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Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
81–90 of 229 posts
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even worse are pictures and videos. Rather than including a URL to it, the 'push' includes the base64 encoded binary data. Hmm.
Posts have different "views" one of which is meta which would just have a URL pointing to the photo instead of including it in the post. See: http://tent.io/docs/post-types
Ah ha, I missed that. Good work!
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Having a good product is necessary, but far from sufficient.
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
WebSockets also have the advantage that they pass through corporate firewalls and open wifi networks, as well as many proxies, as they masquerade as HTTP traffic. And a nicer frames mechanic than raw socket, something I love. (nowhere near as low-level, but for me it's essentially stateful UDP that's reliable, i.e. TCP except with datagrams)
Corporate firewalls are the general boogieman, but in reality, I haven't seen evidence that they're much more than that. To test this, we implemented fallback-to-HTTPS behavior in a very widely used previously non-HTTP client. We then observed the number of clients that failed to connect via our custom protocol, but succeeded in falling back to HTTPS. The numbers were negligible. It's ridiculous that we'd seriously b…
Perhaps, but open wifi often only allows 443 and 80.
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
HTTP accomplishes all of our design constraints via REST and long-lived streaming connections. It is a very reliable, mature protocol, and the security and performance are very well understood. Also, if we invented a new binary protocol, users wouldn't be able to host their Tent servers on easy-to-use platforms like Heroku. Developers may implement other protocols in the future, but we are targeting HTTP as an access…
HTTP is a huge, hefty, inefficient and complex protocol whose only advantage is that HTML/JS supports it by default. Arguments that 'websockets' solve this are ridiculous in the face of the fact that we can just use 'sockets', like we always have. WebSockets are a work-around for the constraints of the browser. As a mobile/desktop/server engineer, I would love the opportunity to work with other server-side teams that…
> HTTP is a huge, hefty, inefficient and complex protocol
It's starting to sound like you've never used CORBA.
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
HTTP accomplishes all of our design constraints via REST and long-lived streaming connections. It is a very reliable, mature protocol, and the security and performance are very well understood. Also, if we invented a new binary protocol, users wouldn't be able to host their Tent servers on easy-to-use platforms like Heroku. Developers may implement other protocols in the future, but we are targeting HTTP as an access…
HTTP is a huge, hefty, inefficient and complex protocol whose only advantage is that HTML/JS supports it by default. Arguments that 'websockets' solve this are ridiculous in the face of the fact that we can just use 'sockets', like we always have. WebSockets are a work-around for the constraints of the browser. As a mobile/desktop/server engineer, I would love the opportunity to work with other server-side teams that…
HTTP implements an architectural style which ensures reliability, scalability, decoupling of systems and support for hypermedia for a complex network of disparate, unreliable systems and networks.
Do you have any suggestion that provides the same features, or should we forgo them because HTTP is "hefty"?
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#87This 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…
A couple of things I don't see on a quick scan of the docs:
(1) I don't see how one Tent entity contacts another proactively - it looks like A can't message B unless B has already chosen to follow A. If this is so, is it an anti-spam measure? Given that StatusNet etc. are infested with spam, it seems like a very wise one :-) On the other hand, it is rather limiting as compared to centralized platforms, don't you think?
(2) I don't see how you maintain the promise of a portable identity when your identities are hosted URIs. Eg, if my identity is tent.is/foobar, and I want to move to a different host, how do I do that? I can download my data, sure. It looks like I can even bounce from tent.is to another data server. But unless I want to break all my social connections, don't I remain at the mercy of tent.is? This strikes me as a rather unsolvable problem, but it would be reassuring to clarify that you're not solving it :-)
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#88Earlier 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.
You're right-- Our plan is to get the protocol and reference server functioning for general use. We're mindful of the notes made here: http://liberationtech.tumblr.com/post/13377461578/how-the-ne.... We have some thoughts on adoption tactics and strategy, but the master plan is still under development. All insights are welcome.
edit: wow, wrong link.
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or at least some hard details about what those existing alternatives are lacking. That could lead to further improvement, as whatever communities have already formed around those alternatives could debate the questions and possibly improve their protocols. As it is the FAQ reads like "those are old and busted, we wanted something new and hot," which gives off an aura of NIH syndrome.
We take NIH very seriously and originally began by attempting to revise existing protocols. We have some very specific complaints about existing federated web protocols: • no support for private message (pubsubhubbub, anything atom-based) • inability to move relationships when changing service • no standard API for application interaction by leaving each of these (and others) out of scope see: http://ostatus.org/site…
And what about XMPP? It has private messages. If run in a similar way to tent (single user per server/domain?) then switching service provider is exactly the same. "No standard API" ... isn't the protocol an API?
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#90What happens when my server is down when you try to post a notification?