P2P/ Distributed Network Protocols

I'd like to get clarification as to 1) which parts of Holochain's value proposition you believe in wholeheartedly, 2) which you believe are untenable, and 3) which you believe are tenable but wrapped up in unnecessary complexity and "vendor lock-in". My understanding so far is this:

1) You believe wholeheartedly in the concept of agent-centric computing and the proposed way of achieving it through the use of peer-node distributed hash tables.

2) You don't believe in Holo or the idea of distributed hosting which you believe to be untenable on account of the amount of time it will take, in your opinion, to get people running Holochain on their computers and/or making available their spare computing capacity/running holo boxes at the scale necessary for websites to start making a mass migration from big central servers to the Holochain.

3) You believe in peer-node distributed hash tables as a way of implementing agent-centric computing (as already stated) but consider the way that they are seeking to do this to be unnecessarily complicated and entirely unjustifiable on rational grounds given that (according to your claim) it is possible to achieve this using existing and well-developed web tools such as Wordpress, Python and others.

Could you please make any necessary corrections and additions to this breakdown of your claims so that I/we can get really clear about what you are saying - thanks.

Dear Adam,

The prezi really makes this clear. It literally draws a diagram showing what I believe the most obvious, simple and flexible structure for a Policing Neighbourhood DHT. I will answer your questions directly, but briefly.

1. What we are talking about is agent-centric proof of truth, within a blockchain style context. Agent-Centric computing is not the same thing: agent centric computing - https://people.dsv.su.se/~fk/pris/articles/Jennings_1999.pdf .

The idea of a Policing Neighbourhood DHT is a very good one. Mathematically, it seems that a PNDHT could to deliver very high confidence in proving the voracity of agents in a purely distributed manner. I have encouraged the construction of a modelling tool for such types of networks, and hope to see that available soon.

1. I made it very clear sitting in the Holochain kitchen, that I think the Holo value proposition is a poor one. The requirement to create a completely new kind of software, on top of an enormous monolithic codebase that is two years old, compared to the 2.5 decades of global work on the world wide web and internet tools is nothing more than marketing spiel. The PNDHT protocol does not require the "building of a new internet" to function, or to deliver the kinds of promise that people are excited by. What this means is that, if "Holo" is a distributed tool for allowing people to create decentralised hosting space (which is an enormous technical challenge, due to the relatively unpredictable nature of "home hosting" - if my nine yearold unplugs my holo box, what will the result be?), as well as being built on top of a brand new technology, which makes it even more complex. Now if the point of Holo was to create hosting space for any and every kind of software and website, it would still be an enormous challenge, however the point of Holo is to create a hosting environment for a brand new platform which deliberately eschews almost every existing web technology and library in existence. I am somewhat afraid that grass roots orgs will actually put in the effort necessary to connect with such a network, only to discover in 2 years time that they could have just used the very mature tools that they were already surrounded with, witih PNDHT capabilities added to them.

2. The project, as I see it, is to work in theory on the Policing Neighbourhood DHT concept, create a set of draft protocols, build a modelling tool for such a network (which as I said, I have convinced someone to do already) and then create an implementation of PNDHT which supports interaction in a federated fashion. Exactly like building an email server. The implementation would be a piece of software that ran on the peer device, maintained the DHT, and pushed hooks for validation out to whatever implementation is being used to implement the App specific code. The app specific code could very well be implemented on top of a tool such as wordpress, which is an extraordinarily mature tool for creating Post Types, Validation Rules and User Interfaces.

I spent many hours documenting the security design of Holochain, and speaking "at" Eric and Arthur about these concepts, and they essentially didnt respond... unless you take the kinds of things OIi has been saying about me as "a response".

