Python. Python is an easy and versatile progamming language to learn, which keeps the code accessible to as many people as possible. Code for the app is in comrad/app.

Terminal app

Vanilla Python. Code is in comrad/cli.

Backend

API

Plain old object-oriented code in Python. The root entity is a "Keymaker": anyone from @Telephone, to @Operator, to users, to groups, who has a public/private key pair. The database uses a simple file-based key-value store, written in Python (simplekv). Code is in comrad/backend.

Cryptography

We are using Themis, a high-level cross-platform cryptography library, for all cryptographic functions, rather than handling any primitives ourselves.

Code is primarily in: * comrad/backend/keymaker.py * comrad/backend/comrades.py * comrad/backend/phonelines.py