What is Synereo?
Synereo is a decentralized distributed social network built on the blockchain platform, whose target is the attention economy. The goal behind the Synereo project is to build a project that encourages users to curate online content that is actionable, relevant and adds value to the audience.
Therefore, by a long shot, Synereo aims to make the internet a better place in terms of content and value addition.
What is the problem that Synereo Solves?
There is a lot of buzz about social media, ever since the likes of Facebook and Twitter came alive. A lot of projects release their manifestos, advertising what they plan to offer to their audience should they come on board. This has been evident, especially given the divergent shift from mainstream media to social media. The focus here has always been about user-generated content. All the control is given to the users, or at least the users are made to think so.
However, while there was a shift from mainstream media to social media, ownership of the service still remains a challenge. Of course, the people do produce the content needed on these networks. However, even with content from users, the social media service is still in the hands of an authority, and this is where things go wrong.
Given the kind of control that service providers have over the social platforms, they constantly find themselves at an advantage, running psychological experiments on the users from time to time through their feeds. This is done in three ways:
- Selling critical information and personally identifiable data about the users to the highest bidder
- Making user data available to spooks
- Invasion of user privacy, and wanton misuse of access to privileged data about the users, without their consent
Given the challenges described above, there is a need for social media users to get back control not just over their accounts, but over the services that they are using as well. Data should no longer be centralized. Distributed data is one of the safest ways of protecting user accounts and data.
The social media industry is facing a revolution, similar to what the music industry has gone through. At the moment in the music industry, it is possible to build your own professional studio in your house. The same changes are happening in the social media space.
This is where technology is. Users are fast coming to terms with the fact that massive data centers are no longer necessary. The environmental impact notwithstanding, people need to start engaging and interacting with data as a service.
Bearing this in mind, therefore, the service providers are currently not serving up a plan in their manifestos, but an attitude. They offer a promise without truly telling their audience how they plan to go about it, or how they plan to achieve the goals that they have outlined.
At best, they are asking social media users to put their trust in them, yet that is not what people are currently looking for. What the audience needs is an engaging platform where they are informed of how they can play an active role in the development of the services they are using, and more importantly, how these will meet their innate goals.
How does Synereo Solve the problem?
Contrary to what most projects are offering about their plans for social media, Synereo presents an attention model that anyone who is motivated can interact with, or even build. Synereo also highlights how an attention model can be realized, and how to integrate it into an attention economy, on a distributed network.
The vision behind Synereo is that the future of the internet lies in decentralization, a distributed DIY system where users can create and maintain reliable communications infrastructure. Synereo is all about effectiveness.
For a network to be effective, the flow of information has to be managed properly. For this reason, Synereo uses an attention economy. By default, the brain uses attention to manage information. Attention is a valuable commodity and a scarce resource.
What Synereo does is to target the attention of the users, their activity on the network and social feedback, given that these have a very high power and can influence the reputation of the individual, and the manner in which content flows within their social circles and communities.
This structure is supposed to induce an element of social agency whereby value creation is recognized and rewarded within the network, thereby encouraging quality engagement. This effectively gives back control to social media users, given that they are at the center of all interaction and communication.
The network model implemented by Synereo borrows heavily from the principles of the flow of electrical current in the neural networks of the brain. Synereo creates an ecosystem where information is channeled towards a section where it will not just be utilized, but will also be appreciated.
As a result, Synereo creates a social media platform where valuable information is created and shared with users and in communities where this information is most appreciated. This, therefore, enhances quality content curation and healthy interaction on the network.
What makes Synereo better than the competitors?
Synereo makes use of AMPs. AMP is the currency used on the blockchain to propel the reach of organic content. Users can buy AMPs and exchange them with one another. They can also be invested to support the flow of specific content throughout the network. AMPs are also used as compensation, given to users who generate quality content by those who appreciate it.
AMPs can also be earned by adding infrastructure to the network. Users who have lots of idle resources are often encouraged to do this. They can add bandwidth or storage space to the network. Technically, Synereo acts as both an application and a distributed protocol. End users are in a good position to run Synereo on whichever devices they use, in the process getting complete control over the data they share.
Synereo makes use of two forces, Reo, and engagement. Reo measures the reputation of an individual as a publisher, especially when they curate content that is worthy of attention. On the other hand, engagement is the platform upon which Reo is built. Engagement, therefore, acts as a quantitative measure of how much an individual interacts with the content curated by another.