Kinds regards

Christopher

I should probably clarify my own position here:
* I think Christopher has an interesting idea and direction and hope he pursues it and that it works.
* I am also still working on a Holochain project, and given the overall goals and "business plan" of the founders, think that what they did makes sense for them and could also work, and maybe get up and running faster than Christopher can get his project up and running. At that stage, it would be very interesting to see if they can interoperate.
* I do think the Holochain founders have some we-are-the-center-of-the-universe pretensions but that is normal for people whose life work is to do something like what they are doing. This is a mission for them, and they think the business aspects are necessary to get it to work. Not the way I would have done it, but I'm not them, and don't know if their way or my way will work.
* Whether their plans will result in anything you could call vendor lockin or not remains to be seen. They promise other software that compiles to Web Assembly will be compatible, and theirs is open source. So it's constrained, but not locked, if those promises hold up.
* I am also working on projects using ActivityPub and SSB, and have friends who are working on Solid. I think something more general is happening with P2P networking that all of these candidates are examples of. They will converge and interoperate or those that don't will die.
* @lynnfoster says I should explain that we do have standards for organizations and projects we will work with, and Holochain has more get-rich attention around it than we would prefer, but there are also people around and involved that we think have compatible values and goals. We are not comfortable with all the venture capital that has gone into Solid, either, but are happy to help friends who want to work in that ecosystem.

first isn't better

especially if the "constrained" revolves removes every mature ecosystem with complimentary functionality, forcing or delicate ecosystem to invest enormous effort in various wheels

xx good talking with you.

might have some stuff to post next week on implementation stuff, not sure.

@christopher7 you might want to think about how your ideas might it fit into ActivityPub. Already got at least one WP plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/
And the economicPub functions might get there in your timeframe.

@christopher7 @bobhaugen Thank you both so much for taking the time to try to explain your points of view. I will take my time to try to absorb this information. I like the Holochain bunch as people but I take very seriously Chris's point that they are creating unnecessary levels of complexity and, in so doing, denying their community the opportunity to work with mature and well established tools. Novelty for the sake of novelty is not what is needed right now. I hope that it is possible to implement the idea of Neighborhood Policed Distributed Hash Tables using existing web technologies in the way that Chris describes and that developers have the opportunity to take advantage of the benefits of agent-centric computing AND the benefit of mature software tools - Wordpress, Python, etc. What's not to like about that prospect? And anyone who wants to can still choose to work with Holochain, Solid, IPFS or whatever they wish.

and @olisb @asimong

and I have to say. the "initial dht" which is "being redesigned based on feedback"didn't have neighbourhoods implemented AT ALL, lol, there was only one neighbourhood, zero protocols for dealing with bad actors, etc etc etc. amazing how there is enormous media description, at the core of the hc message, but only work on a platform.

oh. that's what I said. lol really.

Does anybody else think we are getting into a flame war here and everything has been said and we're going in circles?
Anything new and important to add?
Or are we at https://xkcd.com/386/ ?

Hi Bob @bobhaugen -- actually this comes across to me as one of the most informative, interesting, and potentially important discussions I have seen for some time. What sparks there were at first, which could have resulted in flames, have (with particular thanks to you, to @adamwaterhouse and latterly @pauldaoust1 ) generated more light than heat.

Three things I would be delighted to see, which in my opinion would really allow this discussion to bear good fruit:
1. a joint document summarising what has been set out in an agreed way, with clarity about where people agree to disagree
2. linking this back into learning materials, so that anyone with sufficient competence can dig in to follow the discussion and evaluate for themselves
3. some response from the Holochain people indicating that they've seen and understood, and what action they might take

I could help on the non-technical side with 1 and certainly with 2, but 3 is obviously out of my orbit! Number 2 is related to what I'm starting with the P2PF wiki

The whole discussion restores my faith in the idea that it is indeed possible to have useful discussions in fora like this. Your XKCD point is good, though ;)

a joint document summarising what has been set out in an agreed way, with clarity about where people agree to disagree

I doubt that is possible. Paul and I both agree that Christopher has some good points, and I would like to see what Christopher can do with with a Wordpress plugin and a Policing Neighbourhood DHT. But @christopher7 , you seem to me to be getting more pissed off and contemptuous.

Christopher and the Holochain leaders disagreed so fundamentally on implementation design that it was probably a given that they would need to divorce. And be pissed off at each other. I have not talked to Art or Eric about this, just Paul in the Holo organization, because I know him to try to be fairly open-minded, and he was not already pissed off at Christopher. (And I don't know Art or Eric very well, so I probly would not get much of an answer from them.)

