Create open-proposal-agregore-mobile.md

[RangerMauve]

As per conversations with @autonome, here's the proposal for developing Agregore Mobile with IPFS protocol handlers, integrating IPFS pinning with the Nimble mesh network node, and conducting workshops with community network stakeholders in South Africa.

Let me know if there's anything I could do to help process this. 😁

[RangerMauve]

Added @autonome as the technical sponsor.

[autonome]

Thanks, we've discussed this a lot before submission so most of my comments are already addressed. A few additional thoughts:

• I can put you in touch directly w/ Berty to support gomobile-ipfs usage, which should speed things up if you get blocked
• Brave's patches should show the way for Chromium Android support for IPFS/IPNS protocol handling, we can ask them for pointers to those. Sadly, Igalia's work to do this at build-time will not be landed in Chromium core until mid-year.
• Brave only did a HTTP redirect which is similar a bit to the local gateway approach you are taking. Could be that a Chromium->gomobile-ipfs bridge is possible though, which would be less overhead - maybe Berty can point the way here also. Worth looking into that before committing fully to a local HTTP gateway
• Roadmap section is great, super helpful to see the plan to hit the target, as these dates are pretty aggressive
• Opportunistic feature could also be the libp2p BLE transport Berty made - might be very useful for the use-cases you're addressing

Aside from the core engineering work happening and focus on mobile, the proposal is very high value in two other specific ways:

• It engages impacted stakeholders directly and intentionally as part of the implementation plan, instead of "we'll build it and the users will come"
• The work on a publishing API flow is incredibly important - one of the weakest links in the stack, so there's a lot to be learned there

Related to those - here are two places I'd like to see more detail to in the proposal, to optimize how the broader ecosystem can benefit from your work:

• Where and how will the program be communicated? Is there a project blog? There's material for at least 4-5 posts in the topic areas you're covering in this work, would be amazing to see that shared in a way that is archived for future use.
• Can you identity in the proposal which software work might result in modular/reusable components or libraries? You're tackling a lot that others can benefit from. Maybe some is not reusable and that's ok - but please flag where you think it is possible, as it's possibly a compound impact as a side-effect of the work.

Final note: The breakdown of milestone and hours-spent is a fantastically helpful way of making clear where time is spent by who on what. However, I noticed in milestone 4 and 6 (at least) some of the hours at top (eg "tech lead, 30h") didn't reconcile w/ the hour count in the line-items below it. Can you go back through and reconcile those numbers and update the proposal so they all match?

[RangerMauve]

Thank you for the review @autonome ! We (and folks I've been chatting with outside the project) are excited to get this put together and into the hands of people. 😁

I went over and made sure the hours lined up everywhere, added info about reusable components from each milestone, and added a blurb about publishing blog posts on https://agregore.mauve.moe 🎉 We'll squeeze the time for creating the blog posts in between all the other tasks. Not sure how many posts we'll end up making yet so we'll figure it out as we go along. :)

[autonome]

Fantastic, thanks for fixing those bits. The re-usability notes are fantastic, we should ask for that in all grant proposals!

[RangerMauve]

@autonome Is there anything else we need to do before the next steps? 😁

[autonome]

@mishmosh @realChainLife anything these folks need to do to move to evaluation stage?

[mishmosh]

Hi @RangerMauve thanks for the very thorough submission (and revision). Currently in the final steps of review, we'll share an update before Friday.

[realChainLife]

Thanks @autonome!

Hello @RangerMauve we would like to fund the work outlined here. Please email [email protected] to discuss next steps.

[RangerMauve]

🎉

[RangerMauve]

Will this be getting merged now that the DocuSign is signed and all that?

[mishmosh]

@RangerMauve correct, we meant to merge it instead of close it. Apologies!

[RangerMauve]

Hello, we've got the initial version for Milestone 1 ready and would like to get it reviewed so we can process the initial payment. 😁

We have a screenshot of it in action here: https://twitter.com/AgregoreBrowser/status/1511418042122739717

And the APK can be downloaded here: https://build.mauve.moe/builds/AgregoreMobile-0.0.0-rc0.apk

Currently it only works on Android 9 and older due to Android 10 and 11 breaking some go-ipfs functionality but we're planning to work around this as part of Milestone 2.

To be specific:

• We have created a GitHub repository with patches which may be applied over Chromium and scripts for building the browser
• Our patches customize the branding of Chromium with the Agregore logo and title
• We have developed a repository based on the the Go IPFS gateway which enables some of the protocol handlers from Agregore Desktop
• And we have added patches on top of Chromium which start the gateway on boot and tear it down when the browser is closed
• The gateway can be accessed via http://localhost:8080/ within web pages and we have tested loading IPFS data on it as can be seen in this screenshot

We ended up not using the Kiwi browser due to their build instructions not being available and them missing some files that are necessary to compile from source. Instead we've started building on top of Bromite which adds a bunch of privacy preserving patches on top of Chromium.

