All my friends hate Google Docs with Andreas Tsamados
While at Devcon 2024 I spoke to Andreas Tsamados, cofounder of Fileverse and anime gif connoisseur. I highly recommend trying out ddocs.new as a decentralized alternative to google docs.
We spoke about the issue of radical communities using google docs, the importance of decentralized and censorship resistance knowledge sharing systems, and how this is all possible on Fileverse.
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Transcript
You need to depend on the cloud paradigm, which is some mega servers in California and Washington state that basically control your whole life, your identity, your accounts.
The moment you're in, they lock you in. They make it difficult for you to port your personal data. There are just too many examples of, you know, big tech shutting down, like, entire Google drives because they were supporting, Palestinian causes or pa or other types of causes that, like, you know, Google didn't want to be associated with. And so they lost their entire, like, knowledge infrastructure.
Australian pension fund worth, like, a $150,000,000,000 lost most of its proprietary data because of manual misconfiguration by an employee at Google. The cloud is starting to crack. It's time to move on to something that is more robust. Our tech stack is based on, as much as possible, your own laptop. We've had twenty years of development of hardware,
capacity for memory, for computation, etcetera. It's time to take advantage of that. Hey, guys. What you're about to watch is one of the many interviews I took during my time in Thailand for DevCon twenty twenty four. I was in the country for a total of over a month and got the opportunity to meet a bunch of really cool people and interview them in person. DevCon itself was an incredible and interesting experience and you can find my full review of it on my Patreon. So if you like the content I've been making and would like me to continue going to these kinds of events and improving, then I hope you'll become a patron starting at just $3 per month for access to loads of bonus content and Blockchain Socialist merch at patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Blockchain Socialist of such a high production value that you're never going to get ever again. I'm taking advantage of this completely. Let's see how many interviews I can get through while I'm at DevCon in this, amazing setup. So my lucky interviewee that I'm gonna be talking to is my friend, Andreas. You are the cofounder of Fileverse, which is a really neat project. Yeah. Maybe I will shut up and just let you explain what Fileverse is as a start, and then we can get into the the hot takes and the kind of, yeah, political nature of the stuff that we're building. Of course. So hey, everyone. Thanks for having me, Josh.
So briefly about Favors. In a sentence, Favors is a trustless collaboration, middleware. So we do a bunch of things. The most concrete, one that you can actually, get your hands on right now is called ddocs.new. It's, it's a play on the domain of docs.new where if you write that in your URL, you redirect it to Google Docs. Google Docs is used by over a billion people. And, our goal was to actually create an alternative that would be end to end encrypted and peer to peer and as self sovereign as possible. So the idea and it works today if you go on the URL, you don't need an account. You don't need a wallet. It's a completely non financial crypto app, which is rare as you know. Yeah. And you need to grind to actually, get people's attention for a non financial app until today, until Defcon, I would say. Because you have people like Vitalik that are finally being like, okay, guys, too much infrastructure. We're ready for the next step. We have this world computer, can create new forms of trust between people. So start using, apps like deduct. New, which he said actually on stage, two days ago, which got us very excited. But this is what you can do. So everything you do with, Google Docs, Google Drive, etcetera, is something that Favors is, building. The current one is DDocs. New.
Yeah. So Favors is, it is one of the few products that I can, like, point out and be like, there you go. There finally, there's one non financial use case for all this crypto shit that we're doing, and, it works. It works really well. I've used it myself. I have shared documents with it. The basic things are there, and it's a nice UI. Yeah. I guess, what was the I mean, just to does it go a little bit deeper into it? Like, what was the, the what what was your, the thing that was making you want to to create this? What was what's the origin story, I guess?
There there are a few origin stories because we're three cofounders. But, basically, it comes down to frustrations. So we all were very frustrated, with the current state of, affairs. I'm a PhD student. My other cofounder is a PhD dropout. The other co founder has created some of the biggest, gender focused, hackathons in India. And so we all use a lot of, collaborative tools, which, today, if you want to collaborate with people on a global scale in a way that is smooth interactive, you don't have any limitations. You need to go through the cloud empire. Yeah. You need to depend on the the cloud paradigm, which is some mega servers in California and Washington state that basically control your whole life, your identity, your accounts, the moment you're in, they lock you in. They make it difficult for you to port your personal data. Things that are essential to you is in the hands of someone else. So my big frustration, which led to me going full on, Faber's was, I was writing a big part of my thesis, paper one, and I lost about 80% of my work, which was catastrophic. And I kept telling myself I should have put it on the hardware. I should have done the obvious.
And Get so mad that you make a whole new product. Exactly.
And this is actually the origin story of, a lot of the best projects out there. Ethereum came out of Vitalik being frustrated at World of Warcraft, which I was also a big player, until quite recently. So yeah.
I think what has been actually really impressive about your team is how quickly you've been able to ship new features. That's, like, super impressive. Like, I I don't remember. I think it was, like because you guys got the attention of Vitalik, I think, on Twitter once or twice, where he asked for a specific Four times, please. Four times. Okay. And, I think he requested some, like, markdown or something like that. That's a and a couple of other things, and you guys shifted right on I mean, maybe in part is because it was metallic that was ask that was asking, but it's still impressive that you guys shipped so quickly. Yeah. So, thanks for pointing that out. Actually, it's something that, we're quite proud of because and you can see the frustration that the space has with slow developments, especially after five fifteen years of
permissionless censorship resistant money infrastructure being built. People want to see things evolve a bit faster, especially in terms of actual use cases. So because we saw that, okay, there is very strong momentum, we paused a lot of the other things that we were preparing like, decentralized sheets, decentralized email, etcetera. And we're like, okay, let's put a lot of attention right now on, the dogs that work very well that have a lot of users and make sure that the first users know that everything that they say, everything that they express as a clear pain point, especially if it's a pain point not covered by another app, centralized app, we want to cover quickly and show that this is a place that will evolve for you and fast. So no need to wait for ten seconds for your page load and neither do you need to wait ten months for a new feature to ship. Markdown import and exports, it was crucial not because only of, Vitalik, but, actually the open source, the free open source software, movements out there and communities, they are very markdown friendly. Mhmm. And, if you put in forefront of your app that, okay, we have every important standard that is easily compatible with our open source app, you can you can bridge the communication to those communities that are very close to us but have a little bit of frustrations with crypto in general. Mhmm. Yeah. So I think the
the biggest kind of to me, what was the, like, really interesting part of the project is that I mean, something I've complained about, many times before on the podcast is that, like, a lot of activist groups or groups that are on the fringes or, challenging capitalist institutions, for example, they use Google Docs. They use, a lot of, you know, big tech infrastructure to facilitate their actions to organize themselves. You know? No no shade to people who do that. Like, it's also difficult otherwise. It has been for a long time to difficult, difficult to do it otherwise. And so there but there is, like, a question in there of, like, you know, there are just too many examples of, you know, big tech shutting down, like, entire Google drives because they were supporting, Palestinian causes or or other types of causes that, like, you know, Google didn't want to be associated with, and so they lost all their all their entire, like, knowledge infrastructure.
Even academics. Right? Yeah. Like, at good universities at Harvard that have been historians for twenty years. Suddenly, the content you've posted in your own Google Docs is a little bit too offensive to our company policy. So we're gonna shut down your your brain. Hey, it's pretty catastrophic. But to go back to what you were saying, the the dependence even in our crowds on centralized tools is quite particular. You said no shade, a little bit of shade. A little bit of shade because if if you look back at the past fifteen years of crypto developments, one thing is clear. One of the most important outpost that the industry has had is our knowledge. Even if the tech disappears, even if the tech turns out not to be that useful in the in the monolithic way that we're thinking about about it today. We will know that we contribute to fifteen years of important research on distributed systems, on identities, on decentralized dynamics, between individuals at a global scale, cryptography for collective power and position, etcetera. So it's essential that at least this knowledge does not disappear. And Notion, for example, started censoring all Russian residents from using Notion and having their knowledge on Notion and organizing what their to do list on Notion. What do you expect to happen from that? Like, ridiculous. And the examples abound, same, one example I like to use just to to speak to a crowd that is also not necessarily crypto focused is beginning of the summer, Australian pension fund worth like a $150,000,000,000 lost most of its proprietary data because of manual misconfiguration by an employee at Google. Same for their backup data. Catastrophic. A month later, Microsoft Office goes down for six hours. It costs trillions to the world economy. It's not normal. The cloud is starting to crack. It's time to move on to something that is more robust and I don't say that from necessarily an ideological, point of view which, of course, I I have my, my thesis around. But simply because there is new technologies that can take better care of our interactions, our daily collaborations, and it's time to move towards those.
Yeah. No. Absolutely. I mean, I think there's, yeah, a a lot of value in this, I mean, not even just from, like, a political point of view, but also just, like, making it normal. Mhmm. Like, making it normal that you don't actually have to go through a big tech company in order to to store your data. I mean, like like, really, in in in the day and age we live in, like, storage is cheap. Mhmm. Like, for the amount of data that probably most people produce, storage is relatively cheap. Then we have the technology out there to, for alternatives that are open source and that are not, yeah, gatekept by by Google and such.
