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An off-grid social network

staltz.com

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Re: An off-grid social network

#251

Post by narrowrail »

vhodges wrote: post #102
fiatjaf wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

email is so complicated. There are probably 3 people in the world who know how to properly run an email server.

Who needs to run a mail server? It's a (specialized) mail client that uses your existing email account as storage and transport.

I like this idea and think it has legs. But, eventually it might be worth rewriting daemons for SMTP/IMAP that have a simple config file format that would allow simple white/blacklisting domains such that one could run a server that would reject all emails from any domain other than the 6 one specifies. Further, without pgp encryption/signing msgs are discarded.

I think such an approach could be interesting, but it seems there is a need for a non-profit to govern such a thing.

Re: An off-grid social network

#252

Post by Pxtl »

myrion wrote: post #39
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...

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.

I'd rather see a universal single consumer server with easy download and plugins for all of this stuff. Host my social network, my mail server, my cloud apps, etc. Basically, make social network a part of OwnCloud and sell OwnCloud boxes. Instead of a million small devices, I do one big one... and "big" can still be RaspPi.

Re: An off-grid social network

#253

Post by [deleted] »

staltz wrote: post #60
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.

There are basically two types of storage. Logs and blobs. Logs were described in the blog post, but blobs weren't. Blobs are mostly images that type of stuff, and are stored in leveldb. It can easily get to 1Gb or more. The trick is that blobs aren't sigchained, so they could be garbage collected, and that is something that we're working on. Logs can't be garbage collected, but they grow slower than blobs do, and are…

[deleted]

Re: An off-grid social network

#254

Post by allannienhuis »

fiatjaf wrote: post #176
cheetos wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think being rude to someone who's rude to you is childlike and petty. It's how wars start. It's much more productive to either ignore it or try to figure out what's really going on.

It's not always natural and of course we all fail at it from time to time, but justifying poor behaviour because someone else started it just isn't cool.

Re: An off-grid social network

#255

Post by cel »

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…

The distinction of binary and non-binary posts on Usenet is paralleled by the separation of messages and blobs on Scuttlebutt. As staltz [explained](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14051181), we can garbage collect ("expire") blobs, but not message logs (although a client could do so with the current APIs, it would have security/trust and UI implications, and I'm not aware of any clients doing so).

We are also basically betting on the size of our message logs to generally grow slower than our individual storage capacities, and it is interesting to know that that worked for Usenet too. For blobs, we will likely develop some garbage collection or expiring approaches. Since the network is radically decentralized, each participant can choose their own retention policy. You can, in fact, delete all your blobs (`rm -rf ~/.ssb/blobs`) and assuming some peers have replicated them, your client will just fetch them again as you need them.

Re: An off-grid social network

#256

Post by hh2222 »

neves wrote: post #237
lettergram wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Usenet back then was spam free and you could usually end up talking to the creators of whatever you're discussing. I rather miss it. I still use usenet! It's not quite what it used to be, but you should check it out.

Can you still access it though Google? They've bought DejaVú!

Yes, you can still access newsgroups through Google, just search for your favorite group, e.g. comp.lang.lisp.

Re: An off-grid social network

#257

Post by ReverseCold »

reitanqild wrote: post #209
freehunter wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Still not convinced. It doesn't need to be for everyone in the beginning. The early web (when I entered and before) wasn't for everyone. And thats OK for me. Actually I think it is a good way to start.

The problems were solved with centralization.

Re: An off-grid social network

#258

Post by ftlio »

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…

I think a lot of this stuff will rely on a more formal spec like https://github.com/solid/solid-spec to be useful.

For identity, there's https://github.com/solid/solid-spec/blob/master/solid-webid-...

Right now I'm particularly interested in https://github.com/solid/web-access-control-spec although I think it's incomplete when it comes to data portability and access control. From what I've seen on re-decentralizing the internet, access control is either non-existent, or relies on a server hosting your data to implement access control correctly.

What if, in the WAC protocol linked above, instead of ACL resources informing the server, we could have ACL resources providing clients with keys to the encrypted resource (presumably wrapped in each authorized agent's pub key). Host proof data is a necessity for decentralized social networking IMO, even if the majority of agents would happily hand their keys over to their host.

Re: An off-grid social network

#259

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #253
staltz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are basically two types of storage. Logs and blobs. Logs were described in the blog post, but blobs weren't. Blobs are mostly images that type of stuff, and are stored in leveldb. It can easily get to 1Gb or more. The trick is that blobs aren't sigchained, so they could be garbage collected, and that is something that we're working on. Logs can't be garbage collected, but they grow slower than blobs do, and are…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: An off-grid social network

#260

Post by cel »

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…

> What problem are they solving? That facebook and twitter can delete and alter your messages?

that using those services for one's communications places too much power in the hands of centralized authority. (I speak just for myself here).

https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/stories/design-challenge-avoid-ce...

> 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?

On SSB we have discussed doing gossip connections over long-range wireless connections: https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%2547H0BQQHAXvvqf8K3ngdeMtAHQdP...

Of course if you are looking for a network in a more traditional sense, something lower-level may be more appropriate.

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