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An off-grid social network

staltz.com

301–310 of 383 posts

Re: An off-grid social network

#301

A hipster living on a self-steering sailing boat has 600 modules published on NPM. I can't even. Seriously how could this be even more funny?!

I think of hipster as someone who follows (non mainstream) trends, goes to starbucks, loves Apple products and cannot live without Wifi. Not a hacker who builds it's own stuff and cares about privacy. But maybe the beard confuses people.

It's hard to define the term, but I think at the most basic level, "hipster" specifically refers to anyone who enjoys being alternative. "Goes to starbucks, loves Apple products and cannot live without Wifi" are common qualities of people who want to be hipsters but only because they think it's cool (and don't actually embrace an alternative lifestyle).

Re: An off-grid social network

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does keybase still upload the private PGP key to the keybase server by default? https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/160

We're trying to move away from PGP to a per-device key model (keys never leave the client devices): https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-new-key-model

You did not answer my question, but I guess it does not matter with the new strategy. Looks like embrace-extend-extinguish to me – has it always been a goal of Keybase to replace PGP with something keybase-specific or did something change?

Re: An off-grid social network

#303
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.

They should break it up by time. For example your database only syncs the past month or so as needed and you can choose to request more if necessary. Someone mentioned 150MB right now. That thing is going to get massive eventually.

Re: An off-grid social network

#304
I'm not totally sure how the traffic management works, but what I would like to know is how services like this will be able to scale? What happens when there is a Pub with millions of users? Does it creep to a halt? Is there a need for dedicated Pub machines? If so, Who funds/maintains them? Does this lead to subscriptions?

Decentralized social networks seems like an inevitable progression as internet users become more aware of their privacy and ways they can improve online relationships and ...."social networking"

Re: An off-grid social network

#305

I'm not totally sure how the traffic management works, but what I would like to know is how services like this will be able to scale? What happens when there is a Pub with millions of users? Does it creep to a halt? Is there a need for dedicated Pub machines? If so, Who funds/maintains them? Does this lead to subscriptions? Decentralized social networks seems like an inevitable progression as internet users become mo…

It's not meant to scale imho

Re: An off-grid social network

#306

I'm not totally sure how the traffic management works, but what I would like to know is how services like this will be able to scale? What happens when there is a Pub with millions of users? Does it creep to a halt? Is there a need for dedicated Pub machines? If so, Who funds/maintains them? Does this lead to subscriptions? Decentralized social networks seems like an inevitable progression as internet users become mo…

I'm not sure how this project in particular handle it, but i see quite a few project that handle it by simply using the "follower" for a user as their replica. Since the message is signed there is no risk of being alterated or forget, so i can get the message of user FOO from user BAR as long BAR is "following" FOO. This scale well since the more popular you get more peer can replicate your messages and post.

Re: An off-grid social network

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to trust the security of pubs. Validation of messages happens through cryptographic signing and public messages are public anyways. You also don't need to trust that pubs will be online much because your followers will also help host your content.

> public messages are public anyways Right, but someone I trust could have their message corrupted, no? eg; some political leader intends to write "everybody vote for Alice" and it is modified to read "everybody vote for Carol". Is this possible? (I generally trust FB not to do this because their business would suffer if they were caught, for example – not so with ephemeral pubs)

Nope, there's proper crypto in place to prevent this (each user has their messages signed with a keypair)

Re: An off-grid social network

#308
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.

They should break it up by time. For example your database only syncs the past month or so as needed and you can choose to request more if necessary. Someone mentioned 150MB right now. That thing is going to get massive eventually.

The quoted 150 MB is for all messages in one's network. On my local node there are 91773 messages, going back roughly a year and a half, taking up 147 MB - of which about 72 MB is the actual messages, and the rest are indexes. gzipped, the 72 MB of messages goes down to 29 MB.

Re: An off-grid social network

#309
post #281
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xyr point seems to be that your claim that e-mail addresses are decentralized is faulty. No amount of "Well you are not decentralized in your block chain, either." is going to rebut that. Indeed, it actually reinforces the argument that your claim was faulty, by implicitly agreeing to it with a "but neither are you" response. So perhaps you would like to now explain how e-mail addresses are a system without a centre.…

> xyr point His point. I am a man.

[deleted]

Re: An off-grid social network

#310

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…

Early email providers in Argentina used Unix to Unix Copy Program (UUCP) to move forward your messages to some of the few internet connected servers. IIRC you would write email in Pegasus or Eudora and then upload/download your mail with a 9600bps modem to a UUCP server.
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