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I'm imagining Outer Circle being implemented as a peer to peer application. In my example Albert->Carol->David. That is Albert is reading David's posts because Albert has white listed Carol (at level one) and Carol has white listed David.

How does the text of David's post get from David's machine to Albert's machine? We already have routing built into the semantics of the white listing hierarch. Since Carol is reading David's posts, Albert can get them from Carol.

I've read that one of the issues with amateur web comics is that good ones become popular and the artist suddenly finds himself with bandwith bills to pay. A peer to peer implementation of Outer Circle could cause this problem if an author becomes popular by millions of fans putting him on their direct lists, but I think that the common case is that a popular author reaches a large audience because he has been picked up by a hundred influention Circlers who are read at two removes by the Outer Circle. So the tree structure will usually give the system good fan out just because few users will wish to manage a direct list of more than 50 or 100 and will therefore access the system through several layers of hierarchy.




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