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An off-grid social network

staltz.com

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Re: An off-grid social network

#131

Post by ICRqVNmDrU8FDi »

crypt0x wrote: post #113
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.

In that case it would work. I was under the impression that you'd be syncing with everyone so someone in New Zealand could contact someone in Canada.

The average person has 208 twitter followers. So lets say you have 208 'friends' + a couple additional 'friends' for each of your original friends. That's 624 people total.

There are 100 million active twitter users each day and 500 million tweets per day, that's 5 tweets per person.

5 * 624 = 3120

That's 3120 posts you'll be processing per day. Multiply this by 140 bytes per post and you have 436800 bytes per day or 159.5 MB per year.

That's manageable.

Re: An off-grid social network

#132

Post by cheetos »

fiatjaf wrote: post #101
allannienhuis wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because it is rude and a lie. Also, your last phrase doesn't make any sense.

Just to be clear, you are the one being rude.

Re: An off-grid social network

#133

Post by reitanqild »

freehunter wrote: post #67
rocky1138 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

And then my internet connection goes down. Power goes out. I run over my data cap for the month. Comcast shuts me down for running a home server. My home network gets DDoS'd. I miss a patch day and I get hacked. None of these things are a concern on traditional social networks. They have to be solved before the world has any chance of moving to a decentralized network.

They have to be solved before the world has any chance of moving to a decentralized network.

I say no. Most of them don't have to be solved first.

Feel free to convince me that 3 days of downtime on my personal messaging account cannot have my personal account is a problem.

Re: An off-grid social network

#134

Post by reitanqild »

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.

If the power consumption of a RPi for each household with someone like us is a major thing then I say we have come pretty far in reducing waste of energy. :-)

Re: An off-grid social network

#135

Post by mi100hael »

staltz wrote: post #11
wesleytodd wrote: post #7

Since 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…

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.

Is there a reason you can't just use the same key pair on both devices?

Re: An off-grid social network

#136

Post by _jal »

fiatjaf wrote: post #85
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.

That's absurd. True, it has become more complicated than it once was, but that's every technology that isn't dead.

Granted, I have been running mail for a long time, so I got to learn the complications as they happened, rather than all at once. But anyone who can set up a production-quality web server/appserver/DB along with the accessories that go along with it can handle it.

Now if email isn't important to your business and/or you just don't want to deal with maintaining it, that's valid. But it just isn't as difficult as a lot of people seem to want to make it out to be.

Re: An off-grid social network

#137

Post by johanneskanybal »

crypt0x wrote: post #110
someone7x wrote: post #52

This excites me. I'm probably naive, but I always imagine that one day I'll retire and spend my days trying to work on an open source mesh network (or something similar). I want future generations to live in a world where 'the internet' isn't a thing that authorities can grant/deny. A headless social network is a promising omen of a headless internet.

> I want future generations to live in a world where 'the internet' isn't a thing that authorities can grant/deny. _THIS_ is very much the spirit of SSB. :)

Did I misunderstand the article or is this only for social feeds? I want headless internet in general, guess it's a common idea these days.

Re: An off-grid social network

#138

Post by rocky1138 »

freehunter wrote: post #67
rocky1138 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

And then my internet connection goes down. Power goes out. I run over my data cap for the month. Comcast shuts me down for running a home server. My home network gets DDoS'd. I miss a patch day and I get hacked. None of these things are a concern on traditional social networks. They have to be solved before the world has any chance of moving to a decentralized network.

It's not that hard for the hypothetical manufacturer to set `git pull` and `apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y` to run on a cronjob every morning at 4am.

Re: An off-grid social network

#139

Post by rattray »

So it seems there are two ways to exchange information:

1) be on the same wifi (presumably great for dissidents in countries with heavy-handed internet control, and inconvenient for everyone else)

2) use "pubs", which can be run on any server, and connected to ¿through the internet?

So most users would use pubs, which are described as "totally dispensable" (a nice property). But how can users exchange information about which pub to subscribe to? Is there a public listing of them?

It seems like the "bootstrapping server" problem (eg; reliance on router.bittorrent.com:6881) will still exist in practice. For that matter, is there currently an equivalent to router.bittorrent.com that would serve this purpose?

This seems like a potentially significant project, and I'm excited by the possibility that it might actually take off – hence the inquiry.

Re: An off-grid social network

#140

Post by rocky1138 »

corobo wrote: post #81
rocky1138 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I do quite like this idea. And, it has precedence.
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