The year of 2020 will be remembered for the pandemic, the BLM movement, and the U.S. elections among other billion of things around the globe. It is funny I even mention the third one considering how little I give a damn about U.S. politics, yet this whole story begins with Parler deplatforming that happened about a month ago. Let me remind you: Apple, Google, Amazon, and a few other companies terminated their service to the free speech social network for insufficient moderation effectively destroying the platform in a matter of just a couple of days. What the fuck?
OK, let me be clear with my position: I believe every private company has a right to refuse service to anyone, whether an individual or a business, but I also have my own right to despise them for exercising that. What they did was probably legal, but screw them anyway, they failed us. Regardless what these psychopathic corporations like to tell the public, they are only concerned with maximizing shareholder value, and if there is anything even remotely resembling an image liability (through pressure by political radicals, cancel culture SJWs, you name it), they will not think twice. What disgusts me the most here is neither greed nor hypocrisy but their unwillingness to grow a pair of balls and stand up for freedom of speech.
You see, freedom of speech and expression must be absolute. You cannot have censorship-resistance with exceptions; otherwise, these exceptions could be used to remove or block anything unwanted, not only offensive. This way, the Chinese cannot access Wikipedia because of what originally started as a counter-terrorism measure, and the Russians cannot access LinkedIn because of what originally started as a children protection measure. We cannot deprive humanity of their freedom just because some small fraction of users might, unfortunately, use that freedom to spread offensive content. In the same way, you do not ban electricity because people get electrocuted.
Let us now switch from corporates to governments. Ooh, wee! Do not even get me started on that. And I am not even talking about cases like Google happily not letting people disable SafeSearch in Indonesia because its government knows best, that is just the tip of the iceberg. I am talking about political censorship which includes silencing people with torture, gulags, and bullets. Here is the world map of the freedom of the press status:
Just look at this mess. Blue tones mean OK-ish, others not so much. This map is NordNordWest’s work based on the 2020 Press Freedom Index and is distributed under CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Keep in mind population densities, e.g. there are about 90 times more people per unit area living in Vietnam than Australia. I am actually surprised the U.S. did so well in 2020 considering how badly they wanted Mr. Assange to be extradited and executed.
What would you answer your children if they asked you how in the world North Korea still exists in its current form with 25 million Koreans suffering for over 70 years and no one is doing anything about that? Or how about 28 million people in Venezuela? Or 82 million people in Iran? Giving voice to all whistleblowers and activists, especially the ones risking their lives and freedom in hostile environments is the fundamental goal of Pepe.
There is already Tor, I2P, Freenet, GNUnet etc. We can run emails, message boards, BitTorrent, Kad, and IPFS on top of them, maybe even use Ethereum smart contracts for decentralized computing. All the technology is there, why bother with something new? Well, first of all, these are all amazing projects, there is nothing wrong with them. The peculiar thing, however, is none of them except BitTorrent (and perhaps Tor) gained much popularity, neither do we see any readily available censorship-resistant communication platforms. Why is that?
I claim there are 2 main reasons for that:
They are hard to use. The “Unix is user-friendly, it is just picky about who its friends are.” aphorism still lives in most them: you may need to install a bunch of additional software (such as [JVM](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_virtual_machine>) or shared libraries) potentially dealing with a dependency hell on some platforms; read through sparse documentation and dead forums on optimal network, security, and sharing settings; carefully configure your router, computer, and client; install, study, and configure applications running on top of the darknet, i.e. repeat the steps. The reason why Tor became popular outside of research was not because it was first, but because of the hacky all-in-one Tor Browser Bundle with sane defaults.
They prefer purity to practicality. Instead of concentrating manpower on few specific use cases, most existing tools try to conquer the world: a new internet, interplanetary, infrastructure, an application framework, APIs, a Turing-complete language on the blockchain etc. This is great and all, it is general, conceptual, modular, extensible, and stackable—everything we like—but sometimes overengineering is just overengineering given the goal. And our goal here is not to make a technical revolution, but to help as many people as we can communicate without fear of retribution.
BitTorrent evolved into something that is used by 150 million people worldwide, it seamlessly adopted DHT, PEX, µTP, trackerless magnet links, and people do not even know what the hell it all means. Even though proprietary, Skype thrived very similarly (at least before it was crippled by Microsoft), millions of its users did not even know what peer-to-peer meant, not to mention how it worked under the hood, it just did. These two systems succeeded not because of luck but rather as a result of some excellent product decisions. We need to learn from that and reiterate.
For the messaging platform, I chose to use an imageboard similar to 4chan or Futaba Channel. While not the most popular type of forum, imageboards are extremely flexible and free of junk like authentication or karma, they promote anonymity in a very practical way, and over 30 million people are already familiar with them. Perhaps, I am not a big fan of their crowded old-school design, but the initial user traction is more important than my sense of beauty, we will refine the looks through time.
That is, the Pepe imageboard is going to be the only application running on top the Pepe darknet, they are in fact inseparable. This way, we can design the network specifically for this one use case. This brings both security and performance benefits. Joining the darknet can be as simple as double clicking the application, and users do not need to install or configure any third-party browsers or proxy servers, they can just go to localhost:8666 using Chrome, Safari, or whatever they like, and it is going to be safe without any third-party extensions.
Once online, users may browse existing or create new message boards about various topics in any language such as /en/food/ or /ja/math/. A board is a collection of threads about something more specific, would it be an idea or a question. A thread has a collection of posts that people send replying to each other. Each post may have one or multiple attachments such as photos, videos, you name it. So that you have an idea of what it looks like, here is a screenshot of a random thread on the 4chan DIY board: