Principles of F2F

The WWW has proved a great tool for sharing information. Its fundamental design is very simple; when you type a web address into your browser, the same URL takes you to the same page. This allows people or organisations to cheaply and easily erect a 'global noticeboard' (like this page) for sharing information publicly.

However, WWW is not good for sensitive information. In life, people often tell their family different things from what they tell their friends, or strangers, or the IRS. WWW has no way of doing this (passwords are an incomplete afterthought), since all the webserver knows little more than the IP address of where it thinks the client is coming from.

Friend2Friend meets this need since the protocol uses strong cryptography, so communications are digitally signed. Individual servers contact their friends directly, and ask friends to contact their friends if desired, and so on. This allows sensitive information to be aggregated between different sites, according to individual users' privacy settings, offering a decentralised alternative to control by a single huge site. Using F2F does not require any trust in organisations, but does require trust in specific individuals (friends) - who are your neighbours in the network. The network has reach because they in turn trust their friends, and so on. F2F challenges the mentality that isolates us from one another, cutting us off and leaving us disconnected from our communities, our networks of care.

"The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small."     Mother Teresa

Like altruistic economics, Friend2Friend is a system with no one in control. Everyone is in a position of influence (proportional to the amount of trust that others choose to give them) but no one can disable anyone else's use of it.