Now it's up to implementation: can Holochain implement their plans, how will it work, will it become a protocol allowing for independent agents or will it be a platform?

And can Christopher implement his ideas? (Which I would like to see.)

In the meantime, I continue to pursue 3 paths and maybe 4, if the Solawi software team uses Solid. Christopher's ideas would fit nicely into the ActivityPub path, which could use something like a PNDHT.

Dear Bob,
sometimes indulging in equivocation is pretty obnoxious. I am in contempt of these people, and I have explained in minute detail why. The idea that "contempt" itself is something to be avoided is deeply oppressive, and is the umbrella that people that like hide under.
I have nothing against Paul, but again his language usage is born of the style of calculated political impact, and I simply dont have time for that. I actually know what Im doing.

cheers

lol, you know I have afghan military priest hugging me in public and thanking me for saving peoples lives by negotiating a new relationship with the government, around the chaos of energies and passion and pain, spending all waking hours building and helping and fighting fear in everyone, including myself, and these pithy little conversations where its considered "not ok" to point out how someone is deliberatley lying is ... not going to get yous anywhere.

Thanks, @bobhaugen -- what is increasingly clear to me is that the social / linguistic conventions that @christopher7 likes and uses seem to differ from yours and those of several other people here. I have been very heartened by how you and others have nevertheless tried to hear him despite his coming across to you as "pissed off an contemptuous". It interests me that Christopher writes about this as: "it's good to have people ameliorating the impact of true words so people can grumble and splutter and not feel out of place." I'm heartened that Christopher has tried to hear others despite them coming across to him as grumbling or spluttering.

Herein, to me, lies one of the great challenges of collaboration particularly in the technical realm, where I sense there is more of what has been called "neurodiversity". It can take a great effort to put aside one's learned reactions to other people's ways of expressing themselves, particularly when it comes to expressing their opinions about oneself! 😆 I'm not an expert, just practicing as I can. But when good communication does take place despite such obstacles, it can be highly rewarding.

I think I am done here. But for the record, I do not think Paul is lying, deliberately or accidentally. And contempt happens, it just prevents collaboration. Sometimes some people cannot work together.

lol. experience tells my friends, and I find them in contempt of this community. if, somehow, you ignore the details to arrive at equivocation, you'll fall foul of it over and over again. xx

Lol, contempt does not "just prevent collaboration". thats a completely irrational viewpoint. Having feelings and being very clear about why is an actual thing. Being able to see past those feelings for the better of a project is another thing. Completely ignoring the behaviour of people because it is destructive, and pretending that selfishness and coniving self agandisment dont exist, because "talking about it" represents "neurodiversity" (which is not what that word means) is ... ... a complete waste of my time.

Equivocating between people that make vague assertions and ad hominem nonsense couched in hypberbole, and people who speak in minute exatitude, and back up their assertions with deep reasoning, is absolutely destructive to this movement, and characterises the sort of middle class "helping hand" that will enjoy making all its own widgets to share with each other.

Ill look on to these channels with interest. gl. hf.
Be prepared to have your predictions come true

ᐧ

"disagreement" or "implied disagreement" as a rhetorical device of control is ... so brittle. Why do people pursue it. Fascinating question. It usually seems to be around money or the promise of money... a kind of "proof of beurocratic viability". its a weird one.

Whats wrong with disagreeing about things and being emotional about it? Whats wrong with someone being right and someone being wrong? lol, sometimes there is a middle ground, sometimes there isnt. jeje. Thank god Im not beholden to that kind of world. Well, almost zero, but not quite.
Be prepared to have your predictions come true

ᐧ

it's a kind of perversion of safe space, created by accidental or deliberate top down management strategy.

Be prepared to have your predictions come true

ᐧ

I've been finding this exchange extremely interesting and rewarding. @christopher7 is not exactly King of Charm ;-) but is making important points and Paul has thanked him for clarifying his own thinking about Holochain and accepted the validity of quite a few of his specific critiques.

Hey @asimong @christopher7 lives in a part of Scotland where hard-hitting and uncompromising rhetoric is the norm. I don't know how much you follow politics. This was George Galloway giving US senators a small taste of Glasweigan wrath ["Glasweigan" means from Glasgow]: https://youtu.be/OnoST3eQm0k

@bobhaugen I do feel like this conversation has run its course -- in this thread, at least.

