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The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

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Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#11
post #9

I don't get where to click to have something happen or what to download to run this myself. Is this an idea to implement ourselves?

Yes, this is just a wiki about small communities. I guess one of the problems of small communities is that you probably can't just one that's advertised since it'll likely be full, so you have to make your own or get invited to one.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#14
post #7
post #4

Looks like they’re using “smol” servers; it crashed under a few hundred HN visits ;)

To be honest, that's kind of the point. When you're "webscale" you're inevitably at a level where you have to pay a lot of money just to keep the site up. Smolnet is supposed to be run from someone's basement.

My $100/year shared webhosting held up just fine to a front-page HN post. I don't think that's "a lot" a of money, though it is probably more expensive than the power usage of a small server in someone's basement.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#15
Good luck getting friends/family to use this instead of WhatsApp/iMessage(in the U.S.).

I tried to switch everyone to Signal, but it utterly failed, people took forever to reply, if they even do, and never actually contact me on it.

Matrix works because it has bridges.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#17
post #14
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, that's kind of the point. When you're "webscale" you're inevitably at a level where you have to pay a lot of money just to keep the site up. Smolnet is supposed to be run from someone's basement.

My $100/year shared webhosting held up just fine to a front-page HN post. I don't think that's "a lot" a of money, though it is probably more expensive than the power usage of a small server in someone's basement.

Maybe!

In the UK $100/year gets you about a 20-40w constant load*.

That's a fairly efficient machine, and then there's the router, modem etc.

Granted some of that already exists, and a Raspberry Pi or similar would fit in that budget.

* quick maths: $100/365 gives 27 cents a day or approx 1c per hour - at $0.50/kWh you have a 25w constant load and at $0.25/kWh you have 50w.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#18
Main thing I want to self-host for friends, that's not served by any of a hundred chat apps:

A place to share media reviews and recommendations. Wiki-like is OK, as long as table support is great.

Difficulty: it should be able to helpfully look up and create entries for any new media it encounters, using various online sources (IMDB, The Movie Database, TVDB, maybe the Musicbrainz DB, something else authoritative-ish for video games, books, and comic books). So if you want to add a title to a table of, say, sci-fi movies, and link that to a review of same, if it's already got the movie, it should recommend it based on the title you type in, and if not, it should find likely candidates to suggest, and fill in things like release year, director, actors, et c., from outside sources, automatically, when you select one of them. It should be able to find all mentions of a given piece of media within its system, such that one could look up a page for a given, say, album, and get a list of every page where it's mentioned on the site.

It should also maintain a watched/listened/played/read list for each user, and be able to import that from places like Letterboxd.

Basically, a Wiki with smart media metadata import.

It's the only thing we want to do that's not served adequately by chat.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#20
post #5

I like this. Speaks to my own goal of creating "micro" communities. https://micro.mu . We limit groups to 20 people. I think that's an ideal number for real connections. Need more, it's likely for a different type of communication.

Trying to use this, I get an error when entering a group. Seems like a cool idea, but it needs to have a lot more functionality to draw me in, I think.
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