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An off-grid social network

staltz.com

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Re: An off-grid social network

#111

Post by AljoschaMeyer »

whiddershins wrote: post #97
staltz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cross device identity is still an issue, but not a problem in the foundation. It's a matter of making client apps (like Patchwork) recognize a message of type "link this and that account together" and then your friend's app would automatically follow both accounts and render them as if they are the same thing. It'll be done eventually in Patchwork.

I'm having trouble following this and the reply thread below. Why is identity device-specific? So every time a get a new computer I have a new public key?

You can also use the same keypair on multiple devices. This however results in another problem: You could post content from both devices simultaneously. But the underlying protocol requires each message to refer to the previous message by the same identity. So if two different devices post a message without having received the message of the other one, one of the messages is considered invalid.

Re: An off-grid social network

#112

Post by allannienhuis »

fiatjaf wrote: post #99
allannienhuis wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You have a point there. "Social content". What is "social content"? Is it people talking about themselves and what they think and showing pictures of themselves? Is that what you do with your best friends? You arrive at their houses and start talking about yourself without being asked?

hmm. I think people expect their friends to do some posting about their life or interests on (our current) social networks - so they implicitly have permission to do so. We don't expect our friends to immediately start talking about themselves in-person, but I do think we expect our friends to talk about themselves and what's going on in their lives - it would be pretty shallow friendships if we only talked about the weather or the news headlines.

Most good conversationalists are good at it because they explicitly draw the other person into talking about themselves and their interests. Whether things become narcissistic is more a factor of personality I think. Perhaps its more than that, though. A good conversationalist would steer the conversation to more interesting content - ie why he person is passionate about their hobby rather than just talking about their accomplishments. Perhaps we need to think about social network features that model what good conversationalists do? Not sure what that looks like though.

[edit for typo]

Re: An off-grid social network

#113

Post by crypt0x »

ICRqVNmDrU8FDi wrote: post #83

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.

how do you read 500 million tweets per day?

the idea is to only replicate who you care about+a couple of their friends.

Re: An off-grid social network

#116

Post by matthewaveryusa »

s_kilk wrote: post #18
rocky1138 wrote: post #16

Earlier 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.

And then your laptop gets stolen and everything's gone.

And then you remember you set up an automated encrypted backup to the cloud and thank your past-self. Now is the time to do it if you're not doing this:

https://msol.io/blog/tech/dirt-cheap-client-encrypted-online...

Re: An off-grid social network

#117

Post by DenisM »

My friends and I have thought this through in detail a while ago, and have a few suggestions to make. I hope you make the best of it!

Distributed identity

Allow me to designate trusted friends / custodians. Store fractions of my private key with them, so that they can rebuild the key if I lost mine. They should also be able to issue a "revocation as of certain date" if my key is compromised, and vouch for my new key being a valid replacement of the old key. So my identity becomes "Bob Smith from Seattle, friend of Jane Doe from Portland and Sally X from Redmond". My social circle is my identity! Non-technical users will not even need to know what private key / public key is.

Relays

Introduce a notion of the "relay" server - a server where I will register my current IP address for direct p2p connection, or pick my "voicemail" if I can't be reach right away. I can have multiple relays. So my list of friends is a list of their public keys and their relays as best I know them. Whenever I publish new content, the software will aggressively push the data to each of my friends / subscribers. Each time my relay list is updated, it also gets pushed to everyone. If I can't find my friend's relay, I will query our mutual friends to see if they know where to find my lost friend.

Objects

There should be a way to create handles for real-life objects and locations. Since many people will end up creating different entries for the same object, there should be a way for me to record in my log that guid-a and guid-b refer to the same restaurant in my opinion. As well I could access similar opinion records made by my friends, or their friends.

Comments

Each post has an identity, as does each location. My friends can comment on those things in their own log, but I will only see these comments if I get to access those posts / locations myself (or I go out of my way to look for them). This way I know what my friends think of this article or this restaurant. Bye-bye Yelp, bye-bye fake Amazon reviews.

Content Curation

I will subscribe to certain bots / people who will tell me that some pieces of news floating around will be a waste of my time or be offensive. Bye-bye clickbait, bye-bye goatse.

Storage

Allow me to designate space to store my friend's encrypted blobs for them. They can back up their files to me, and I can backup to them.

Re: An off-grid social network

#118

Post by COMPUTERLOSER »

thraway2016 wrote: post #75
vog wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why this was donvoted. From a bird's eye view, the whole system looks remarkably similar to Usenet, especially in the old times of UUCP, back when systems were mostly offline and had relatively short timespans to exchange information (via dial-up connection or similar). What's different now is that we have pleny of disk space, and more than enough computing power to perform proper cryptography.

Probably the same reason that "slack == irc" and anti-systemd comments get heavily downvoted. Younger generations want badly to believe that they've invented something completely novel and unique. This absolutely is usenet + crypto.

And the same reason they think hackernews and their js 'frameworks' are special.

Re: An off-grid social network

#119

Post by dceddia »

allannienhuis wrote: post #93
fiatjaf wrote: post #82

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".

"I'm all ears" is simply a common idiom for asking you to suggest alternatives. Not sure why that upsets you?

It's an idiom that can imply entirely different meaning depending on its inflection, though, which obviously translates terribly over text.

"I'm all ears" said in a positive tone can be "Absolutely I agree, I'd love to hear your ideas".

"I'm all ears" in a negative tone is more like "Prove it. I don't think you have any ideas to this unsolvable problem."

All a matter of interpretation, I suppose :) (and fwiw I don't know whether the author meant it in a positive or negative tone)

Re: An off-grid social network

#120

Post by lj3 »

fiatjaf wrote: post #96
allannienhuis wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, it is not a "complete" social network, I was just using it as an example that there are places in which people aren't so narcissistic as in Facebook. See also Joel Spolsky on the topic: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/03/03/building-communiti...

People are narcissistic by design. Social Networks were created to harness that narcissism to make money. I argue that there are a lot of other 'social networks' on the internet in a technical sense. You had profiles and added friends and then sent things to them/chatted with them on AIM, LiveJournal, any of a number of message boards, blogs/comments, etc.

The deciding factor between what came before and facebook and twitter is the ability to broadcast to the entire social network at once, so all of the world can see your brilliance! Feeding into that narcissism is the killer feature of modern social networks.

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