Brainstorming on "wanna server" thoughts

[rmd]

this was me. I'm trying to figure out ways one could implement this with relative safety, and I figured I'd throw it open for brainstorming over here. How could I help people get laid?

Comments

[irilyth]

The idea sounds interesting, but I'm not sure I understood exactly what it is. :^) Can you say more here?

[rmd]

Basically, how to you let people who are interested in each other find out they're interested in each other while minimizing the various exploits to those systems (like, if both people aren't interested in getting each other's info, no info is exchanged, etc)

[fraterrisus]

The basics aren't that hard.

Given a group of people that are willing to create accounts on your server (or use OpenID or some such), you allow people to create anonymized chatrooms with an ID. They can copy the ID of the chatroom onto the confessional with a link. Anyone who wants to can log into your chat system and gets a unique, anonymous ID that they can use to chat in that particular room. Followups, etc are threaded and tagged to the user with the unique-to-that-room ID. The user who created the room can close it to new users at any time, say, once they've started a conversation with someone. At any point, a user can say they would like to de-cloak to the other user. If you get the cross-match, the decloaking happens.

However, the "trustworthy operator" problem is unavoidable*. The site operator would have access to the full set of (real account)-to-(anonymous id)-to-(chatroom) mappings. But at least no one else would.

*ETA I'm trying to think through the encryption aspects of a client that can create a set of values that is secret from the server but not alterable and I can't make it work in my head.

[squirrelitude]

I don't have a specific algorithm in mind, but the service trust issue definitely sounds like something you could solve with cryptography. Running the whole thing through Tor, perhaps as an onion service, would help. Better would be to have the server be a "dumb pipe" and use desktop/phone apps that contain all the smarts for negotiating information exchange via the server. (Best is a competent sysadmin and developer who is trusted in the community.)