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Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

tent.io

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Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#71

Post by danielsiders »

ivansavz wrote: post #27

This would be the "killer protocol" for the freedombox, if combined with some smart dyndns management. Here is a use case scenario I am imagining. I define two servers for myself: home.me.com and cloud.me.com. Where home.me.com is a dyndns to the freedombox. Dyndyns being unreliable, if a tent msg cannot get to my home server, then the messages are sent to cloud.me.com and then pushed to home.me.com when it comes bac…

hosted service within one month. email apps VERY high on our to do list, been watching freedombox for a while, we'll reach out to them after initial release.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#72

Post by biomechanica »

I like how they support Tor hidden services. Though I wish they would go a step further and support I2P.

It's really nice to see people are working on ways to sort of "replace" the current centralized services out there.

Let us hope they are attractive enough to developers and users.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#73

Post by benwerd »

Titanous wrote: post #17
gjulianm wrote: post #12

My first thought was "Well, Diaspora with another name". But after reading and understanding it (it's not very well explained there) seems like a much more abstract thing. They want to build an abstraction layer to the social web, not a social network. The idea seems pretty good. It's just the basics: you follow people and receive their content (text, images, whatever), and people follow you and you share content wit…

We are putting together a wiki-style solution for community-curated post types. Common types are expected to be standardized so that apps are interoperable. For example status/microblog would be a standardized post type. We will launch with common types specified, so that everyone doesn't reinvent the wheel. After that, community managers will help keep the devs in line.

Isn't this something Activity Streams could be very useful for? Activity Streams is also JSON-friendly.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#74

Post by robertfw »

mcantelon wrote: post #51
sidcool wrote: post #35

"Tent servers can also be run as Tor hidden services to create a social darknet for at-risk organizers and activists."

So can anything, but it's awesome that they are promoting this. Speaking of which, does anyone know if there's a hidden service Twitter clone? This would be fun.

TorStatusNet: http://lotjbov3gzzf23hc.onion.to/

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#75

Post by benwerd »

danielsiders wrote: post #61
spolu wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argghhh. Ruby.

Only the site generator is in Ruby. While most of our core team are Rubyists, someone is working on a C++ implementation, too. It's a protocol which means you can write an implementation in any language you want. We hope to see many server implementations with different optimal use cases in different languages. For libraries, Ruby and Javascript are our top priorities with Java and Obj-C/iOS to follow. We'd love help…

Confirming that I intend to write one for (gasp) PHP.

NB: I am the technical cofounder of elgg.org, and I believe software like Tent is (part of) the future of the social web.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#76

Post by pwf »

kevingranade wrote: post #69
pwf wrote: post #16

It seems like this will use up a crapton of bandwidth with its 'push' style notifications. If someone with a million Facebook followers makes a new post, one entry is made in the database and then users pull it down as they visit their own pages. If a million people decide to 'camp in my tent' (?), my server is suddenly pushing out gigs of data every time I make a post.

Status.net/OStatus uses a similar PUSH model, basically it scales with number of followers, and yes, if you have thousands of followers the load will be significant. As a data point, I've been running a status.net instance since last December, during which time I've had 50-80* followers, have made an average of 12 posts/day, have followed 100-190* others, and my instance has transferred a grand total of 10,279MB * ov…

You definitely seem like what I would consider a light user then. My wife has 1000+ Facebook friends, and posts 15-20 times a day. If I round to 1GB/mo in your case, then she would probably use around 20GB/mo... which is actually not bad.

Thank you for the numbers!

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#77

Post by gjulianm »

arscan wrote: post #68

This looks great guys. I'll definitely put up a server and hook up the content I traditionally expose through my personal website. Question: what features that are taken for granted on today's popular social networks are difficult/impossible in this kind of distributed system? for example, i suspect something like "friend suggestions" might be difficult, since you only have access to a part of the network. Auto-frien…

Maybe anything that requires knowledge of the whole network would be pretty difficult. For example, showing the full list of the photos that are being posted. You can't just follow every user that posts photos.

The best solution that comes to mind now is building a server with a database of all the users and their respective servers. But, of course, that would break the decentralized purpose of Tent. It's an interesting problem to solve.

EDIT: Another big problem, how do I search users? A DNS-like solution would be feasible?

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#78

Post by benwerd »

bct wrote: post #59
Titanous wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are starting with an easy-to-use hosted service that will launch in a few weeks. We are catering to the development community by offering a simple, standardized API that will be easy to use. Privacy is a first-class feature, and Tent is specifically designed to be usable by high-risk activists[1] and people in countries that block other social networks. [1] http://liberationtech.tumblr.com/post/13377461578/how-the…

I don't mean this in a cruel way (I'd really like this to succeed), but that's a list of features, not a plan for getting adoption. Figuring out how to bootstrap network effects is critical.

A hosted service, extremely simple APIs and libraries, and some really great end-user clients will go a long way. Make it easy, in other words, and don't make it technical (except for the people who want it to be).

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#79

Post by danielsiders »

arscan wrote: post #68

This looks great guys. I'll definitely put up a server and hook up the content I traditionally expose through my personal website. Question: what features that are taken for granted on today's popular social networks are difficult/impossible in this kind of distributed system? for example, i suspect something like "friend suggestions" might be difficult, since you only have access to a part of the network. Auto-frien…

There are a few "standard features" of centralized social networks that are more challenging to implement, but we haven't found anything impossible yet. Search, especially real-time requires an external search engine. But it means Google (et al) needs to subscribe and essentially ask your permission for real time updates. Friend search is a bit easier if your followers/people you're following are public. Likely there'll be an app for that.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#80

Post by benwerd »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #4
Meldryn wrote: post #2

How does this compare with Diaspora?

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.

Diaspora and some other platforms are federated communities - in other words, they federate between collections of multiple people. Here, the decentralized social activity occurs between individuals. It's decentralized all the way down.
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