An off-grid social network • Hacker News Board

Re: An off-grid social network

#161

Post by XaspR8d » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 4:56 PM UTC

staltz wrote: post #159

XaspR8d wrote: post #156

Basic question: since the entries form a chain and reference the previous, is there no way to edit or delete your old entries? (I see it "prevents tampering" and there's something of a philosophical question here about whether you're "tampering" with your own history when you editorialize -- I agree with the crypto interpretation, but in the context of offline interaction, social communication isn't burdened with suc…

There is no way (as far as I know) to delete old entries, and I think this is good because with gossip mechanics we cannot lie to ourselves: there is no way of stopping that information from spreading. What's possible, on the other hand, is to make a message type "ignore the previous" which client apps would interpret to hide them, but obviously a client app can be configured to not hide them.

Yes I suppose I'm targetting the protocol a little too much when I should think about what features clients can implement.

I'm certainly happy with the "gossip" approach; I just see it as challenging for some people to adopt when they are coddled with the idea that they can censor their past.

Re: An off-grid social network

#162

Post by pfraze » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 4:57 PM UTC

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…

My role was to provide an applications perspective. I worked on UIs and data models. Dominic's the maker of the tech.

I ended up removing the gif maker in one iteration because it was so frequently buggy. That was probably the worst call I made.

Re: An off-grid social network

#163

Post by throwaway32445 » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 4:57 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #4

Yes, 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 eve…

> And I predict, in the next 5-7 years we're going to see a lot more power to the people (...) through decentralized social networking tools / platforms that can run in new types of topologies.

(at 9m53s: https://youtu.be/WzMm7-j7yIY?t=9m53s)

How do you see this happening in such a relative short amount of time? Who (else) is going to do this? Is our culture predisposed to do this, and, if not, is there a strategy to overcome this culture factor?

edit: for clarity

Re: An off-grid social network

#164

Post by pdexter » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 4:58 PM UTC

XaspR8d wrote: post #156

Basic question: since the entries form a chain and reference the previous, is there no way to edit or delete your old entries? (I see it "prevents tampering" and there's something of a philosophical question here about whether you're "tampering" with your own history when you editorialize -- I agree with the crypto interpretation, but in the context of offline interaction, social communication isn't burdened with suc…

I wonder if there was one added step on every post to this network "warning, you are about to make this public without the possibility of removal, are you sure you want to post this?", would that better educate people and make them less likely to make public that which they will later wish was private? I think the solution is also a culture or user education issue. Basically teach people more about how the Internet works and they're less likely to want to post information on it.

Re: An off-grid social network

#165

Post by lj3 » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 4:58 PM UTC

JdeBP wrote: post #158

lj3 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Scuttlebutt intend to store every post forever? Or could posts 'expire' and get deleted, like on Usenet? It would be on you to save the content you wanted to have long term. Somebody could always take on the burden of capturing an archive of the whole thing in perpetuity and provide web access to it, like the archive.org does for usenet.

Note that after the turn of the 21st century, people were not expiring non-binaries posts on Usenet. I observed in 2011 that HighWinds Media had not expired any non-binaries postings since 2006, and that Power Usenet had not expired a non-binaries posting for eight years ("3013+ days text retention" was in its advertising at the time). People effectively just turned non-binaries expiry in Usenet off, in the first few…

You're comparing apples and oranges. Usenet was federated across beefy corporate servers. No single user had to walk around with the entire Usenet archive on their laptop.

Re: An off-grid social network

#166

Post by staltz » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 4:59 PM UTC

rattray wrote: post #151

Bit of feedback: when you download the desktop application, it prompts for a desired name, image, and description. It's unclear whether this can be changed later, and I'm not yet sure whether I want to use my real identity or a throwaway. After creating an account with the default ¿randomly? generated name, I tried to use an invite obtained from http://198.211.122.115/invited which was linked from https://github.com/…

These pubs you mentioned are suffering under the large amount of traffic generated by HN and they were not designed for this load. Ideally hosting your own pub should be as easy as possible. My goal is to have it possible under a Heroku "Click to deploy" button or Zeit `now staltz/easy-ssb-pub` so that we can have more pubs. By the way, my pubs are public just because I chose to, but I may take that down if I want. No data would be destroyed, since you'd have all that locally and you can connect to any other pub and replicate through that.

Re: An off-grid social network

#167

Post by staltz » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 5:01 PM UTC

lj3 wrote: post #105

ISL wrote: post #25

The storage requirements are tremendous, though, right? If I want to have access to everything that's been shared with me, I have to store it all. In the case of images, the storage burden can get large quickly.

Does Scuttlebutt intend to store every post forever? Or could posts 'expire' and get deleted, like on Usenet? It would be on you to save the content you wanted to have long term. Somebody could always take on the burden of capturing an archive of the whole thing in perpetuity and provide web access to it, like the archive.org does for usenet.

Check other comments here in HN thread about "blobs" and garbage collection. But also, there is the easy possibility of just starting a new account. In fact, substack did this, we refer to his old account as "deadsubstack".

Re: An off-grid social network

#168

Post by pfraze » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 5:02 PM UTC

wesleytodd wrote: post #9

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…

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. https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker

@cowardlydragon you got downvoted to death but that's a fair assumption so I want to reply to you here

> forking a website so easily also makes spoofing very easy...

A fork copies the files of a site, so yeah, it certainly would be easily to spoof somebody's site. It basically is a spoof button. But doing so creates a new cryptographic identity for the site, and that will be the basis of how we authenticate

Re: An off-grid social network

#169

Post by Karunamon » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 5:04 PM UTC

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.

The reason those comments get downvoted is because they are wrong. Anyone writing off slack as an IRC clone exhibits a very poor understanding of either system. Slack is similar to IRC in that they deliver text-based communication, but that's about it. The underlying protocols, features, and so forth are radically different.

Most anti-systemd comments are similarly poorly thought out and articulated.

This might be superficially usenet+crypto, but oftentimes things are more than the sum of their conceptual parents.

Re: An off-grid social network

#170

Post by fiatjaf » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 5:05 PM UTC

stinkytaco wrote: post #104

fiatjaf wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blogging is about the same as posting in your own "feed" on any social network. See, for example, the indiewebcamp[1] people, who are against "silos", as they call Facebook et al., but are recreating their same functionalities with personal blogs and a new version of Pingbacks called "webmentions". [1]: https://indieweb.org/

But the pingback was more about making your blog post a comment on someone's post. So it was creating a conversation. I could read a post, respond to it on my blog and ping back to the original. That way my feed was a mix of the discussions I'm having with others as well as my own stuff. I suppose if you take away the "feed" element, you could call web forums and Usenet "social networking".

> But the pingback was more about making your blog post a comment on someone's post.

That's what "webmentions" do.

> That way my feed was a mix of the discussions I'm having with others as well as my own stuff.

Here's something I like: everything you say is part of a public discussion, so you're talking alone, also comments have about the same weight as standalone posts, also outsiders can join the discussion, it isn't restrict to your current circle of friends.