Recently I’ve been getting to know the Tent project. Tent is a protocol for sharing and storing data that has the potential to change the way we think about how social networks are presently organized and integrated. The present system of centralized control and access does a tremendous disservice to users, and can actually be dangerous for those who use social networks for sensitive or political communication. So creating a truly decentralized yet truly interoperable social sharing system is key to addressing the biggest problems that face social networking today.
Some things that differentiate Tent from other social networks, like Facebook or Twitter:
Tent is decentralized. Facebook and Twitter house all of their users’ data in the same system. More importantly, Facebook and Twitter have access to all of your data at any given time. This gives them the right to compel you into their Terms of Service, which means that you are forced to agree to a whole set of things you might not like, just because you want to keep in contact with your friends and family. Tent solves this by giving individual users and groups the capability to organize their own servers that can then be operated on their own terms. This is a great feature for those who are concerned with who might have legal access or rights to their data. Another benefit of decentralization lies in its resilience to external interference. If a government decides to shut off access to certain Tent servers, or if those servers are knocked offline due to technical problems, all other servers can remain active and communicate as normal. The same is not true of centralized services like Twitter which can be disrupted and interrupt communication between all of its users at once. In order to stop all communication on Tent, every Tent server in the world would need to be disrupted.
With the above diagram, we can see how Tent is different from other traditional social networks. Where there is one point of access (and therefore only one failsafe), social networking is less secure and more easy to intercept or interrupt. The distributed model prefers independent users and servers, connected by links of communication (protocols) rather than an internally-constructed platform.
Tent is interoperable. Being a protocol rather than a fixed platform, Tent users communicate with each other via a disparate linking of intercommunicating servers. While two or three of your friends might run their own Tent servers, and four or five other friends might have their accounts on Tent.is (a public Tent hosting service), they will all be able to communicate in the same way with each other. The traffic simply passes over the Internet between Tent servers, instead of stuck inside a closed platform.
Tent is a protocol. A protocol is simply a method for transmitting information, like HTTP over the Internet. Because Tent is a protocol instead of a fixed service, it allows anyone to create applications and servers that can communicate with it. Presently if you share information on Facebook, only your Facebook friends can experience them there, and your Twitter/LinkedIn/whatever other networks are left out. You could always post to multiple sources, but with each share you lose part of the experience that each platform is built to serve. Furthermore, you can only access the information on your Facebook account with your Facebook-approved application, likewise with Twitter or nearly any other social network. Tent changes this by allowing any user running a Tent-compatible program can see what you share, regardless of what service you use to host your data. As the protocol and its servers are open source, anyone can build a custom client to their liking and share it with friends or like-minded users.
And finally, Tent is 100% user-driven. Like mentioned above, it is decentralized and self-managed so the data always remains under your control. But say someday you are done with hosting your server yourself, and want your Tent data to go to another server? You will be able to transfer your data and even your Tent handle easily and effortlessly. You will never need to go through the hassle of asking all your friends to change your address in their computers, or to explain to your friends who only use Facebook/Twitter for example why you are moving elsewhere.
Tent operates in a client-server model. In order to have an account and store your data, you must run a server implementation that can communicate using Tent. This is much like how webservers work: when they receive requests from clients, they serve up the data they have stored for users’ browsing. When you connect a Tent client to your Tent server, you can then view and modify your information as well as get caught up on what your followers are up to. You can run Tent clients on a variety of platforms to access the same information, which is stored wherever you choose to locate your Tent entity, whether it be your own server or that of a public service provider.
Regardless of how you choose to use Tent, there are many different applications and projects in development around the protocol. Each one has unique use cases, which might just change the way people think about social networking. The goal is to share information you want to share, but to keep your data under your own control. Tent is the closest we have come to realizing this goal. ♦