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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

#91

Post by dizhn »

tetha wrote: post #90
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I learned so much about good architecture from just hanging out on Freenode in a few programming channels. At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right? Those were simpler times, I suppose. We were working with all the new frameworks of the day, and it was the grizzled old e…

> At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right? There was some .. lets just call it, rather encouraged rebranding to libra.chat. And there is something else namesquatting the freenode name.

I think you got autocorrected. The name is libera.chat .

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

#92

Post by op00to »

ryanmpierson wrote: post #62

I miss when BBS were all the rage.

I do and I don't. I miss the excitement, I miss the feeling of finding something new that's precious. You only had so much time on the phone in those days, even if you were sticking to your free dialing area.

I also got exposed to a lot of stuff at a young age partially enabled by BBSes, and I wonder how it affected the adult I am today. I was in a LOT of precarious situations far outside what might be considered appropriate free range parenting.

Anyway, agree man, I miss BBSes!

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

#93

Post by gilmore606 »

If you want to build an insular community for your nerd friends, put up a MUD server. You can build silly text toys, write tiny pieces of code for stupid fun, and the best part is, normies can't even figure out your community exists or how to connect to it, because wtf is telnet? It's also effectively invisible to the three letter agencies and whomever else.

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

#94

Post by nathants »

asim wrote: post #25
bioxept wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this compare to a small discord server? What can it do better?

So it's private and invite only by default. There is no element of "public" and the focus is on real connections with people you know rather than people you've never met in person. There's also no notifications or "is typing". The goal is really not to try emulate existing chat or bombard you with the need for immediate replies. It's a lot more focused on how most of our lives and mine personally operates now which i…

no is-typing notifications is a killer feature. sold.

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

#95

Post by nathants »

gerikson wrote: post #7
elektor wrote: 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.

cloudflare workers + r2 is shockingly affordable.

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

#96

Post by rglullis »

TheNewsIsHere wrote: post #64
kensanata wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the "Administration" tag for my blog will attest, the sysadmin side does take a lot of work. Every now and then something is down, something needs defending (like the current HN users all clicking on the site which is running without any caches…), and on and on. In my experience, it's not so much cybercriminals that keep me busy but bad programmers that write spiders that treat every website in the world like corp…

In the past I ended up in a place where I self-hosted virtually everything I consumed within my network that could be self-hosted. Right down to major OS software update caching. It’s definitely exhausting and I hit upon a point where it felt like I couldn’t distinguish between home and business infrastructure. I expanded to include family stuff, and that became a massive headache. When you do that, it’s not always e…

You seem like my dream customer for communick. What can I do to have you joining it?

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

#97

Post by sshine »

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #85
tetha wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days. Man, with me on the edge to nuking or not nuking my reddit account with a couple of smaller communities, I didn't need more nostalgia back here. I was part of the "night crew" over on the old freenode in a few…

Man, I learned so much about good architecture from just hanging out on Freenode in a few programming channels. At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right? Those were simpler times, I suppose. We were working with all the new frameworks of the day, and it was the grizzled old e…

> something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right?

It was a netsplit.

Freenode was sold to an heir of the former Korean monarchy. The idea that the network was even sellable did not resonate with several former staff calling it a hostile takeover, so Libera.Chat was formed as a moral successor.

The split caused a drop in user count from ~80k to ~45k. Some channels migrated to OFTC instead. See a user count history graph:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera_Chat#History

https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021

Since the decline of freenode, their user count statistics have looked unapologetically synthetic.

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

#98

Post by narag »

bamfly wrote: post #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…

It's been a long time since I used it, and I've read that there was a messed version change since then. So take it with a pinch of salt.

Drupal had a very nice hybrid of forum and wiki, it was called "book" IIRC. It was possible to organize the pages in a hierarchy and at the same time it provided discussion in every node.

Being modular and open source, you could add the import thing. I've been working in importing stuff for a while so maybe I see it easier than it is. The community features were very good, with a nice permissions system.

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

#99

Post by sdm »

telotortium wrote: post #74
em-bee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 seems a bit low. what happens if i want to invite 21 people? many groups have a few active people and many less active people. one group i am in has about 80 members, 10-20 or which are active and keep a steady stream of communication. if the group were to grow much beyond that, it would be to much. so you are right that 20 active people is a good group size but if there is a technical limit of 20 that means i hav…

For Wechat specifically, I think that the group size limit of 500 may be related to Chinese law. They want group sizes to remain somewhat small to prevent news from spreading too quickly.

Correct, because over that size a number of censorship and monitoring requirements come into play. A lot of WeChat's early success was focused around keeping things more private. The 500 limit is part of that.

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

#100

Post by manicdee »

asim wrote: 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.

Dunbar's number is 150, which seems about right for the number of people to be involved for the group to end up devolving into two macro communities. The micro-communities still hover round the 2 to 5 mark where everyone gets to feel like they're participating and appreciated.
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