@asimong Glad you found this conversation constructive -- I was worried that people would feel like this thread had been hijacked by the two of us. If people are interested in seeing something like this I'd be happy to chip in on point #3. Probably won't be for a week or two, as I've got a few commitments before then.

@adamwaterhouse thanks for the context re: cultural differences and brusque Glaswegians; wasn't aware of that. If this other document/thread does come into being, though, I'd prefer if it only focused on the technical details and not get into interpersonal/emotional stuff -- not because emotions are unwelcome, but merely to improve the signal-to-noise ratio for that specific artifact.

honestly, characterizing my extremely well described position, and clearly expressed distaste as "Glasgow brusque" is... deeply disrespectful of me, Im annoyed because the behaviours are awful. the language used by holo and paul is carefully designed to convey something deeply misaligned with the truth. that's called "lying"

it's also pretty racist. you unlikely have a clueabout Glasgow culture, and... pfff. I'm being brusque because of the deliberate lies. either come up with a decent repost, or don't say anything. don't try and somehow ameliorate the effect of my words with some arbitrary meta concept. picking "Glasgow brusque".to "explain the brusque", when I'm quite clear the brusque is because of deliberate lying and smoke screening, is an arbitrary abstraction, which is a form of social violence that, unlike me, you're not owning up to

Hey Chris, don't blame Paul blame me! He was responding to my comments. TBH you do come across as though you're spitting blood. I think that you've made some terrifically valuable points and I also think that Paul has been very good natured in his responses which it would be nice if you could give him some credit for!

:) I'm not blaming anyone. I was talking about what you said. I'm not attacking you, I'm pointing out what I think.

it's ok. I expect you hear me and agree. again. I'm happy to hear whatever, but i'm being clear about my deliberately hard descriptions. they are hard because I'm specifically choosing them to be, not because of some accidental emotion or cultural oddity.

xx

lol, I don't come across as spitting blood, I come across as icy hard on some specific points

I'm with you there though Chris. It surely is unconscionable for the Holochain team to 1) neglect to draw a clear distinction between the protocol and the framework and 2) fail to make clear to the larger Holochain community that a choice has been made to prioritise the development of the framework over the development of the protocol AND the reasons for that decision. And, in view of this I am sincerely calling upon @pauldaoust1 to do his best to rectify this state of affairs as he said he would do. I do, however, think that Paul deserves a LOT more credit from you than you have given him. Many (perhaps most) people in his position would have responded to you in a highly defensive manner, gone on the offensive or refused to engage with you at all. From my POV at least he has done none of those and has instead a) engaged with you in good faith, b) acknowledged many of your points, c) THANKED YOU for helping to clarify his thinking with regards to the distinction between the protocol and the framework and d) offered to do his best to try to help the broader community to understand this important distinction. NONE OF WHICH you have offered him a single word of thanks or appreciation for! On the one hand I think that it shows a lack of basic human decency when it comes to your handling of situations like this and is extremely "unfair" towards Paul, but on the other hand I also think that it is pretty dumb strategically.

I mean let's face it Chris - you're not going to get Art and Eric to dramatically change their roadmap and priorities to what you think they should be. If that was going to happen it would have happened long ago. That ship has sailed. The decision has been taken. The MOST that you can realistically hope to achieve with respect to the Holochain team with regards to this issue is to persuade them to retrospectively acknowledge the decision made and to provide reasons for that decision and Paul is, at least if I am understanding him correctly, offering to try to do that! And asides from the fact that I think that he deserves credit for the openness and honesty with which he has handled the discussion I'm also concerned that if you don't pause breath from criticising him for a moment to at least say "well, okay, that would at least be something" - an acknowledgement of some description - he's not going to bother following through on the things that he's said he'll do since "clearly nothing that I say I'll try to do to clarify things will ever be enough for Chris" and we won't get that one truly meaningful outcome from this intense discussion that Paul is offering to deliver on. As my dyslexic brother once put it [true story this] you need to LEARN BETTER TICTACS! ;-)

Hey Chris, so I get that there are many layers to your criticisms but let's look at what has happened here from a big lens perspective:

1) You started working with the Holochain community in 2017 after attending one of their hackathons in the States. You were, initially, tremendously positive about the experience of working with them and grateful to us [the Noomap team] for putting you in contact with them. During the conversations that we had in Rotterdam in early 2017 you were contrasting them very favorably with us and really singing their praises.

