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Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

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Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#181

Post by AgentME »

jklinger410 wrote: post #150
BeetleB wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As was recently demonstrated, online mob harassment is very doable on Mastodon: http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-...

Beyond the fact that I don't really believe Wil is entirely innocent in his complaints, he simply had to change instances. He also used his real name. In fact, he didn't really take any steps to protect himself besides moving to mastadon. Large instances, after all, simply function like an unmonetized twitter.

> He also used his real name. In fact, he didn't really take any steps to protect himself

I kind of think that's the point for a celebrity on Twitter or a similar site.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#182

Post by kodablah »

ForHackernews wrote: post #40
9712263 wrote: post #34

The most successful decentralized communication system - email as it turned out, people would concentrated to large free provider like Google. Decentralized server does not protect privacy for normal user because not most people could handle owning their server. The most success decentralized service is BitTorrent. It is decentralized and it is decentralized in client level. Though it also caused uncontrollable pirac…

Maybe. But then there's a question of where does the content live? Most people don't have a desktop they leave connected all the time, and don't want to be hosting videos and photos off their mobile device. So you're stuck with replicating that data out to all the peers, which means you've just lost control of "your" data again.

> But then there's a question of where does the content live? Most people don't have a desktop they leave connected all the time

I think most people know someone who does and we can start there. The first step is to make it really easy to host on a desktop (including addressing and NAT busting, both of which Tor provide).

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#183

Post by jlg23 »

ohwaitnvm wrote: post #175
gaius wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diaspora has been a comedy of such errors for the decade it's existed I think I had a Diaspora account in like 2011... Then they announced they were blowing away everyone's account to redesign the database or something... Never bothered with it again.

I wish I had been able to convince the guys to use a relational DB from the beginning instead of Mongo. Turns out a social network is full of relational data - but my buddies were too excited by new tech, and made a decision based on “cool”ness that hurt themselves in the long run. However, it’s still impressive what four guys at the end of their college careers were able to build with no professional experience what…

> Though it took me a full week to convince them to use a framework, Rails, instead of hand-rolling everything around a custom EventMachine loop... The loop never even worked, but it was “cool”. Give me boring and powerful any day.

Funnily exactly that choice was what made me reject the request to help with development early on.

Not building on SMTP was a wise choice in hindsight, given that it turned into a pretty monopolized protocol since then - most people have a hard time to get their mails delivered from a private server nowadays.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#184

Post by ohwaitnvm »

jlg23 wrote: post #183
ohwaitnvm wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I had been able to convince the guys to use a relational DB from the beginning instead of Mongo. Turns out a social network is full of relational data - but my buddies were too excited by new tech, and made a decision based on “cool”ness that hurt themselves in the long run. However, it’s still impressive what four guys at the end of their college careers were able to build with no professional experience what…

> Though it took me a full week to convince them to use a framework, Rails, instead of hand-rolling everything around a custom EventMachine loop... The loop never even worked, but it was “cool”. Give me boring and powerful any day. Funnily exactly that choice was what made me reject the request to help with development early on. Not building on SMTP was a wise choice in hindsight, given that it turned into a pretty m…

That’s too bad. Their situation was that they were working in Pivotal’s office, surrounded by extremely high quality Rails devs who were happy to give free help and advice.

Like I said, the EM loop never worked, and instead of spending weeks banging their heads on it, Rails allowed them to move forward onto their actual problem, instead of having to invent everything themselves.

I guess I don’t know that much about SMTP still :)

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#185

Post by iforgotpassword »

flavor8 wrote: post #169
skocznymroczny wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another example - Git. It's decentralized in principle, but in reality, people either centralize around GitHub and alternatives, and even when self-hosted, there is usually a notion of master repo.

That's partly a tooling issue, though. If git had native requests and a decent UI around them baked in, and the UI client also had some way of discovering your peers across networks, then the need for gitlab/github would be diminished.

Yeah no, unless you work on a project with 100 other people. Even if peer discovery, nat traversal and whatnot would be solved, what am I supposed to do if both my project members are currently offline? Synchronizing progress would be a nightmare in a three people project where everybody is located somewhere else. You could pretty much consider git peer to peer already, but everybody is too lazy to open their firewall and instead talks to the always-on supernode that is github.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#186

Post by jandrese »

51lver wrote: post #159
TimNN wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at https://joindiaspora.com/statistics , you'll actually notice that "Registrations" are "Closed". I guess that means that this specific "pod" is full and you need to find a different "pod"?

Yes that is correct, or start your own. Here is a tool to view info about pods: https://podupti.me/ On theis diaspora wiki page, the GIANT sign up link will direct you to a random pod: https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Choosing_a_pod

Why are implementation details like this visible to the end user?

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#187

Post by znpy »

9712263 wrote: post #34

The most successful decentralized communication system - email as it turned out, people would concentrated to large free provider like Google. Decentralized server does not protect privacy for normal user because not most people could handle owning their server. The most success decentralized service is BitTorrent. It is decentralized and it is decentralized in client level. Though it also caused uncontrollable pirac…

You might want to check out https://snake.li - It's a cryptography-based "social network" born out of a masters' degree thesis. AFAIR most of it works in the browser, while the server doesn't really know much about the data.

A nice idea that sadly didn't get enough funding, and their creators eventually moved on.

It's AGPL though.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#188

Post by znpy »

optimuspaul wrote: post #105
9712263 wrote: post #34

The most successful decentralized communication system - email as it turned out, people would concentrated to large free provider like Google. Decentralized server does not protect privacy for normal user because not most people could handle owning their server. The most success decentralized service is BitTorrent. It is decentralized and it is decentralized in client level. Though it also caused uncontrollable pirac…

Playing devils advocate here, but I also kind of believe this... There is no such thing as privacy in the social network. It is foolhardy to assume it is even possible. Even a real life social network relies on trust, trust that can be broken very easily and totally outside of your control. Maybe the answer is to accept that privacy isn't a real thing and stop sharing things, even in what you assume is a protected en…

Not really. I've been using Mastodon for the last four months and I feel pretty safe. My instance doesn't know much more than I already told it. And I don't get reminders, emails telling me to check in, or ads following me. I could also run my own instance, and still be connected to the people I know.

Mastodon is pretty cool.

Re: Diaspora: Hello and a big welcome to everyone arriving from Google+

#189

Post by dredmorbius »

erikb wrote: post #158
dredmorbius wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon dates from 2016. Depending on which aspects of blockchain, it lon postdates Bitcoin, and came up roughly in parallel with the blockchain-all-the-things idiocy. Mastodon itself has no reliance on blockchain.

If one thinks about it, a properly used social network also doesn't need proof-of-work, because it has social proof. If three people you trust have spent 2 years regularly liking posts from a fourth account you can be quite sure that fourth account is no fake.

Reasonably. Sybil attacks still happen with frequency.

I've also noted that creating a new account with little visible connection to another can also re-establish social connections fairly quickly. After getting booted off G+ at one point, (accessing the site via Tor), I decided to tweak the entire notion of a trusted identity (having already gone pseudonymous) by naming my new account "The Real Slim Shady". I managed to re-acquire most of my core 20-40 followers over a few days.

(Being able to corroborate the connection from other sites helped, though many people twigged on who TRSS was even before checking.)

I've also seen known users turn hostile in bad ways over time. Much as I've had the experience of knowing people who've ended up committing murder, or serious financial crimes. Vetting is a hard problem.

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