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An off-grid social network

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Re: An off-grid social network

#181

Post by fiatjaf »

stinkytaco wrote: post #172
fiatjaf wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I can accept that "social networking" is a bad term, but in popular usage it encompasses the "personal feed" almost by definition.

Yes, but just because no one has tried to create a different social network. That's why I made my initial comment in the first place.

> What you are describing has existed for years and we called it Usenet. Or a forum. Or a mailing list.

I don't know about Usenet, but forums and mailing lists are generally oriented to narrow topics, it is not something in which you'll see your school friends or people with multiple areas to discuss varied subjects.

Re: An off-grid social network

#182

Post by NoGravitas »

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…

In the very early 90s, my personal computer had a UUCP feed for email and news from a local BBS. I didn't use bang paths on it; the provider had a proper Internet connection. It worked satisfactorily well.

Re: An off-grid social network

#183

Post by hmhrex »

rocky1138 wrote: post #16
chc4 wrote: post #15

This sounds like what I wanted from GNU Social when I first joined over a year ago. GNU Social/Mastodon is a fun idea, but it falls apart when you realise that you still don't own your content and it's functionally impossible to switch nodes like it advertised, along with federation being a giant mess. I tried to switch what server my account was on halfway through my GNU Social life, and you just can't; all your fol…

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.

This is what I want. I've been wanting to build something like this for a long time. Something where I own my data. I can back it up and if my laptop gets stolen, I just import my data on a new machine and we're good to go.

The challenges that I see: - Making it easy for any user to get up and running. - De-authenticating old devices. - Making it available from any mobile device.

Re: An off-grid social network

#184

Post by lj3 »

JdeBP wrote: post #175
lj3 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn't comparing anything. I was proposing a suggestion and only mentioned usenet as a means of explanation.

> I'm simply pointing out the error in the premise of your question.

No, you made a non-sequitur factual post about Usenet. I see no actual error pointed out. The fact that Usenet stopped expiring non-binary posts after most of their traffic fled to other services is not a valid argument against possibly using the feature in a peer to peer distributed social network.

Re: An off-grid social network

#185

Post by yoandy »

Does it normally take too long indexing database? since I started the app have been a long while. I thought this could be a nice tool to use in places like Cuba, but I've realized now, that once connected to a Pub it download more than 1 GB, that would be a problem too in a place with lack of internet bandwidth.

Re: An off-grid social network

#186

Post by Nadya »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #179

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…

>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?

Mesh networks/WANETs. But you need enough adoption for the network to be considered long-range. Generally they are local-only.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network

Re: An off-grid social network

#187

Post by ytjohn »

DenisM wrote: post #117

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…

For relays, that is more or less what the pub servers do. I connect to a relay, and if I subscribe to a channel or follow an individual, I end up with messages from months ago. The pub servers "gossip" with each other, so any particular pub server you connect to, should be able to catch you up on all of your friends and channels "gossip".

Re: An off-grid social network

#188

Post by JdeBP »

cestith wrote: post #92
Jaruzel wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the topology as very USENet like. Not that this is a bad thing. There's still life in USENet, and a fair few people still sit and discuss things in various groups (if you know where to look)[1]. The backbone concept of USENet is still great from a decentralised point of view - someone just needs to add some crypto layers to it (as a standard), and I reckon it could rise again like a phoenix. --- [1] I'm deliber…

If you make a decentralized, encrypted, potentially anonymous network some users will use it for bootlegs and probably worse. That doesn't preclude or outweigh all the legitimate uses.

History says otherwise. Usenet shows, in the ever growing ratio of binaries to non-binaries traffic from (roughly) the 1990s onwards, that in terms of the literal weight (i.e. the traffic volume) the uses that you talk about very much did outweigh the "legitimate" uses, by an order of magnitude at least.

And the history of Usenet also shows that people do think that the fact that something is mis-used should preclude any use of it. One can look to the history of how several organizations discontinued their Usenet services as a lesson for that, too.

Re: An off-grid social network

#189

Post by freehunter »

reitanqild wrote: post #133
freehunter wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't matter how you feel about it, take a look at people complaining when Google put a news article about Facebook at the top of the results instead of the Facebook login page:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/feb/11/face...

These are people who typed "Facebook Login" into a Google search, clicked the first result without reading, and got confused. Now tell these same users that Comcast blocked their social network or that they can't log in on their phone because their home Internet connection is down.

If you want a social network filled with just people like you and me, look at App.net or GNU Social for inspiration. If you want average users to sign in, these issues absolutely do have to be solved.

Re: An off-grid social network

#190

Post by NoGravitas »

crypt0x wrote: post #45
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.

Well.. I've been on there for quite some time, granted it's been not mega active but here is a rundown of how much it took until now: there is the main sigchain database, which stores all the messages (following, posts, ....) which is now 150megs in size and there is the blobs (binary attachments like images) which is about 500megs in size. YMMV depending on how many catpictures your friend share ofc. The flipside to…

That's going to be a bigger problem on mobile than it is on desktop (I mean, not literally those amounts, but the amounts you'd get from a busier feed).
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