2) At some point in 2017, probably gradually and over time, your perception of them changed and you ended up falling out with the core team in October.

3) Although you left the core team you remained part of the larger Holochain community and continued to discuss Holochain on Mattermost (I don't know if you still are as I haven't been on it myself in months) and were allowed to engage in whatever conversations you wanted there. There was no vindictiveness on their part (from my POV), no airbrushing you out of photographs. It was just simply the case that you were not longer a part of the core team as the working relationship between you and them had broken down.

4) Sometime after that, according to what you've shared here which I have no reason to doubt, you were able to help a team to get funding for a fork of Holochain that will be creating a PNDHT that can facilitate agent-centric computing using a federated protocol that the existing mature ecosystems such as Wordpress, Python, etc, can easily plug into and run on top of.

YAY! Welcome to the new world of agent-centric computing that everyone can plug into and take advantage of! Thank you Art and Eric for providing the initial inspiration and thank you Chris for placing the idea into the hands of a team who could share it with the world in a way that everyone can take advantage of! :-)

5) Holochain release their combined protocol and framework to the world with vocabularies that allow people to start creating new models of social organisation and economic exchange on top of Holochain.

YAY! Welcome to the new world of scalable distributed communities, new, original and diverse forms of social organisation, value exchange, and collective intelligence! :-)

6) Having pursued their parallel paths for a time the various projects within the world of distributed computing (including Holochain and the open PNDHT) ALL start talking to each other and drawing inspiration from each other leading to further cross-pollination of ideas and an evolutionary leap for humanity, with the whole world now able to take advantage of every single aspect of the value offering of Holochain, CEPTR, the MetaCurrency Project, the open and federated PNDHT, Solid, IPFS, etc, etc.

YAY! Welcome to the new paradigm of love, peace and abundance! And we can all go into a big, beautiful field, with trees and flowers, and join hands TOGETHER in a big circle - you, me, Art, Eric, Paul, Matthew EVERYONE at Holochain, everyone within the WHOLE Open Apps Ecosystem and everyone else - ALL OF US TOGETHER and sing and dance all day long until the sun goes down and far into the night in the pale light of the stars and the moon! :-) ;-)

I mean, and I missing something here because I just don't see the problem? Can we not be pragmatic and forward looking? How about sharing with us a link to the project that has forked the Holochain code with a view to creating an open and federated PNDHT? How about asking Paul and the Holochain team if, having clarified this matter, they would be gracious and big enough to provide a link to this project? You clearly have a fearsome technical intelligence but you need to balanced it out with love man! ;-) This is not hippy talk. It is basic interpersonal psychology. People don't respond well if they feel that they're under attack. You're familiar with the story of the competition between the sun and the wind, right? ;-) See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GGvRtuxglM

ok Adam.

this is the last of this I'm going to speak.

1. not being defensive when someonec rather grumpily shows you are talking a combination of nonsense and falsehoods AS YOUR JOB, and your organisation is KNOWINGLY stealing time and energy from a very delicate ecosystem is not laudable. I've actually been through difficult things in my life. having a mild, factual, impersonal roasting on a loomio channel isn't one of them.

2. you have absolutely no idea what happened with holo, hilochaim and my personal and business life. you are making things up. I have absolutely no interest in your opinion about "what happened". I can assure you the reality was quite as vicious as I am implying.

3. my "tactics" ... lol, are extraordinarily successful. it may be that I don't give a rats arse about whatever it is you are talking about. consider that I may, in fact, be doing exactly what I want to, and have absolutely no need of your help, or coaching.

4. as you point out, I had initial positive feelings. this is because art and wick are premeditated liars who manipulate the ecosystem of peace and open live for their own gain. much like noomap, who are also people I have nothing to do with.

peace.

thank you for your attention and time.

