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Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

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Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#31
post #2

This assumes that edsu will never betray you. Given the broad meaning of betray used, that seems unlikely. If edsu gets big it will have to pay for all that storage somehow. Like all things edsu will one day come to an end, and like most websites/companies/endeavors it will probably come to an end before I do.

Edsu seems to rely on federated services. Email, similarly, unfortunately fell to convenience - GMail, with Google selling your data. The parent brings up a good point, how do we know Edsu won't betray its users? Or that it won't become dominated by a centralized provider? I'd love to hear an answer. For me, our team decided to take a route that cannot be compromised - your identity belongs to you, fully decentralize…

I absolutely sympathize with the concern - but I don't believe it's an a priori solvable problem.

Bitcoin is theoretically fully decentralized, but when I sold mine off it took 2 days to sync the chain - I get why people use Coinbase. I'd still be running my own email server right now if it weren't for spam.

My point is that I think there's inflection points - when weaknesses in design or implementation become apparent - where centralization can get a foothold, and I don't think it's inevitable which course things take at those points. HTTP hosting, for example, has some big players, but it's still very much a commodity.

I realize that this is a crowded field, with lots of contenders, like yours. I think it's an important enough problem that it warrants parallel attempts, so that at least one of them sticks. Edsu picks a very specific strategy, which is that it's a compromise - it's not like, say, IPFS in its level of decentralization. For an app platform, I think there's challenges enough at any level of decentralization, and Edsu tries to b-line it straight there by being very orthodox and old-skool in nearly every other way. I thought it was a good bet, but only time will tell.

Props for the password resets, BTW. The importance of that feature is underappreciated :)

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right about the sync part, but it's an old skool client-server sync, not a peer-to-peer one.

Hmmm, a p2p version that uses local storage on each device you have could have some interesting applications. As a client-server architecture it's a tad complex for a lot of users to set up, but with a good UI it could become a viable alternative storage method, as well as allowing for potential app cross-compatibility. You would have to make sure at devices had a chance to sync - perhaps have a web service there? -…

...I just described a subsection of git... although with better UX.

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edsu seems to rely on federated services. Email, similarly, unfortunately fell to convenience - GMail, with Google selling your data. The parent brings up a good point, how do we know Edsu won't betray its users? Or that it won't become dominated by a centralized provider? I'd love to hear an answer. For me, our team decided to take a route that cannot be compromised - your identity belongs to you, fully decentralize…

I absolutely sympathize with the concern - but I don't believe it's an a priori solvable problem. Bitcoin is theoretically fully decentralized, but when I sold mine off it took 2 days to sync the chain - I get why people use Coinbase. I'd still be running my own email server right now if it weren't for spam. My point is that I think there's inflection points - when weaknesses in design or implementation become appare…

I admire that.

Don't let any counter argument ever stop you. Parallel experiments are critical for success.

With that said, can't we say that the federated experiment has already played out? Particularly, in email?

What new innovation or changes do you think will make the story play out differently this time around, versus outright P2P/decentralization?

Thanks!

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edsu seems to rely on federated services. Email, similarly, unfortunately fell to convenience - GMail, with Google selling your data. The parent brings up a good point, how do we know Edsu won't betray its users? Or that it won't become dominated by a centralized provider? I'd love to hear an answer. For me, our team decided to take a route that cannot be compromised - your identity belongs to you, fully decentralize…

I know I'm a bit of a broken record, but a notice that JS is required is always appreciated rather than a blank page.

Apologies, yeah, the site has an interactive coding tutorial that teaches you to write and run your JS. would be good - make a PR? https://github.com/gundb/gun-site/blob/master/docs/src/index...

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#35

This is my first time reading about Edsu, it seems very similar to the Solid Platform in one important aspect: it keeps data in the control of the user, separate from applications. I like how low-level and simplified the protocol is, being limited to only 9 types of messages. Compared to Solid which carries baggage from RDF, this seems far easier for third parties to implement. The note-taking app is really under-sel…

Thanks! One of the goals of Edsu is that it's simple enough that you can "telnet" in and just talk directly to the server like you can with HTTP or SMTP. It can seem like a trivial feature, but I've found that being able to speak a subset of a protocol from any language after just an hour or two of duct-tape hacking ends up being a big unsung feature.

And itgoon has it right - this was the most useful thing I could think to write that only took a single day (I had an self-imposed deadline to hit earlier this week).

Here's a discussion of more interested projects and how Edsu could be used in each (and its advantages and disadvantages):

https://edsu.org/use-cases/

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#36
post #15

This is my first time reading about Edsu, it seems very similar to the Solid Platform in one important aspect: it keeps data in the control of the user, separate from applications. I like how low-level and simplified the protocol is, being limited to only 9 types of messages. Compared to Solid which carries baggage from RDF, this seems far easier for third parties to implement. The note-taking app is really under-sel…

I agree, the protocol looks pretty neat. I wonder what the hold up is on Linux support. I love me some FreeBSD, but Linux is better supported. The note-taking app seems more like a proof of concept than any kind of category-killer, though. I'll be keeping an eye on that protocol, though.

It's only because FreeBSD is my desktop OS, and so I used kqueue during dev. I understand that there's a compatibility shim for Linux, so theoretically a port should be quite easy. The bulk of the code is in Rust, and that shouldn't need porting at all.

And thanks for the kind words :)

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, a p2p version that uses local storage on each device you have could have some interesting applications. As a client-server architecture it's a tad complex for a lot of users to set up, but with a good UI it could become a viable alternative storage method, as well as allowing for potential app cross-compatibility. You would have to make sure at devices had a chance to sync - perhaps have a web service there? -…

...I just described a subsection of git... although with better UX.

But let’s say for example your phone and your computer are clients, and your computer has latest version of your data. When you open your phone, if your computer is not on the internet, you won’t be able to get latest. So, would this be practically useful for a terribly trivial use case like this?

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right about the sync part, but it's an old skool client-server sync, not a peer-to-peer one.

Hmmm, a p2p version that uses local storage on each device you have could have some interesting applications. As a client-server architecture it's a tad complex for a lot of users to set up, but with a good UI it could become a viable alternative storage method, as well as allowing for potential app cross-compatibility. You would have to make sure at devices had a chance to sync - perhaps have a web service there? -…

It's possible and there has been research in this area, see http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/ for details about conflict resolution.

The main problem is garbage collection - to guarantee that you can sync across all devices for all time, your data structure must be append-only, so your document can only grow. A long living document will eventually grow very very large. You could let the user decide when to collect garbage/establish a new baseline doc; maybe like 5 years. But this means that if you edited the document on a laptop, didn't sync it with another client, and then closed the laptop for 5 years you would lose the ability for the changes you made on that laptop to be resolved automatically.

Re: Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you

#40
post #24
post #16

I actually found that using special directory for notes and git and grep is actually convenient. The only thing I'm missing is fuzzy search features of grep, like build on word2vec models.

Can we call this the Dropbox syndrome where people boasts they have a better solution with combination of cli tools instead of a service?

That is an interesting Hacker News type of phenomenon, but I personally enjoy reading the alternative solutions to a presented problem.

And sometimes it turns out that the SASS product is simply a wrapper around a cli tool... for example the product [1] Mole, which is a wrapper around ssh to make it easier... but not really necessary...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18236125

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