Why do all "social networks" have to be a feed of news? Couldn't anyone think of anything better than a system in which people are only encouraged to talk about themselves and try to get other people's approval? In which having more "friends" is always better, because you have more potential for self-agrandissement in your narcissistic posts?
An off-grid social network
31–40 of 383 posts
Re: An off-grid social network
#32You can make sure that the author wrote this post by copy-pasting [this signature]( https://raw.githubusercontent.com/staltz/staltz.github.io/ma... ) <-- 404: Not Found. Now I am not so sure on who the author is anymore...
Thanks for mentioning. Should be fixed now. I recently migrated from gh-pages to netlify.
I didn't know about netlify, it looks neat!
Re: An off-grid social network
#33I'd like to see all my friends post updates and photos to blogs where I can subscribe via rss. This would be the best social network for me.
Re: An off-grid social network
#34This sounds like what I wanted from GNU Social when I first joined over a year ago. GNU Social/Mastodon is a fun idea, but it falls apart when you realise that you still don't own your content and it's functionally impossible to switch nodes like it advertised, along with federation being a giant mess. I tried to switch what server my account was on halfway through my GNU Social life, and you just can't; all your fol…
Not being able to switch nodes pushes you to try and host your own instead. That's what I've done. IMO we should instead be looking at packaging a self-hosted version into a native Windows and Mac app. Run it in the background and everything's done.
> Not being able to switch nodes pushes you to try and host your own instead.
And you just use it for yourself? well, ok... but at that point you could also use a fully decent system.
Re: An off-grid social network
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then your laptop gets stolen and everything's gone.
Make backups. How is this any different than saving photos just in case you spill water on your laptop keyboard?
It's different precisely because most social/cloud networks abstract away backups.
Very few people have considered whether or not they should attempt to back up their Facebook account. Same's true for Flickr, Twitter, and Gmail.
Re: An off-grid social network
#36> For instance, unique usernames are impossible without a centralized username registry. This is Zooko's triangle and was squared by blockchains. Namecoin (2011), BNS (the Blockstack Name System, 2014), and now a bunch of other fully-decentralized naming systems can give you unique usernames. Recently, Ethereum tried launching ENS and ran into some security issues and will likely re-launch soon.
Problem is, I don't want to be assigned a username. I hate it when I get assigned a username. I want my username. If you hand me a username of "$&OdUgr606cZ", I will never remember that, I will never share that, and I will consequently never ever log in. But it doesn't matter because this issue is already solved. We already have globally unique usernames. They're called email addresses, they are unique by their very…
> But it doesn't matter because this issue is already solved. We already have globally unique usernames. They're called email addresses, they are unique by their very nature, and they are (for all intents and purposes) already decentralized.
No, they're not: billg@microsoft.com depends on microsoft.com, which depends on com, which depends on the root nameservers, which are … a central nameservice.
That's the whole point of Zooko's Triangle: of secure, decentralised and human-readable, you can have at most two. Global-singleton approaches are still centralised (the singleton is the centre), although they may build the singleton in a decentralised fashion.
Re: An off-grid social network
#37I've been thinking about this very thing the past few days!
Forgive the rambling, this is the first time I've written any of this down...
My idea is to use email as a transport for 'social attachments' that would be read using a custom mail client (it remains to be seen if it should be your regular email client or have it be just your 'social mail' client. But... if using another client as regular email, users would have to ignore or filter out social mails). It could also be done as a mimetype handler/viewer for social attachments.
Advantages of using email: - Decentralized (can move providers) - email address as rendezvous point (simple for users to grasp) - Works behind firewalls - Can work with local (ie Maildir) or remote (imap) mailstores. If using imap, helps to address the multiple devices issue. Could also use replication to handle it too (Syncthing, dropbox, etc)
Scuttlebutt looks like a nice alternative though. Will be following closely.
Re: An off-grid social network
#38I really like his train of thought. The future of social networking will be very different from how it is structured today. That's a very safe bet.
Re: An off-grid social network
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you shut your PC down when you leave the house and then want to access your network from your phone.
How about this: you buy a physical device at Wal-Mart for $29.99, plug it in, hook it up to your wifi and leave it plugged into an outlet. It's got Mastodon or GNU Social on it and could look like this, but branded: http://thegadgetflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SmartPlu...
Then I have yet another device permanently plugged in and running, at a time where I and frankly all of us should try to reduce our energy consumption.
Re: An off-grid social network
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not being able to switch nodes pushes you to try and host your own instead. That's what I've done. IMO we should instead be looking at packaging a self-hosted version into a native Windows and Mac app. Run it in the background and everything's done.
> Not being able to switch nodes pushes you to try and host your own instead. And you just use it for yourself? well, ok... but at that point you could also use a fully decent system.
You can follow and reply to any one on any node from your own system. Your feed is populated from people on any node you follow.