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An off-grid social network

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Re: An off-grid social network

#81

Post by corobo »

rocky1138 wrote: post #28
freehunter wrote: post #23

Earlier 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...

Putting another barrier in front of it is not what's needed for people to use it. Treat it like email (or heck, early Facebook), get big clusters of users in by convincing universities and colleges to run a campus server. Businesses would also be a good idea but a harder sell

Re: An off-grid social network

#82

Post by fiatjaf »

No, you're not. If you were that would mean you would be interested. If you were interested you would have more to say.

You're just trying to imply that I must suggest an alternative before commenting on the poor state of "social networks".

Re: An off-grid social network

#83

Post by ICRqVNmDrU8FDi »

This wouldn't scale. If we replaced twitter with this right now, that's:

500 million tweets per day. 140 bytes (140 characters * 8-bit ASCII) per tweet.

140 bytes * 500 million = 70GB

Thats 70GB per day before metadata. Use this social network for a month and we've exceeded the 1TB mark, twice.

Remember this isn't just 70GB per day on one server, this is 70GB per day on every users PC.

Re: An off-grid social network

#84

Post by lolc »

cryptarch wrote: post #58
myrion wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A Raspberry Pi is very low-powered though, it's completely insignificant compared to the power used by the webservices you use daily.

I disagree. Google uses 1/4GW worldwide and that's less than a watt per user.

Re: An off-grid social network

#85

Post by fiatjaf »

vhodges wrote: post #37

I'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…

email is so complicated. There are probably 3 people in the world who know how to properly run an email server.

Re: An off-grid social network

#86

Post by jdormit »

I think I missed something. If information is exchanged when machines are on the same network, how does the guy in New Zealand get updates from the guy in Hawaii? Is there a server involved, or does the New Zealand guy have to wait until he is on a network with someone who has already connected with the Hawaii guy?

Re: An off-grid social network

#87

Post by allannienhuis »

fiatjaf wrote: post #74
allannienhuis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

presenting social content in a different format would be interesting, but I've not seen any compelling options. But the issues of looking for approval and social status are social issues - not sure how a social network tool could avoid that. Isn't that what a lot of people's casual relationships are like? What do most people do at parties and social events in person - they talk about themselves and each other...

On Hacker News, for example, people don't talk about themselves, although they do like to get upvotes.

but hacker news isn't really about social content. Some of that might creep in for some users, and yes the karma thing does pollute motivations for some, but I've never thought of it as a social network. Some networking is done here, but only indirectly I think.

Maybe I'm not thinking about it right or use it differently than most :P

Re: An off-grid social network

#88

Post by vhodges »

ChefDenominator wrote: post #50
vhodges wrote: post #37

I'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…

The popular free email providers do not like busy transactional mail service.

Sure, but remember it's p2p and no different from me composing an email and BCC'ing my 50 friends and family.

One this I didn't mention was that there wouldn't be any public posts so definitely more social network than social media.

Anyways, just an idea at this point, though a prototype would not be that hard to put together as an experiment.

Re: An off-grid social network

#89

Post by good_vibes »

jdormit wrote: post #86

I think I missed something. If information is exchanged when machines are on the same network, how does the guy in New Zealand get updates from the guy in Hawaii? Is there a server involved, or does the New Zealand guy have to wait until he is on a network with someone who has already connected with the Hawaii guy?

Good question. I'm curious too now.

Re: An off-grid social network

#90

Post by freehunter »

zeveb wrote: post #36
freehunter wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

I think you misunderstand what the phrase "for all intents and purposes" means. It doesn't mean "literally, 100% true" it means "for true enough for this argument". What network does your blockchain run on? It still relies on Comcast to get to my house right? Because you want it to run over the Internet? Maybe you're using AT&T? Probably L3 is in there somewhere, but you're still relying on a centralized piece of equipment somewhere, and you're probably going to have a .com or .org to advertise it, and you might have a Wikipedia page or a Facebook group or collaborate development on Github and chat with your team on Slack and exchange files on Dropbox and send messages on Gmail and you log into all of those services with... your globally unique email address. Possibly using a domain you own, with the mail exchange hosted on a server you own that you set up specifically for this project.

Maybe I'm missing the point, and I would look to you to explain to me what that is. But I guess congrats, you don't rely on ICANN anymore...

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