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@ Arjen Stens
2025-02-17 08:13:00
**Alright, This weekly review's gonna be a quick one as i covered my weekend + monday about Sats 'n Facts in the last one. Which leaves us with only a few days, some of which I had to give in and rest as I had been continuing to work with quite a bad cold for too long. The Facts must've been hitting too hard...**
## Reflecting on networks
A lot of my time this week was reflecting on the event and all the contacts I'd made there. There has been a surprising lot of enthusiasm of the community about Tollgate specifically. There's something that draws me to the project and i think it's not even the flashy-ness of routers paying routers, I'm starting to see the bigger possible implications of the sovereign networks that can grow from this. Not for the western world per se but for places that want to build out new infrastrucutre with their own communities. One of the worries from people to operate TollGates is if they'll get trouble with their ISP's. Which is a legitimate worry, but how long will that worry be relevant?
One thing I realize, as Nostr grows -and Blossom too- is that the data we pull in will be more localized. Imagine a city equipped with a Sovereign Tollgate network. If a few people in your city have watched a video, there will likely be a copy of that video inside the city-wide network. Then if the city get's cut off for any reason, that video will still be very much accessible and people might not even notice the 'internet is down'. I woke up in the middle of the night and had to draw out this visualization of the combination of Clearnet + Tor + TollGate networks and how they can interact with Epoxy proxies in between (visualized by the ♾️ symbol). Anyone that sees an opportunity to bridge the networks can jump in and be that link.
Even attacking (DDOS) services within other networks might become harder, because either:
1) you have to have your botnet reside inside the network of the victim. Which, if it's a small network won't comprise of a significant amount of nodes.
2) you have to have to route your attack through (Epoxy) bridges known to you, the attacker. Which likely have limited bandwidth.
Anyway, this is just my 3 AM brain-dump. I'll keep chewing on this...
## Marketing TollGate
Like I mentioned earlier there was a lot of interest in Tollgate and to be honest it's been a bit overwhelming, there are so many opportunities like podcasts, meetups and articles opening up to share it and talk about it that I have to think about the form in which I want to relate myself to the project. In any case, these are Good problems to have...
In the meanwhile we've worked on getting a good website landingpage where we can point people to that are interested in the project, it should be up soon!
- Consumers can download the Android (for now) app
- Operators can download TollGateOS to put on their router
- FAQ's
Also, i've been helping out to get some stuff automated. so we can build and push new versions quickly to start getting user feedback and enable iterating on a fast pace!