Is there a whitepaper? Difficult to analyze the system and decide whether it's going to do a good job, be safe against adversaries and manipulation, etc. without seeing some sort of high level description of how it works. Knowing it uses php and mysql doesn't tell me anything about the actual application.
Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network
91–100 of 146 posts
Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, it is still decentralized. - Even if it were true that "everyone uses Google/Microsoft/Apple/etc", the ones that don't can still send/receive emails from everyone else. - If one of the of the big providers disappear, the system as a whole will continue to function.
I am pretty sure if Google disappeared we were going to see a huge drop in the email traffic. How would I get to know the new email address of my friend who we only talked using Gmail for example?
> How would I get to know the new email address of my friend who we only talked using Gmail for example?
Call him up on the phone or message him on whatsapp or... whatever...
email IS decentralised. Even if we had ONLY gmail, a startup could implement a better email frontend and be successful.
Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly like email or the web. Certain services (shame on you, booking.com) now consider it a potential bug if you email doesn't end in gmail.com (they do their "did you mean: tadzik_@gmail.com?" when I enter the proper one, with my own domain). The web itself also tends to gravitate towards either "cloud" providers or at least stuff like cloudfare for ddos protection. Yes, it is still decentralized, but people keep…
> "did you mean: tadzik_@gmail.com?" This is incredibly annoying, I agree, but having run a service for which people type their email addresses, and having seen just how many people can't actually type their own email address properly (currently running at about 5%) I'm not surprised that a service aimed at non-technical people puts in attempted safeguards like this. And my service is for technical people - I can't i…
could you give some examples of the types of mistakes they make?
Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. If I were to give feedback, I'd say it needs a better landing and a user guide for the app (as opposed to the protocol inundated with dev jargon). Not really gonna send my mother a GitHub releases page; she needs to be the intended audience. I guess I could send her http://dinosaur.is/patchwork-downloader/ and ask her to read https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/getting-started.html and/or https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/#qui…
Agreed. I'll add that my main issue with Patchwork is that from what I can tell it's pretty much impossible to develop for it without using Node.js. I really think that for this to take off, it needs to focus on 'developer happiness' right now. There's a solid client, a relatively vibrant and activist community, but too little in the way of (relatively) inexperienced devs like myself to build apps on top of. this is…
I really like the idea of SSBC, on the other hand, most of it's problems are similar to those of XMPP and which are solved with it. (See, for example, Message Carbons, Microblogging over XMPP, OMEMO for multi-device encryption, etc).
I've tried running Movim and BuddyCloud when they got released, but left me with a terrible, unstable, feature-lacking experience (this was in ~2012). Maybe revisiting the idea of social networks on top of XMPP would worth a few thoughts, given it's now in a much better state.
SSBC is a very interesting idea and solution for sneakernet issues, but it comes with a serious amount of issues on it's own.
Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "did you mean: tadzik_@gmail.com?" This is incredibly annoying, I agree, but having run a service for which people type their email addresses, and having seen just how many people can't actually type their own email address properly (currently running at about 5%) I'm not surprised that a service aimed at non-technical people puts in attempted safeguards like this. And my service is for technical people - I can't i…
could you give some examples of the types of mistakes they make?
Omitting letters in their username, getting the domain wrong by omitting or mutating letters, commas instead of periods, spaces, and more. Some, such as commas and spaces are easy to catch, but mutations in the username are pretty much impossible to catch.
Without digging through my records I can't be more specific, but in general I was horrified at how many can't actually spell their own names correctly. Seriously, one person typed jojn.dpe instead of john.doe (name deliberately changed to protect the user). Sometimes it's possible to guess the correct username/domain, but sometimes it simply isn't.
Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its design intended it to be used that way, but that's not how people use it. Everyone uses a centralized email provider now (Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc.), and these providers act as gatekeepers to email. If they disappear, people will find an alternative centralized messaging scheme, not start learning how to run their own mail servers...
