Hi Heather, and a warm welcome to P2P-Zone!
Your article is excellent, both insightful and technically accurate. It is a pleasure to see a mainstream media reporter with a clue on p2p!
Private networks have indeed become an important part of the p2p ecosystem. Especially WASTE is gaining popularity due to its encrypted communications and good decentralized implementation. The setup and key management are easy enough for today’s savvy p2p users, and a handful of active members are enough to make a solid and reliable mesh. Invisible as they are, it is hard to estimate the total number of meshes – my guess is that there are already thousands of them around. As typical 20-30 peer meshes might have 1-2 TB of shared content each, the total shares may already be in the petabyte range.
As the number of meshes keeps growing, an increasing number of p2p users will inevitably come to touch with at least one of them. The savvier users are already getting
multimeshed: they routinely run a number of separate WASTE instances on their computers to be simultaneously present in a number of independent meshes.
The direct obvious benefit of multimeshing is having more content available from a larger source pool, but that’s only the download side of things. On the sharing side multimeshing empowers the user to share selectively to different interest groups and control the flow of content between the meshes. As each WASTE instance can have its own independent shares and downloads, the user may keep her meshes fully separated or she may share everything to everybody or do anything from between. This kind of flexible redistribution scheme allows the formation of complex and intelligently adaptive distribution chains on the emerging mesh-to-mesh macrolevel.
Another benefit is the resulting redundancy in connectivity. One mesh may go down without affecting the others in any way. And as the meshes depend on IP numbers and routing only, they will remain functional even if services like DNS go down, making them rather resilient beasts in the restless Internet.
So even if WASTE itself does not offer any group-to-group integration tools the smart users are already bridging the cap manually and – given enough time – they will be able to build a sort of supermesh, still very private and trust-oriented in nature, but tunnelling content effectively among large user populations.
- tg