Yeah. And, again, just to be as pragmatic as possible, the idea is not to propose, okay, there is an alternative. It's built in a peer to peer way, open source. It was, created thanks to donations, etcetera. It's to say, there is a competitive UX to Google Docs Yeah. And the likes. It makes you, puts you in control of your own data accounts, identities, your existence in a digital form online. Mhmm. And there are a thousand and one examples on why this is important. And, I'll point to one last thing, if you'll allow me to, which is, the practical example of regulations changing across the world. So there is a push. There is a community push by people around, mainly for now, western countries that say, hey, we want more privacy. Apple was forced into implementing end to end encrypted cloud. Still cloud, but end to end encrypted. Finally, no more celebrity leaks, of their photos online, etcetera. And on the other side, you have regulations as well that are pushing CCPA in California, GDPR in Europe. And we've gone from Google paying a 50 k fine to the KNIL, the French data protection authority five years ago to now paying, around 1 to $3,000,000,000 for leaking data, for abusing selling it to a thousand data brokers that nobody knows about, etcetera. So the change is happening. The technology that adapts to this change, will win. And I don't think those big empires that have built their whole business model around the extraction of people's most essential resources is capable of changing its architecture
mid flight. Whereas new projects can be there to welcome people. Yeah. So maybe I'm a little bit curious, you know, what is the, like, in in in for a layman, like, what is the the tech stack? Like, how is this actually possible? Because I can imagine a lot of people listening probably to me don't know what, you know, what what is behind all these things and
Yeah. So, thanks for the question. Always important to explain, okay, why our alternative technology is actually worth it. So for the past, ten years, we've been developing as an industry, good technology. We like to think of them as community computers, public blockchains. And we think that they pair well, very well with something we've had since the beginning of the Internet which is peer to peer networks. So if you combine those two, by the way, peer to peer networks were essential to the growth of the social web. Third of all Internet traffic was, peer to peer BitTorrent exchanges until 2010. Yeah. And then it was replaced by those behemoths. Our tech stack is based on as much as possible your own laptop. We've had twenty years of development of hardware, capacity for memory, for computation, etcetera. It's time to take advantage of that. The reasons we went to Google, Docs was collaborative capabilities were not well supported on local devices. Now you have your device that is good enough. So we use your device. We use something called IndexedDB to keep a lot of your data in your browser. The real time collaboration with, other people right now up to 20 people but it's scaling, can happen does happen through peer to peer manner. So we use WebRTC paired with IndexedDB. And for some redundancies, we use, GONEDB, which I recommend people check out. It's very cool. And we use IPFS, which is a very well distributed network of nodes for data, content addressing and data, pending storage. And finally, the blockchain for having people's identity and a encrypted manner, only accessible to them and people that have access to that data. And the reason why this is important is, going back to regulation, it gives you things that are important is going back to regulation, it gives you things by design. It gives you privacy by design. Everything is end to end encrypted. It gives you, data portability, account portability fuck off?
You would consider
it. I would consider it to do things much more impactful in the same causes, maybe. Right. But, even if we do take that route, people will be able to continue using the product, running the software, taking their data, and doing everything they've been doing without, having a dependence on us.
So yeah. I mean, I guess, for a lot of people that may not you you listed out a lot of different types of databases. Sure. I guess the main kind of point about that is these are technologies that have I mean, I guess a lot of them have been developed more or less than the last decade or so, I guess. But they have gotten to the point where they can they work. Like, there's there's no, question about it. We can put it together. The question I I'm I'm curious about the the blockchain stuff is interesting because I think I don't know how many times maybe you would have presented this idea maybe before you started it or even after to people who are, I don't know, anti blockchain or something like that. They'd be like, oh, that's great. And there's no blockchain in it. Or would be, like, very surprised to hear that there is a blockchain involved in it. Does the how would you, like, succinctly kind of summarize the benefit of blockchain in that stack in particular? Is it like, like, to me, it sounds just kind of like, permissioning and retrievability. Does that make sense? Yeah. Is that kind of the Yeah. Think of it as a source of truth
Mhmm. That is independent of, third party, keeping that source of truth available for people. So, if we're a big community and we want to, all together manage a website or an archive like the Internet archive. We don't want to basically depend on either one super admin or a third party to, manage all that. So we use the blockchain as a source of truth for data to be retrieved in case, user interface and app disappears, or something like that. But the keyword was succinctly here. So, to put it very briefly, the current cloud empire requires a lot of infrastructure. The alternatives require almost no infrastructure because require almost no infrastructure because the app team doesn't need to spin out their own infrastructure. Infrastructure is already there. There are community computers to leverage to make sure that whatever happens, those computers still have the data that people require.
Like, you're referring to like by like because hardware has advanced enough, we can simply just put store more locally? Store more locally and have a backup,
which is peer to peer networks Mhmm. And an index of that backup if you want Mhmm. On the blockchain.
Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I'm, I'm also curious if you have any thoughts, like, on the well, I mean, of course, you do. On, like, the future of the project, where do you see it being, like yeah. Because because, I mean, I guess, the the main thing I'm thinking about with with this is not only it is mainly in the context of, like, being being in conflict with state actors or with certain institutions. Do you have any thoughts on, like if you were to, like, pitch this to a group who's about to go into, you know, activist mode or whatever you want to call it, counter to to founder mode. Although, that's also a cringe term, so don't take that.
I can see Paul Graham, quote, tweeting you on this.
I wish I didn't say that.
It's online forever. Yeah. Yeah. I'll put it on the blockchain. It's on the blockchain. Make sure.
Yeah. I guess what would be your your pitch to them on followers?
So the non marketing pitch would be, not just yet. Not just yet because we're testing the reliability and the censorship resistance, of our technology. We've done two audits with Nevermind of the smart contracts. One audit for privacy of the front end avoiding any type of metadata leak, etcetera, which is super important because, yes, we encrypt everything end to end. But who sends what time from where, all that is all the NSA needed, to actually, shut down a bunch of activist groups. It's all that they needed to actually, catch most of, according to James Comey, the ex FBI director, testifying in front of senate special committee, metadata is basically everything that they need to I think they they had a really crass, saying that to kill people, basically. Yeah. And, but once we're we're past that phase of auditing, making sure that everything is robust, I would, if I was talking to activists, I would say, first of all, try to be as able as possible to have plausible deniability. So make sure that as little as possible data is traced back to you. And that means, don't have a third party, to which you entrusted your identity, your life, your social graph, who you're connected to, what's the name of your grandparents, because they're the first point of contact for state actors. So today, actually, a month ago, major, American ISPs had a huge data leak. It was, allegedly it comes from the PLA, so Chinese, hackers. And, the way that they actually managed to do that is by using the backdoor that the US government had put on, the ISP's. Right. Right. Right there. So
They found a copy of the keys. Exactly. It's a, it's a bit of a big issue.
Golden key hidden in the bushes. So I would say try to avoid a dependence on third parties. So our tools is going towards, this exact description. And yeah. To be honest, if you're an activist and you're doing something really dangerous, use as little computers as as you can because, yeah, I can't recommend, foolproof, bulletproof way of being absolutely, private and, and, in control of your data. Even if you use Tor, even if you use your own hardware, even if you use only open source software, there are ways to get to you. So extra extra careful. Yeah. No. But at the very least, like, you can,
you probably won't get won't have your entire drive deleted
Exactly. Or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. You're setting. And for activists, it's important. They produce a lot of knowledge. They need to keep it.
Yeah. And so the last question I wanted to ask you is that, is where do you find so many anime GIFs on Twitter? Every reply on Twitter file verse, I think, is an anime gif, and they're always, like, incredible they're incredible gifs that I don't know. Where do you find them? Where do where do you get them?
Yeah. So, first of all, let me shame you for saying gif instead of gif. I said gif. Oh my god. God. I think it comes from graphical
something something. I'm pretty I I swear I could be wrong, but I swear I read something that the guy who made it said it was supposed to be pronounced jif. Okay.
That's true. I Someone At the Internet decide. There's a poly market going right now to to decide what is true or not. So why where's where does all the anime come from? Why so much anime? You store it all in Fileverse. First of all, all of it is on Fileverse, just in case, just in case Crunchyroll or others start attacking us. But, no. We're we're all anime and manga fans in the in the team. I know it's a little bit, it's the typical geek response, but, I know that a lot of people out there, also, do watch anime and, read manga. Actually, the culture is turning very anime and manga friendly, rappers, pop stars, movies, all that. So it's a way also of connecting, with people and telling them, hey, we we're not a big, company brand that, tries to put, on, on, some pink in their logo to do a little bit of, what's it called? Pink washing. Pink washing, but something also like Rainbow washing. Something capitalism.
Rainbow cap Rainbow capitalism.
No. We're genuine. If you see that, we have a super specific reference to Hunter x Hunter chapter 453, it's because we're part of you people and you can, yeah, you can expect, you can, be a bit more trustful with, with us than, you know, a big machine that doesn't even know, there are humans in it.
Awesome. Well, yeah. Thanks, for coming on and Thanks for having me. Coming on to this amazing set that I'm never gonna have again. Yeah. Would you like to leave anything, for the audience? Any any plugs you wanna leave for people to check out Filoverse or check out your work?
Yeah. Please check out, ddocs.new. So ddocs.new. You don't need an account. You don't need crypto. You don't need anything. It just works. It's a good alternative to, Google Docs. It's the first thing that's out. A lot more is coming. And I would recommend that people read a bit of Ursula Le Guin. I'm reading a book by her at the moment. So my mind is, is, in her in her fantastic environments. So, yeah, as a last word, I recommend that. Awesome. Thanks for having me, man. Yeah. Yeah. Of course.