> Everyone uses a centralized email provider now (Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc.), ... No, it's not the case that "everyone" does that. I don't, and many of my colleagues don't. Perhaps muggles in general don't, and perhaps you're really only talking about such non-technical people, but your hyperbole undermines your argument. And I'm getting really tired of those big services automatically classing as spam anything…
> No, it's not the case that "everyone" does that. I don't, and many of my colleagues don't.
To add a little more nuance to that, millions (or billions?) of people working in various areas have email addresses provided by their employer with specific domain name suffixes. Even if those are using cloud based email providers like GSuite or Outlook 365, as far as someone who wants to correspond by email with these people is concerned (personal or work use), the email address is certainly not an @gmail.com or @outlook.com address. And all these people understand that quite well, even if they don't work in the tech sector.
> And I'm getting really tired of those big services automatically classing as spam anything that comes from a different domain.
This really bugs me A LOT! It's as if the systems have a knee jerk reaction based on domain names while they themselves wouldn't consider all their users (on their domains) as spammers.
Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network
#97Thank you Friendica team! We need more work in this space! > Friendica runs on PHP with MySQL as a database. If you can run WordPress, you can run Friendica. This is a problem. I picture the future decentralized systems being a self-contained system that runs on your device (desktop or mobile) as well as servers for more technical people . To this end the only scripting language that can pull this off is Javascript.…
In what way is installing and running node different than installing and running PHP or any other? Anything that ran like this would have to be contanerized anyway, meaning literally any stack would work.
I wasn't talking about running a node server application. I used "node" to refer to the v8 engine being embedded into an electron or mobile app which Ruby and PHP can't do (at least with any level of ease).
Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. If I were to give feedback, I'd say it needs a better landing and a user guide for the app (as opposed to the protocol inundated with dev jargon). Not really gonna send my mother a GitHub releases page; she needs to be the intended audience. I guess I could send her http://dinosaur.is/patchwork-downloader/ and ask her to read https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/getting-started.html and/or https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/#qui…
Agreed. I'll add that my main issue with Patchwork is that from what I can tell it's pretty much impossible to develop for it without using Node.js. I really think that for this to take off, it needs to focus on 'developer happiness' right now. There's a solid client, a relatively vibrant and activist community, but too little in the way of (relatively) inexperienced devs like myself to build apps on top of. this is…
What language would you feel more comfortable contributing in? For good or bad Node seems quite popular especially with newer programmers so I can at least somewhat understand the decision.
Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair and important questions. The closest immediate answer I have is https://indieweb.org/SWAT0 but the page is quite dense with indieweb terms. EDIT: https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/SW... might be a better source. Defining a minimum set of features for what a social network (media? web? system?) is is certainly a required step, and any suggestions are welcome.
That's a start, but I suspect we're better off thinking about all possible features, because this allows us to define a protocol that generalizes better. In your example, users can be tagged in a photo. That's nice. But let's say that in the future we want to share who's attending what events. Perhaps we can use the same kind of constructs in the protocol for both uses. Of course, an implementation does not need to s…
Your example works with those protocolls already too and I implemented it on my website, here is a example: https://jeena.net/events/11
And you can get all of that machine readable too: http://pin13.net/mf2/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fjeena.net%2Fevents%2...
Re: Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network
#100This is yet another platform solution. The problem with platform solutions is that they still present one and only one choice of software. Decentralized systems can only take off if they are built around standardized protocols - this is why email works. The choice of smtp servers to run, email clients to choose from, that's what's making it resilient. Ideas like ActivityPub, webmentions, microsub, micropub, while not…
That's what Movim does, by building on XMPP and its extensions. It's still pretty rough though, and administering a node (something that regular users are NOT required to do, but I thought it would be cool) requires some knowledge of XMPP/ejabberd (which I lack, as I discovered).
Ideally I'd be happy with something like that, where a single geek can provide a secure and federated social hub to his circle of friends/family.