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Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

tent.io

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Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#111

Post by flatline3 »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #84
flatline3 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That also breaks IMAP(S), SMTP(S), Jabber, AIM, and a slew of other applications.

I don't see that we should model the internet architecture on bad technical choices made on a limited number of open wifi networks.

Or, we just frame our standard protocol over websockets as an (unfortunate) fallback, if it ever is revealed to be a real problem.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#112

Post by mmahemoff »

Meldryn wrote: post #9
danielsiders wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This was the mistake Open ID made, which they later realised complicated things way too much for the average user. Regular users want to identify as an email address, not a URI.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#113

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

flatline3 wrote: post #108
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you're using C/C++ and only native OS libraries (or on windows, afraid to use WinHttp for fear of lack of SP1 support)

Marshalling back and forth between HTTP requests and in-app models via the like of NSURLConnection is far more ugly to do cleanly and efficiently than a simple state machine modeled on message passing over a socket.

That's only for Objective-C, it's nicer in Go.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#114

Post by arscan »

webwanderings wrote: post #105

"Every user decide which other users can follow them and what information will be shared with each of their followers." This effectively makes each person an island in h/herself and hence the model of social-web breaks down. It wouldn't work and people know it. In order to liberate the data, you're throwing the baby out with the bath water.

I'm not following your rationale. Isn't that Facebook's default model? I explicitly choose who is allowed to see my content, and I have control over how much of that content they can see through privacy settings / lists. The problem with Facebook is that I simply don't trust them with my data.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#115

Post by morsch »

khet wrote: post #103

"How is Tent licensed? Tent will be completely free and open and treated as a standard. To prevent fragmentation before launch, the original authors currently retain copyright. This is a temporary situation which will be remedied immediately after a governance model is chosen. We decided it would be best to share what we could as soon as possible, releasing early and often. We are entirely committed to free and open…

Retaining copyright means that you can't fork their code to easily establish a working but slightly incompatible version, which is what fragmentation is.

Project leader is not a formalized position (or even a meaningful concept, really) in free software and doesn't come with the power to prevent forks or fragmentation. I guess their thinking is once a community of users and developers is brought together, they can be trusted to establish a model that retains compatibility since it is in everybody's interest. While at the moment, an incompatible fork would have the same "network effect" as the original.

Either way, the copyright only covers the software, not the protocol.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#116

Post by Titanous »

cyarvin wrote: post #87
danielsiders wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

1) This isn't clear in the docs right now, but unauthenticated notifications are allowed, and eventually we'll add signing (think Domain Keys).

2) Every piece of data in the system will be available via the API including negotiated app and follow credentials, moving will consist of authorizing an importer app to have read access to everything, and then pushing a post that tells all the servers to check the profile again for updated entity and server details. It should be a very simple process.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#117

Post by darkhorn »

enobrev wrote: post #97

A few years back, I started getting interested in a similar idea. I'm definitely intrigued in seeing how well it goes. Good luck to you. Of course, as ideas go, I allowed myself to think further into the possibilities, and found some interesting avenues. For instance, why allow the facebooks, twitters, etc to own domain over our content? Let people store their own data, and offer API endpoints giving facebook, twitte…

You mean like using Gmail as email client similar to Thunderbird and Outlook. (You know, where you add POP3-SMTP address ... )

Why not, it will go to that point.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#118

Post by rapind »

danielsiders wrote: post #55
smacktoward wrote: post #49

Random thought: it might be helpful to give Tent-the-protocol a different name than Tent-the-server-implementation. In other words, "Tent" means either the protocol you're specifying, or the server software you're planning on releasing, but not both. An analogue would be the naming distinction between HTTP, the protocol, and httpd, the first Web server ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_httpd ). That naming split ma…

Definitely-- The first "Tent server implementation" will have it's own name, TBD. We spent a lot of time on nomenclature and still aren't 100% with any of the terms, they're effectively all in flux until v1.0. The wackier issue is whether users call their "Tent-servers" "Tents". If you have any suggestions on names for this or any other terms, we'd love to hear them! edit: when the hosted version launches it will be…

A collection of Tents could be called a "Camp".

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#119

Post by allertonm »

danielsiders wrote: post #20
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.

We anticipate follower counts similar to the levels seen on Twitter today. Managing 1 few hundred followers isn't too difficult, thousands can be managed by cranking up the dynos on heroku. But yeah, Justin Bieber is going to need a hosted solution to handle that kind of load (like he has now with Twitter, YouTube, etc). We also have a setting in subscriber settings that control which types of posts are pushed in the…

While the example of Justin Bieber makes it seem to make sense to push the cost of following to the followed rather than the follower, I am not at all sure this makes sense in the general case. It puts the user at the mercy of spammers & bots and ISTM making the follower bear the cost of following would disincentivize this kind of bad behaviour.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#120

Post by darkhorn »

flatline3 wrote: post #42
Titanous wrote: post #13

Earlier 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…

You can use DSNP but I cannot because shared hosting do not provide that much support. I wish everybody could use it.
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