Why I started PeerPiper
It was a chilly October in Ottawa, Canada when I realized I had just missed a big cheque in the mail.
You see, after serving 20 years in the military as an Naval Engineering Officer, I had moved all over the country several times, each time I had to reach out to all my contacts and advise them of my new info. As the years passed, I got less diligent about updating contacts since it was a lot of administrative work. It seemingly had no consequence, until I missed an important piece of mail.
But then I realized had also missed a credit card statement (and missed paying it…) due to the same reasons, causing my near perfect credit score to plunge.
And I wondered what else I was missing that I didn’t know about? Inheritance from a long lost aunt perhaps? Tax documents I had forgotten about?
As an engineer passionate about the internet, I was left scratching my head wondering how this was even possible. We’d had the internet for a few decades now. Why couldn’t I just push a button and update everyone, at once?
Why couldn’t I just push one magic button and update everyone all at once?
It’s at that time I realized that this part of the internet was broken, and I set out to fix it.
We used to have mechanisms for this type of thing. I began wondering what happened to things like RSS (Real Simple Syndication) and why I couldn’t have my own personal data RSS. RSS is dead for a variety of reasons (Google Reader was an RSS reader, it also killed by Google). But surely I wasn’t the only one with this issue?
Still, I had no way of independently emanating my own data to my contacts — Yet.
But there was more to it than just some RSS feed. Not only did I need my own personal feed, it needed to be independent of any one company.
Why? Because as I thought back, I was a big FriendFeed user. I loved it, it made life so easy. But what happened? Facebook bought it and it got shut down. Same with Google Plus, also killed by Google. If I had built anything on those platforms, I’d be wiped out. I had a short lived project built on YouTube messaging, but then YouTube shut that down too.
If I was to hand out my link to my personal data feed, I had to make sure that it wouldn’t disappear without my consent.
I needed something that didn’t depend on Google, Facebook, or anything other than my own electricity and internet.
My research quickly took me to check out the blockchain and cryptocurrency space (don’t worry, this story doesn’t end like that). The issue with cryptocurrencies and blockchains for this problem are numerous, but that may deserve it’s own blog post. Basically the fees kill you as you pay to have your data on someone else’s computer while your computer sits there unused. Doesn’t make much sense to me, so that turned out to be a hyped up dead end.
My research next took me into the “Digital Identity” space, and “Self-Sovereign Identity”, since my main criteria needed was to be independent (or “Sovereign”) from any one entity, other than myself. This is important because my personal feed needed to be uniquely identifiable as me, and nobody else. The good folks at the W3C have been working on an internet identity standard for some time now, and there is even a decentralized identity foundation which is fantastic!
The final part of my research led into data itself. My info needs to be stored “somewhere,” and that “somewhere” needs to be A) accessible to other people, and B) again, independent of any one company or entity. How about storing my data on my own hardware? There’s a novel idea!
There are solutions to be had! Yes indeed. But one of the big issues with many of the current solutions is that they may be “geek friendly,” but I want to be able to get my mom to use it too. My mom doesn’t know what a “Command Line Interface” is and there’s no way she’s going to learn. So I added another criteria that it should also be accessible from the web (the world wide web).
Hence, https://PeerPiper.io.
I wanted a space where it was easy to build your own personal data network, but would survive independent of whether or not PeerPiper.io was still around or not.
The foundation of PeerPiper is a library I built called HyPNS, built on the Hypercore-Protocol, which works both in the browser and on a home computer. In other words, if PeerPiper were to go down, anyone using the web version could just switch to their home version and be just fine. Mission accomplished!
What’s really cool about it is the larger your network grows, you actually backup your friends’ data too. The more connections you have, the stronger your network is and the more we all benefit.
Interested to know more about how I’m doing? Or want to become a user? Leave a comment here and/or post & tag me on Twitter, and I’ll be sure to get you an early adopter account and answer any questions in the next post!
