Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web • Hacker News Board

Diaspora is mentioned in the article in the "What about the federated social web?" section. Apparently it is more decentralised than Diaspora. Although I can't see what that means at the moment as implementation details are fairly sparse.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#5

Post by knowtheory » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 7:08 PM UTC

mike-cardwell wrote: post #3

Sounds almost too good to be true. Looking forward to being able to download some software.

They've got a github repo they're working out of it looks like:

https://github.com/tent/tent.io

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#6

Post by danielsiders » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 7:10 PM UTC

Meldryn wrote: post #2

How does this compare with Diaspora?

Diaspora* is a federated open source social network. It does not have a protocol specification or an API for app support/integration. Diaspora* is not intended to be run as one server/user, but by clustering users on pods with pod administrators, etc.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#7

Post by mbreese » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 7:11 PM UTC

Why is it that every new protocol seems to want to piggy back on HTTP? It seems to me that maintaining state would be a useful feature for a social protocol.

Another issue is that this assumes that the web will be the client of choice in the future... with mobile apps being as big as they are in the social space, this seems a bit shortsighted.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea behind having a "social server", but I don't necessarily think that starting with HTTP is the way to go.

I don't have any particular argument with using JSON for data transfer though... I think that is probably a good choice. Also using SSL for all connections is probably a good call too.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#8

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 7:14 PM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #7

Why is it that every new protocol seems to want to piggy back on HTTP? It seems to me that maintaining state would be a useful feature for a social protocol. Another issue is that this assumes that the web will be the client of choice in the future... with mobile apps being as big as they are in the social space, this seems a bit shortsighted. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea behind having a "social server", but I…

[deleted]

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#9

Post by Meldryn » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 7:15 PM UTC

danielsiders wrote: post #6

Meldryn wrote: post #2

How does this compare with Diaspora?

Diaspora* is a federated open source social network. It does not have a protocol specification or an API for app support/integration. Diaspora* is not intended to be run as one server/user, but by clustering users on pods with pod administrators, etc.

Reading the API docs, it seems that every user needs their own URI to be uniquely identified. I wonder how this will work with the average user, just IP address? What about users with shared internet?

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#10

Post by pwf » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 7:15 PM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #7

Why is it that every new protocol seems to want to piggy back on HTTP? It seems to me that maintaining state would be a useful feature for a social protocol. Another issue is that this assumes that the web will be the client of choice in the future... with mobile apps being as big as they are in the social space, this seems a bit shortsighted. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea behind having a "social server", but I…

They describe it as a 'protocol' on top of HTTP; I don't think that assumes much about the 'client of choice'. Most apps I've worked with already use HTTP and JSON anyway.