twister - p2p microblogging

http://www.twister.net.co

What is twister?

twister is an experimental peer-to-peer microblogging software.

User registration and authentication is provided by a bitcoin-like network, so it is completely distributed (does not depend on any central authority).

Post distribution uses kademlia DHT network and bittorrent-like swarms, both are provided by libtorrent.

Both Bitcoin and libtorrent versions included here are highly patched and do not interoperate with existing networks (on purpose).

License

Bitcoin is released under the terms of the MIT license. See COPYING for more information or see http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.

libtorrent is released under the BSD-license.

twister specific code is released under the MIT license or BSD, you choose. (it shouldn't matter anyway, except for the "non-endorsement clause").

Development process

There is no development process defined yet.

Developers of either bitcoin or libtorrent are welcomed and will be granted immediate write-access to the repository (a small retribution for bastardizing their codebases).

Testing

Some security checks are disabled (temporarily) allowing multiple clients per IP. Therefore it is possible to run multiple twisterd instances at the same machine:

$ twisterd -datadir=/tmp/twister1 -port=30001 -daemon -rpcuser=user -rpcpassword=pwd -rpcallowip=127.0.0.1 -rpcport=40001
$ twisterd -datadir=/tmp/twister2 -port=30002 -daemon -rpcuser=user -rpcpassword=pwd -rpcallowip=127.0.0.1 -rpcport=40002
$ twisterd -rpcuser=user -rpcpassword=pwd -rpcallowip=127.0.0.1 -rpcport=40001 addnode <external-ip>:30002 onetry

Note: some features (like block generation and dht put/get) do now work unless there are at least two known nodes, like these two instances.

Wire protocol

Bitcoin and libtorrent protocol signatures have been changed on purpose to make twister network incompatible. This avoids the so called "merge bug":

http://blog.notdot.net/2008/6/Nearly-all-DHT-implementations-vulnerable-to-merge-bug

Bitcoin signature changed from "f9 be b4 d9" to "f0 da bb d2".
Bitcoin port changed from 8333 to 28333.
Torrent signature changed from "BitTorrent protocol" to "twister protocollll".
Torrent/DHT query changed from "y" to "z"
Torrent/DHT answer changed from "a" to "x"

Quick JSON command examples

To create a new user key and send it to the network: ./twisterd createwalletuser somebody ./twisterd sendnewusertransaction somebody

To create the first (1) public post: ./twisterd newpostmsg somebody 1 "hello world"

To add this user to the following list: ./twisterd follow somebody '["somebody"]'

To get the last 5 posts from user we follow: ./twisterd getposts 5 '[{"username":"somebody"}]'

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