I am not responding "well" because I was "attacked" as you put it, repeatedly, in several ways, none of which were as loving as some negative comments backed up by strong analysis. I am responding.

the issue here is, Adam, you are assuming that somehow holo don't deserve the vitriol I'm pushing at them. actually they deserve much worse.

I am presenting "love", for the sake of the larger community, through putting an extraordinary amount of effort into explaining exactly what is happening, in a formal sense, with the technology, offering it insights openly, and you can do what you will with it.

people are free to work with whoever they want. you won't find me near certain types of people.

gl;hf;

it makes much more sense to me for this conversation to result in "let's sort out PNDHT, and btw, this holo people seem a bit dodgy" , than "let's sort out a PNDHT, and aren't those holo people great for what they are doing".

much as the people in my POLICING NEIGHBOURHOOD have a serious distrust of the three muskateers of noomap, holo are also that.

anyone who thinks this wider ecosystem doesn't have sharks (little baby ones admittedly) in it, is missing the point of how humanity ends up in these situations, and may get some value going out into the wild, say refugee camps or working with poverty on the streets, to get a better grip of human nature in its complex delusions and tempting deceptions.

lol, you've even got me doing it. there isn't any vitriol, just some clear negative comments. lol

lol, imagine i was the king of charm, and my words represent a very gentle description of the reality. some of the documentary evidence of holo's behaviour would make your toes curl. lol. might even promote outrage. I'm just being clear. hah, not trying to stir up anything. my agreements are well backed up by rational analysis. holo literally demand that they don't have to respond to criticism. lol

actually mostly thanks to me. it's good to have people ameliorating the impact of true words so people can grumble and splutter and not feel out of place. it's also true I know how to make sparks without setting fire to things.

as to working with holochain, I wish you the best of luck, but as you can imagine, I have no interest I working with people as ignorant of real world issues as these kinds of people. there's not enough time. I've done my academic background work, and spent years on the ground at the front lines of the various class wars (from urban poverty to running a huge refugee camp). perhaps they have something to offer you, and I respect that.

from my perspective they are destructive, manipulative and adolescent

lol, have you actually seen the weird language forms that spring up around these kinds of people? there are loads of them just in this thread

pseudo logic with a goal; hyperbole on stained metaphor; appeals to avoiding feelings. it's not open analysis my friend. and see which people join in because they think it's clever

OK, at this point I think I move on, too. We all tried to have a conversation that worked for us at least. "Assume good faith" and all. It was harder than I had hoped, but these things happen.

Back, I hope, to core thread territory ... I have always been interested in a deep appreciations and critiques (and comparisons) of these various technical systems, though recognising the severe limitations of my own technical understanding. That's what prompts my willingness to help (note, not do by myself!) lay out the learning groundwork from which people can understand what is being proposed and make better decisions about which "horses" to back. I hope to offer an opportunity for those who care about communicating technical matters to use me as a guinea pig... I really value the kind of deep transparency that comes from attending to multiple voices that are able to intercommunicate. Please let me know if I can do more towards this!

Yeah, I had conversations in good faith with people around this topic for quite some time. Because my good faith has been pushed way way passed boundaries so many times, I am quite comfortable being rather cold in my analysis of people's accuracy and choice of words

"And he’s right about the pattern being able to stand on its own. I think we could do more to clarify the distinction the DHT from the app dev framework, and after reading Christopher’s comments I think I’ll start doing that. (TBH I was never quite clear)" This is an astounding admission from @pauldaoust1 that amounts to an acknowledgement of @christopher7 's core critique. I can only feel tremendously grateful to both Christopher and Paul for having this vigorous discussion.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I try to take input from every place I can -- I feel like I have major perspective shifts every week or two (thrilling but exhausting), so this epiphany is par for the course. Just want to mention that I had a few colleagues (including Art) review what I wrote, and they thought it was pretty accurate. So it appears that this revelation is astonishing only to me -- that is, it's a part of my own learning journey. I guess Art and Eric don't disagree with Christopher so much on the protocol/framework distinction, but on the relative importance of each. I think they see a good, ready-to-use framework that bakes in a bunch of affordances related to P2P interaction as crucial for adoption. If the protocol is the road network, the framework is the vehicle, and they want to make sure both are easy for devs to use.

