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Challenge:

How might we make data work for individuals and communities?

Phase: Entries

Heartbeat: privately social.

We’re building a beautiful social network designed to respect and protect your human rights.

Photo of An Old Friend
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In one sentence, describe your idea as simply as possible.

A beautiful, free and open, decentralised social network where your identity is your own web site and where any private messages you send travel securely between only your device and the device of the person you’re talking to.
My opening keynote from The Conference in Malmö from August, 2015. (Video courtesy of the kind folks at The Conference) If you’d rather read about the talk, Katie Collins has an excellent write up of it on Wired.co.uk at: wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-08/18/aral-balkan-ethical-design-cyborgs (For a more in-depth look at the problem itself, please see my earlier talk, The Camera Panopticon: https://ind.ie/the-camera-panopticon/#transcript)
My approach to design for creating delightful experiences. I am applying that to free and open source to create what I call independent technology (indie tech). I see indie tech as the next iteration of free and open source, where we build beautiful products designed to respect and protect human rights.
An example of the result of my approach to design: a delightful hack as presented at TED@London.
Your public posts are served by your own independent web server and also aggregated on Ind.ie. Your public posts are served by your own independent web server and also aggregated on Ind.ie.
In addition to communicating privately, Heartbeat enables you to easily publish to your own web site. People can reach your public posts through Bonjour or IP address even if you’re not connected to the Internet as long as they’re on the same local network. In addition to communicating privately, Heartbeat enables you to easily publish to your own web site. People can reach your public posts through Bonjour or IP address even if you’re not connected to the Internet as long as they’re on the same local network.
Screenshot: having a private conversation with my parents over Heartbeat.

Heartbeat is an easy to use app that empowers you to share the things that matter to you with the people you care about (and no one else).

Private messages

All messages are saved in HTML format and synchronised via our fork of a peer-to-peer file synchronisation engine called Syncthing. (Again, this happens behind the scenes, you don’t have to have any technical knowledge beyond how to launch an app to use Heartbeat.)

public POSTS

In addition to private messages (which are securely synchronised directly between your device and the device of the person you’re talking to), you can also write public posts. Your public posts are both served locally from your own web server and aggregated on Ind.ie. (All this happens automatically and seamlessly.)

currently pre-alpha

Heartbeat is at pre-alpha, the source code is available, and there are a couple of hundred people testing our instance of it as we speak.

That is where we are today.

Where we want to get with it is even better…

the future: better decentralisation, better indie web, ios support

In a nutshell, we want to decentralise Heartbeat further by enabling people to own their own domain name and control their own always-on encrypted private messaging node.

This year, I want to evolve Heartbeat in the following ways:

  1. Your own web identity and always-on private messaging node. This is currently a centralised component of the design and it makes us into an identity provider (which we do not want to be). I designed Heartbeat this way for pre-alpha to make it easier to for people to find each other. (You need to have some way to refer to people, after all.) In the next major update, I want to move to using domain names as the identifier and to making it seamless for people to purchase and use their own domain name as part of the on-boarding process. Making this seamless is a major design challenge.
  2. Asynchronous private messages. Currently, for messages to synchronise between two people, both of them must be online at the same time. When people have their own domain names we can provide them with always-on nodes. This will mean that messages will sync even neither of the parties was online at the same time.
  3. iOS support. Heartbeat is currently only available for Mac OS X. My goal is to also have it available on iOS next year. For this to happen, we have two volunteers who work at Philips in the Netherlands during the day and help us to port the synchronisation engine (Syncthing) to Swift in the evenings. I would love to explore how they can work on Heartbeat in a more permanent manner.


Needless to say, all this represents a major amount of additional development and Ind.ie is currently young, broke, and beautiful. So we need additional funds to build it all.

Briefly describe the need that you're trying to address.

The cost of participating in modern life using mainstream technologies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc., is your privacy. These services make money by channeling all conversations through their centralised silos, eavesdropping on our conversations, and exploiting what they learn about us. There is no technical reason for these essential technologies to be designed in this centralised, intrusive manner that erodes our human rights.

What progress have you made so far?

We have developed a pre-alpha that is being used by several hundred people at the moment. There have been roughly ten pre-alpha releases since the original one a few months ago.

There are links to the source code, as well as to documents on the conceptual design, etc., on the introductory forum post:

https://forum.ind.ie/t/heartbeat-pre-alpha-release/740

What would be a successful outcome for your project?

To decentralise the web and empower people by giving them ownership of their own online identity and the means to communicate privately in a peer-to-peer fashion.

Please list your team members and their relevant experience/skills.

Aral Balkan: Primary Designer/Developer. 30+ years of programming experience.
Laura Kalbag: Web and Communications Designer/Developer. 8 years industry experience.
Jo Porter: Operations. Background in philosophy of technology.

If we can get additional funding, I want to hire two or three developers to help with development (decentralisation and the iOS ports as mentioned above).

Where is your project located?

We are currently based in the United Kingdom. Aral and Laura are working out of a shed in Laura’s dad’s back yard in Surrey, and Jo lives in Brighton. Once we have raised further funds, we plan to move outside of the UK to a more privacy-friendly location. (We don’t want to find ourselves in a situation where we may be asked to compromise the integrity of what we’re building in a couple of years time by the UK govt.) We are considering possibly Sweden (Malmö), Berlin, or Iceland.

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Photo of Mathieu

Here's an applause to building the (better) future. A place where your digitally empowered self is still you and yours to keep and share directly to those you want.
Aral's talks on the subject are, well, enlightening.
Please support this first step in that direction.

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Photo of An Old

Thank you, Mathieu.

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