While Milestone 1 is being processed we've already started work on parts of Milestone 2.

[RangerMauve]

Since we've had multiple tracks at once the milestones are getting completed a bit out of order.

Here's the current state of our milestone progress:

Milestone 1: Done

• Got mobile app compiling based on bromite
• Initial Go-IPFS based gateway
• Loading gateway on startup

Milestone 2: Almost done

• Formal spec for protocol hanlders
• Initial ipfs:// and ipns:// protocol handler APIs
• Initial app for Wifi autconeccting
• Currently integrating wifi autoconnect into the browser

Milestone 3: Almost done

• Running protocol testing suite
• Updated tests to account for new spec
• Fixing bugs in protocol handlers in order to get tests passing

Milestone 4: Done

• Example markdown blog app using protocol handlers
• QR Code Scanner app

Milestone 5: On hold

• Need to investigate if IPFS-CLuster is the right approach
• Need to investigate security/safety implications of p2p on community networks
• Need to make extension which makes it easier to pin content

Milestone 6: In Progress

• Settling on a workshop date
• Putting together workshop materials and demo

[RangerMauve]

We were also thinking of asking to add another milestone to work on some Agregore Mobile features like extensions which we couldn't get in due to not being able to build on top of the Kiwi Browser source code. As well as some slight stability improvements.

Would it be possible to talk more about that within the context of this grant, or should we open up another one?

[RangerMauve]

Update on milestones:

Milestone 2: Done

• Patch which integrates IPFS/IPNS/IPLD protocols into the browser by wiring them up to a local gateway https://github.com/AgregoreWeb/agregore-mobile/blob/default/patches/0001-AG-Handle-IPFS-and-IPNS-URLs.patch
• New writiable gateway APIs based on the IPFS Gateway, along with a spec which documents all the APIs. https://github.com/AgregoreWeb/agregore-ipfs-daemon/blob/main/spec.md
• Reusable Android Java library for automatically connecting devices over Wifi: https://github.com/RangerMauve/WifiAutoConnect-Android
• Example app for how to use the library, plus proving that MDNS peer discovery could work over the connection. https://github.com/RangerMauve/WifiP2P-MDNS-Test
• Integrating wifi autoconnect into Agregore Mobile in order to transmit IPFS data over local ad-hoc networks. https://github.com/AgregoreWeb/agregore-mobile/blob/default/patches/0001-AG-Wifi-Auto-Connect.patch

Milestone 3: Done

• We've updated the ipfs protocol compliance suite to account for new IPNS key generation APIs: https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-protocol-compliance-suite/
• We've also got a majority of tests passing, 35 out of 50 (similar to Brave)
• We've got automated build scripts up on a build server which can be triggered to compile APKs.

As discussed with Dietrich, I'd like to put together an extra Milestone 7 which will do the following:

• Add Web Extension support based on the Kiwi Browser (3 weeks / 60h)
• Add the ability for the gateway to load just on the initial IPFS request (1 week / 20h)

I'll submit a PR this week for it.

[RangerMauve]

Also,

Milestone 5: In Progress

• Dirk is looking at setting up IPFS Cluster and setting up DNS/SSL services for it on the Local stack for the Nimble
• I'm staring to put together a thing to make it easy to talk to the IPFS-cluster pinning API for IPNS and to regular IPFS Pinning Services.
• We're also looking at the implications of running a cluster on these networks

Milestone 6: In Progress

• Eric has worked with folks at VPUU to reserve a space for June 4th to run the workshop. We're going to be getting a diverse set of participants and will be using funds to transport them in from across the region.
• Dirk has started working on the workshop materials and framing

[RangerMauve]

Update for Milestone 5 and Milestone 6:

Milestone 5

• Here are the scripts for setting up IPFS-Cluster on Lokal for the Nimble Mesh Network in a Box: https://github.com/Wakoma/Lokal/pull/32/files
• Here's the Pin Management UI we created that can be used on phones: https://agregoreweb.github.io/pin-manager/ this can be used with the pin manager to manage pins in a community and to bootstrap new users.
• Here's the blog post we made for talking about considerations for p2p web usage with community networks: https://agregore.mauve.moe/blog/2022/09/considerations-for-p2p-web-community-networks

Milestone 6

We ran the workshop in Cape Town successfully, and Dirk has posted a blog post talking about how it went along with some recorded interviews of folks that attended: https://www.thebacklog.net/2022/07/12/reflections-on-running-a-p2p-web-workshop/

This has been reviewed+approved by @autonome today and we'll be submitting the invoice for the final milestones today. :)