InitmateP2P

Our house—our garden: A prototype for intimate P2P file sharing

Proposal

We have been using Soulseek to download music. It is P2P, but different than torrents. In Soulseek you share a whole folder from your computer (this could even be your home folder—then you share everything). Doing this for the first time, it feels a bit scary and very intimate, kind of like inviting someone to your house and just letting them look around, touch, take…

We would like to expand on that intimacy by building a more personal P2P environment that is not limited to music. We thought it would be cute to actually use the house analogy, either by naming the folders (“room”, “close to the window”…) or trying to include a visual layer with a map or drawings of home-y items.

How to implement?

Soulseek prompts to add buddies

• We could use Soulseek and figure out how to only share files with a selected group of people. (Might possibly be easy with adding friends?) In this scenario, everyone has one personal environment that can be shared with others. They can browse, download, but not change anything.

• We could use Syncthing, but not for syncing between personal devices, but between different people. This way, we could tend to a house (or garden?) all together—everybody can add, move or remove files.

Testing

No connection yet…

We can all find our profiles on Soulseek and add each other as buddies. What is not working at first is sharing files—the right port is not open. Using a VPN that allows port forwarding (e.g. airvpn), we can open it which then makes our shared files accessible for everybody.

Since all three of us are using a different OS, the configuration of the VPN is different as well. But after that is taken care of, we are able to share files with each other using Soulseek. It's very easy to add a folder that is only accessible to buddies.

For Syncthing, it is crucial to enable "Global Discovery", as only then it is possible to sync files over the internet. Otherwise, the sharing only works if all devices are on the same network. We added each other's laptops to our list of remote devices and shared a folder among us.

Careful: Not setting the correct path (e.g. missing a subfolder) can easily make more files available for syncing than were intended to share.

Syncthing shares

The house

We each added one folder to our Soulseek shares, but made it only available to buddies. Barbara made a complex folder structure that makes it possible to explore her desk, bookshelf and more.

Soulseek logs who is looking at your profile, browsing your files, or downloads something from you. This makes the experience very interactive!

The garden

First draft of the file garden

Lea started cultivating files in the garden: music, drawings and photos, as well as html files with text styled to fit the setting. The html files she built are also available on sergio:

📎 a-sign-at-the-entrance.html

📎 a-book.html

Sibyl later added a folder with a pdf of the book that she is currently reading, and instructions for knitting and cooking. She also shared movies, which lead to big folder sizes (that take quite some time to sync).

Sibyl's cooking: We could have a picnic in the garden!

Conclusion

intimacy, being in close proximity (and available to discuss things at the same time) makes things easier

risk of sharing private files (setting the wrong path in syncthing, sharing a folder with more devices than intended, or having files in a soulseek share that you forgot about)

potential for text adventure games (folder structures and text files)

potential for "multiplayer" games (soulseek logs, collective "gardening" in syncthing)

potential for a visual layer (with drawings, photos, html files)

syncthing API explorations

playing around with "folder poetry":

• https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Exploring_our_file_systems#touring_around
• https://www.radicalnetworks.org/archives/2019/participants/melanie-hoff/