An off-grid social network
staltz.com
An off-grid social network
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Re: An off-grid social network
#2Right now Mastadon might as well be off-grid, unable to add additional accounts on the main server. Popularity has stunted it's growth!
I am not sure how much thought has been given to the scalability of this solution, it sounds like it will benefit from most of the advantages offered by P2P in this department.
Eventually something like this could organically grow into the "next Internet", in much the same way that the current internet has morphed into what it is today.
Re: An off-grid social network
#3> However, to get access to the DHT in the first place, you need to connect to a bootstrapping server, such as router.bittorrent.com:6881 or router.utorrent.com:6881
This is a common misunderstanding. You do not need to use those nodes to bootstrap. Most clients simply choose to because it is the most convenient way to do so on the given substrate (the internet). DHTs are in no way limited to specific bootstrap nodes, any node that can be contacted can be used to join the network, the protocol itself is truly distributed.
If the underlying network provides some hop-limited multicast or anycast a DHT could easily bootstrap via such queries. In fact, bittorrent clients already implement multicast neighbor discovery which under some circumstances can result in joining the DHT without any hardcoded bootstrap node.
Re: An off-grid social network
#4Yes, this guy gets it. This community gets it.
Not everything needs a global singleton like a blockchain or DHT or a DNS system. Bitcoin needs this because of the double-spend problem. But private chats and other such activities don't.
I have been working on this problem since 2011. I can tell you that peer-to-peer is fine for asynchronous feeds that form tree based activities, which is quite a lot of things.
But everyday group activities usually require some central authority for that group, at least for the ordering of messages. A "group" can be as small as a chess game or one chat message and its replies. But we haven't solved mental poker well for N people yet. (Correct me if I am wrong.)
The goal isn't to not trust anyone for anything. After all, you still trust the user agent app on your device. The goal is to control where your data lives, and not have to rely on any particular connections to eg the global internet, to communicate.
Btw ironic that the article ends "If you liked this article, consider sharing (tweeting) it to your followers". In the feudal digital world we live in today, most people speak must speak a mere 140 characters to "their" followers via a centralized social network with huge datacenters whose engineers post on highscalability.com .
If you are interested, here I talk about it further in depth:
Re: An off-grid social network
#5Right now Mastadon might as well be off-grid, unable to add additional accounts on the main server. Popularity has stunted it's growth! I am not sure how much thought has been given to the scalability of this solution, it sounds like it will benefit from most of the advantages offered by P2P in this department. Eventually something like this could organically grow into the "next Internet", in much the same way that t…
But you can register an account on any node[0], and communicate with anyone else on the entire network. That's the strength of federated protocols.
Re: An off-grid social network
#6Right now Mastadon might as well be off-grid, unable to add additional accounts on the main server. Popularity has stunted it's growth! I am not sure how much thought has been given to the scalability of this solution, it sounds like it will benefit from most of the advantages offered by P2P in this department. Eventually something like this could organically grow into the "next Internet", in much the same way that t…
Run your own instance and all your performance problems go away. That's the point of federated services.
Re: An off-grid social network
#7Since the author didnt mention it, the original creator of the patchwork project is https://github.com/pfrazee
When I used it, which admitedly was a long time ago now, the biggest setback was lack of cross device identities. So I ended up having two accounts with two feeds, `wesAtWork` and `wes`. Maybe they have solved this by now.
ps. Does patchwork still have the little gif maker? Because that was a super fun feature.
Re: An off-grid social network
#8So... it's kinna like USENET then?
Re: An off-grid social network
#9Since the author didnt mention it, the original creator of the patchwork project is https://github.com/pfrazee When I used it, which admitedly was a long time ago now, the biggest setback was lack of cross device identities. So I ended up having two accounts with two feeds, `wesAtWork` and `wes`. Maybe they have solved this by now. ps. Does patchwork still have the little gif maker? Because that was a super fun featu…
Also, because Paul has awesome projects, and deserves some attention when a project of his makes it to the top of HN but doesn't even mention him, he is working on a browser for the distributed web called Beaker (I am using it to write this now), and it is awesome.
Re: An off-grid social network
#10> However, to get access to the DHT in the first place, you need to connect to a bootstrapping server, such as router.bittorrent.com:6881 or router.utorrent.com:6881 This is a common misunderstanding. You do not need to use those nodes to bootstrap. Most clients simply choose to because it is the most convenient way to do so on the given substrate (the internet). DHTs are in no way limited to specific bootstrap nodes…
to me it always sounds like approaches like dht are the solution but i'm having difficulties diving into it for the purpose of implementing it for my own apps.
are there any noteworthy resources for non-academics to get started?