In previous posts, I spent some time describing a protocol design for negotiating independent channels over a shared connection of sorts. That’s all well and good, but it does beg the question what purpose channels serve. In the abstract, it is just what I just wrote, a mechanism for conducting multiple parts of a larger communication in parallel, and independent of each other. But while that description is apt enough, it also leaves a lot of questions open.

Since I occasionally find people focused on the same kind of problem that I’m trying to tackle with this project, and I have a terrible tendency to share my thoughts informally, I figured it would be a good idea to post a kind of roadmap for the project. This isn’t going to be fixed in stone forever. But its general outline should remain more or less intact. The overall goal is to “fix” the problems of the World Wide Web by addressing the privacy and security needs of the users and by embracing that most users will use a multitude of devices, some of which are shared.

A few days ago, I managed to complete another milestone for the NGI0 grant agreement. It’s released as channeler on the Interpeer code page. In a sense, this is more of an interim update. The grant agreement covers many more milestones in this repository, and as it stands, the code is highly work in progress. But it demonstrates the basic channel establishment functionality – and while that doesn’t have any bells and whistles yet, it’s a good starting point for further iteration and refinement.

In my last post, I wrote about how REST architectural principles feed into the problem with surveillance capitalism that the world faces today. Today, I want to explore how we might approach an architecture for a better, more human centric internet. Figure: “architecture 2” by fontplaydotcom is licensed under CC BY 2.0 Internet or Web? First, some quick disambiguation. The Interpeer Project’s aim is to provide infrastructure for a next generation human centric internet – so why focus on REST, when that is specific to the web?