"I guess that Art and Eric don't disagree with Christopher so much on the protocol/framework distinction, but on the relative importance of each." But WHY @pauldaoust1? Because the advantages and potential benefits of creating a PNDHT protocol that anyone could use as they chose, coupled with a dedicated communications campaign and hackathons could surely be enormous in terms of kick-starting a new era of agent-centric computing. Where is the costs/benefits analysis that can explain why not doing that and focussing on the framework instead is serving a greater good? Are those of us who have supported Holochain precisely because we were inspired by the concepts of agent-centric computing, Sovereign Accountable Commons, etc, as explained so eloquently by Art and Eric, not entitled to ask for one?

Yes, I agree with @christopher7 that it is, in general, rather oppressive to give people a hard time about getting emotional about things that upset them. It is true though that it can be problematic when you have two people getting emotional with each other but I haven't seen that happening with @pauldaoust1 who has been totally cool, non-defensive and good-natured - much respect to you brother! :-)

Hi @adamwaterhouse just to be clear, I have nothing at all against expressing emotions. What I find helpful is to separate personal value judgements from matters that people can agree on as facts, and to own the emotions and the values as clearly as one can. Emotions can be complex little beasts, and learning about one's own as well as those of other people can really help in dialogue.

I am recognising that this is now totally off topic. But it's a topic that I would gladly return to in an appropriate place.

Yes, I agree with you in general and it is a topic that is of interest to me also. So if you start discussing it in a different thread please do invite me - cheers!

Yes, I try hard to be clear where my expressions come from, which I think is required to respect the other people in the "room".

I have no problem calling people out, or being quite clear when I see patterns of deliberate avoidance and whool pulling.

@pauldaoust1 btw, my emotional experience is not that "you are lying", but to be honest Paul, you are towing the line of explanations that to not hold water, and you have a responsibility to analyse that for your own good. The result is no different to if you are lying or not. Be careful of houses in glass cards.

Ah, thanks for the clarification. I have to be honest with you: in certain places it definitely came across as "you are lying" (or at least being disingenuous), and it felt quite demoralising. Believe me, I scan my intentions constantly for clues that I'm toeing the party line vs speaking from sincerity, not just for my own good but for the good of people I'm talking to.

Well, in my analysis of your words, which I accept is coming from an ice cold perspective, there are two things. You make statements which appear to be formal, but which are symbolically questionable, but tow the line of the soundbytes/hyperbole coming out of Holo/chain - this is easy to do when you are surrounded by it. Two I made criticisms of things that you said, which you then repeated to other people, without addressing me and those critiques.

none of that is weapons grade bad, but its coming close. I appreciate that you didnt resort to criticising my style of communication, and drag the conversation into a valueless meta.

For my part, I hope that my strong attempt to justify my position without reference to my feelings is visible to you. It is true I have feelings about the position, and I hope you are able to see the world in multi-dimensional ways, as I do, and allow those things to exist independently of each other

In the interests of harvesting nuggets from this looong thread . . could someone who's on top of this please identify (ie link to) the comment where DHT/Policing Neighbourhood DHT first makes its appearance (with explanatory links?)?

Likewise, the comment where the Wordpress plugin route is described, documented or linked-to. Thank u

me:
https://prezi.com/view/NvRAZ35fln9i70V3YCrl/
us:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14Naw_P2Lsqnf5EMRQYWugEB5KuxtLro61VWiPTtdg4o/edit?ts=5c3d4362#heading=h.27kb44fekzzg

Hey Chris, I don't know exactly what happened between you and Holo but I spent a week with Eric and know Nico well. Everyone has personal limitations and blind spots. I'm giving you plenty of credit, and thanking and supporting you, in clearly articulating and explaining what surely is a serious omission on the part of the Holochain team - their failure to draw a clear distinction between the PNDHT protocol and their own framework. That said we do appear to have a clear difference of opinion on the social side of things - I believe in building bridges and certainly don't want to foreclose on the possibility of working with Holochain folk in the future. Nor would I wish to burn bridges with you. The idea of an open and federated PNDHT protocol has a lot to be said for it and you are doing a grand job of championing it! :-)