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An off-grid social network

staltz.com

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Re: An off-grid social network

#171

Post by fiatjaf »

dceddia wrote: post #119
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?

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…

What I was claiming in my answer was that it was done in a negative sense. I understood it that way because the comment lacked other indications of genuine interest in the matter, which would soften the lack of inflection.

Re: An off-grid social network

#172

Post by stinkytaco »

fiatjaf wrote: post #170
stinkytaco wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What you are describing has existed for years and we called it Usenet. Or a forum. Or a mailing list. I can accept that "social networking" is a bad term, but in popular usage it encompasses the "personal feed" almost by definition.

Re: An off-grid social network

#173

Post by JdeBP »

georgecmu wrote: post #150

As a historical note, there used to be quite a few very popular solutions for supporting early social networks over intermittent protocols. UUCP [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP ] used the computers' modems to dial out to other computers, establishing temporary, point-to-point links between them. Each system in a UUCP network has a list of neighbor systems, with phone numbers, login names and passwords, etc. Fido…

It's slightly misleading to refer to Fidonet only in the context of Russia. It was popular in quite a lot of places around the world, not just Russia. Not even principally Russia, in its heyday.

These things are definitely systems to learn from, both their architectures and their histories; and people have already been drawing parallels to Usenet on this very page, notice.

Re: An off-grid social network

#175

Post by JdeBP »

lj3 wrote: post #165
JdeBP wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was your comparison, note. I'm simply pointing out the error in the premise of your question.

Re: An off-grid social network

#176

Post by fiatjaf »

cheetos wrote: post #132
fiatjaf wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One has the right to be rude if someone else is rude first. Right now you're being rude, for example, because somehow my rudeness offended you.

Re: An off-grid social network

#177

Post by fiatjaf »

Kiro wrote: post #142
fiatjaf wrote: post #31

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?

That's your dystopian description of the current state of social networks and not the reality.

Well, it is impossible to fit the "reality" in a text comment, so yes.

Re: An off-grid social network

#178

Post by staltz »

XaspR8d wrote: post #161
staltz wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another very important point with no-deletes is: you can't deny history. You can't, in real-life, take back something you said. The mechanics of digital deletion in centralized systems is a big problem for History. I remember Julian Assange describing a corruption scandal that was essentially erased from History because a digital article by a large media company was deleted, and not replicated fast enough.

Re: An off-grid social network

#179

Post by matt_wulfeck »

The post starts by introducing two people (one in a boat in the ocean and another in the mountains in Hawaii) and states that they are communicating to each other. I thought this post was about some new long-range wireless protocol that sync'd via satellites or some such. I was disappointed to see this:

> Every time two Scuttlebutt friends connect to the same WiFi, their computers will synchronize the latest messages in their diaries.

Ultimately this technology seems to be a decentralized, signed messaging system. What problem are they solving? That facebook and twitter can delete and alter your messages?

Meanwhile I'm in search of a long-range, wireless communication system that can function like a network without the need of an ISP. Anyone know anything about this?

Re: An off-grid social network

#180

Post by cjbprime »

agravier wrote: post #157
cjbprime wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Keybase server manages giving out usernames, and recording the proof URLs for users, and then your client hits the URLs, checks that the proofs are signed with the appropriate key, and caches them to watch for future discrepancies. Keybase offers decentralized trust, in that the Keybase server can't lie to you about someone's keys -- your Keybase client will trust their public proofs and not the Keybase server --…

Are you working on a fully decentralized architecture?

(Speaking personally, not sure what an official Keybase opinion would be.)

No, I don't think the tech is quite there yet. Even just handing out human-readable usernames requires blockchain-style consensus, and we don't have a blockchain being followed along by everyone's machines to adjudicate consensus requests (yet!).

The folks at Blockstack Labs are doing fine work in this area, though: https://blockstack.org/

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