What a great idea. I hope it succeeds.
An off-grid social network
321–330 of 383 posts
Re: An off-grid social network
#322My 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 the distributed identity piece is there a good reason not to rely on keybase.io? Also important that an initial smaller community would be targeted and that it would succeed there. FB did this will colleges, a federated one would in a world where FB already exists would have an even harder time.
What the heck is keybase ? I went to the website and it does not offer a clue about what this is or how it works. It says "download the app" but is not an app. It says it's more than a website but does not seem to be distributed in any way.
The fact that it failed at the most basic thing of actually telling what it is about, what it does and how would be good reasons to not use keybase.
Re: An off-grid social network
#323As 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…
And this is why I'm curious why nobody yet written a social network on top of NNTP.
Re: An off-grid social network
#324This 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…
> [...] which also lets you have a reputation system and ban spammers which you can't do easily with a pure DHT.
Sounds interesting. How can you ban spammers when they can just create a new public key/identity if their old one is banned? And also, what does "banning" comprise, in a decentralized social network? I would assume it would be sufficient to just "unfollow" that particular identity.
Re: An off-grid social network
#325I'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 scales by each "circle of friends" or community having its dedicated pub, set up by some tech-savvy person. Pubs should be easy enough to setup for anyone who knows what a VPS is. A community or circle of friends is usually not millions of people.
For the "social media aspect", like in Twitter, we're looking at making alternative types of pubs. Imagine having a pub dedicated to only replicating your content (and no one else's). Or multiple of these. So that whoever wants to follow (if you're like Elon Musk famous) can just follow one of your pubs.
Re: An off-grid social network
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
email is so complicated. There are probably 3 people in the world who know how to properly run an email server.
That's absurd. True, it has become more complicated than it once was, but that's every technology that isn't dead. Granted, I have been running mail for a long time, so I got to learn the complications as they happened, rather than all at once. But anyone who can set up a production-quality web server/appserver/DB along with the accessories that go along with it can handle it. Now if email isn't important to your bus…
" I have been running mail for a long time, so I got to learn the complications as they happened, rather than all at once. But anyone who can set up a production-quality web server/appserver/DB along with the accessories that go along with it can handle it."
Are you using Sendmail?
Re: An off-grid social network
#327I'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
It is certainly meant to scale, it's an eventually consistent decentralized database. Centralized services historically have difficulty in scaling, but distributed and decentralized are by design easier. In Scuttlebutt, we don't need to have everything connected to everything, so it easily scalable. You just need to give up the idea of a global singleton, global search indexes, that type of stuff.
Re: An off-grid social network
#328I'm really excited to see how this develops. Best of luck to the Scuttlebutt team, what a great idea :)
Re: An off-grid social network
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then your laptop gets stolen and everything's gone.
And then you remember you set up an automated encrypted backup to the cloud and thank your past-self. Now is the time to do it if you're not doing this: https://msol.io/blog/tech/dirt-cheap-client-encrypted-online...
Why, oh why do we have smart individuals replacing internet with the word for the visual analogy we used to represent the internet to not knowing better people in position of power ?
This is not a damn cloud ! This a remote computer you can access over the internet. Can we stop with this use of marketing lingo please ?
Re: An off-grid social network
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then your laptop gets stolen and everything's gone.
Make backups. How is this any different than saving photos just in case you spill water on your laptop keyboard?
My laptop keyboard has drain holes directing the liquid to the bottom without ever getting inside, so that's one way it is different.