Reo and engagement are important in creating a priority hierarchy of how content should show up in the user’s stream. The higher a curator ranks in the community that is important to a user, the more likely the curator’s content will be visible in the user’s stream, in such a manner that they have a high likelihood of noticing it.
Reo and engagement are further supported by the AMP. Content owners can generate and publish content by attaching a specific amount of AMP. Synereo runs an algorithm to prioritize content.
This algorithm considers the AMPs used in specific content and makes use of this information to share the content in a community that would appreciate it better. Therefore, Synereo uses AMPs to buy the attention of individuals.
For the targeted users who eventually receive the amplified content, they also earn some of the attached AMPs. The higher the Reo the users have with respect to the curator, the higher the value of their attention in the community, and the more AMPs they receive from the post they access.
How can Synereo be categorized?
Synereo is a project that is creating software solutions and tools for users in the attention economy. Primarily, Synereo targets content curators and publishers online, by using a rewards incentive to encourage the curation and sharing of value-adding content online.
What’s Synereo’s vision on Security?
When it comes to security, Synereo uses methods that have not just been tried and tested, but those that have been proven to be effective. There are new cryptography protocols and primitives that come up from time to time.
Even with a lot of pressure and hype around these, Synereo stays away from such because such measures have in the recent past proven to be difficult to implement into an already working system correctly.
Implementing such would also leave the ecosystem vulnerable to a lot of challenges. Besides, as it is, Synereo does not lack sufficient security measures, so the need for new tools is uncalled for.
All messages that are in transit between different nodes in Synereo are encrypted by the SSL capabilities built into Synereo by RabbitMQ. However, there are plans to implement ZeroMQ as the main transport core for messages in Synereo.
Keys are exchanged between nodes opportunistically. This does away with the need for a certificate authenticity protocol because there is no need for a certificate authority. Certificate authorities are naturally centralized, which is against the basic concept of Synereo, a network that is fully decentralized.
The only problem with doing away with certificate authorities is that this creates a loophole, making these communications a prime target for Man in the Middle (MITM) attacks. Synereo has techniques in place to mitigate against such risks, including raising errors when fingerprint anomalies are identified or pinning common certificates on every node to a local cache.
For users who are security-conscious, you will need to make an effort and confirm node fingerprints through trusted channels when initiating contact. Over time, Synereo will work towards establishing iterations of current security measures to offer more protection for messages in transit in the ecosystem.
Censorship Resilience
New technology constantly challenges the preexisting power structures and profit establishments. As a result, this naturally births resistance. Most P2P technologies are not resistant to censorship attempts. Censorship never exists in isolation. Before censorship, there must have existed surveillance at some point.
Internet traffic is constantly under dragnet surveillance. This is information that has since been made available in the public domain following the chronicles of whistleblowers like Edward Snowden. This type of surveillance monitors different types of traffic.
Any adversary, therefore, who has the necessary routing equipment such as spy agencies, governments, ISPs and law enforcement authorities study the patterns of the Source IP address, Source Port, Destination IP address, Destination Port and the Data being exchanged, even if the data is already encrypted. As a result, they are able to make an informed guess based on what they find. This is what happens to P2P traffic too.
The security concern for Synereo is whether or not the traffic patterns of data transferred through Synereo can also be analyzed in this manner. Synereo traffic is concealed through pluggable transports, the technique used by the Tor network to obfuscate traffic on the Tor protocol.
For an adversary to monitor and block Synereo, they will need resources to filter and block a significant portion of internet traffic, which is theoretically a challenge. Besides, there are political ramifications of such actions, which they would not want to deal with.
Examples of Synereo use cases/applications
Developers can build applications on the Synereo framework. This is particularly for apps that are designed to harness the power of the Synereo attention model, and the benefits of distributed technology. Developers can use the interfaces available, or change the information and actions in their stream items, or alternatively recreate and create apps that perform different roles altogether.
Gateway Services
Synereo will enable gateways as part of their deployment plan. Gateway services are a solution for those individuals or entities that are unable to deploy their Synereo nodes on their own, to still use the network.
To do this, some services are centralized, giving the users access to technical resources that allow them access to Synereo as a web service. Therefore, all they need is a web browser to access all the services.
Third-party Services
Synereo is not built to thrive in a vacuum. There are other technologies and projects around it that will work together with Synereo. There are lots of micro-transactions that are handled on the Synereo ecosystem. Some of the projects that are linked to Synereo include MaidSafe and Factom.
Resources
https://coincheckup.com/coins/Synereo
https://github.com/synereo/synereo.github.io/raw/master/whitepapers/synereo.pdf