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Open Social

overreacted.io

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Re: Open Social

#41

Post by notatoad »

koolba wrote: post #39
notatoad wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

running a domain costs money. there's no way around that - it requires server resources to respond to dns queries, and that requires servers and electricity. so to offer it for free means somebody has to subsidize it. letsencrypt can operate because big companies with lots of money want their ads to be delivered without being intercepted by an ISP. what's the motivation for anybody to subsidize free domains?

> running a domain costs money. there's no way around that - it requires server resources to respond to dns queries, and that requires servers and electricity. I guarantee you I can store and make available over DNS the less than 1 KiB of data for less than a penny a year. Instead of free, charge a flat $1, put it in long term US treasuries at 5% / TIPS at 2.5% and you’ve covered your hosting costs forever. The princ…

okay, so why aren't you doing that. if you can offer domains for $1, you can undercut all the existing players by a huge margin. that's a big opportunity, no?

Re: Open Social

#42

Post by brap »

I think we tend to do a lot of idealization. The vast majority of non-techies don’t care whatsoever about decentralization.

Re: Open Social

#43

Post by jerf »

mcny wrote: post #4

Now here is a controversial question... Can we have a free of cost top level domain? What are the actual costs associated with registering a domain? If let's encrypt can provide secure certificates free of cost, why can't a different no profit provide domains free of cost as well? It doesn't have to be pretty. It could be a UUID v7 stacked on top of another UUID v7 for all I care but it would be globally unique and a…

A free of cost TLD is probably not practical. There are some special things that go along with being a TLD and being in the public suffix list: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list

If you drop the TLD part though, you can do whatever you want with any domain you want, up to and including handing out free subdomains to anyone who asks. As usual, though, if you try to do this, the dark internet will make you regret it as one day, quite suddenly, you'd find you were hosting the DNS of some massive scam email or other, or any of who-can-even-enumerate ways of making you sorry you put this service up because of their abuse of it. Just like anyone can make a URL redirector, and many people even use it as a sort of "learn this language project" but if you actually put it up online you will rapidly regret it.

It's a bummer and I'm not celebrating this fact, but, yeah, it's not something you want to do.

Re: Open Social

#44

Post by drnick1 »

This "Open Social" stuff is too complicated I think. I don't see what's wrong with having your own website. It takes a couple of minutes with the help of GPT to write an HTML 1.1 basic page and host it from home on your own hardware. Or better yet, don't have an online presence at all.

Re: Open Social

#45

Post by meowkit »

deadbabe wrote: post #21
notatoad wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

running a domain costs money. there's no way around that - it requires server resources to respond to dns queries, and that requires servers and electricity. so to offer it for free means somebody has to subsidize it. letsencrypt can operate because big companies with lots of money want their ads to be delivered without being intercepted by an ISP. what's the motivation for anybody to subsidize free domains?

How about DNS on a blockchain?

https://docs.ens.domains/learn/protocol/

Supporting DNS all up should be possible but organizing the other decentralized services (compute, storage) is the hard part

Re: Open Social

#46

Post by pfraze »

drnick1 wrote: post #44

This "Open Social" stuff is too complicated I think. I don't see what's wrong with having your own website. It takes a couple of minutes with the help of GPT to write an HTML 1.1 basic page and host it from home on your own hardware. Or better yet, don't have an online presence at all.

Bit apples to oranges, isn't it? You're not exactly able to do tiktok with personal websites

Re: Open Social

#47

Post by numpad0 »

I'm starting to feel many of "next big Twitter to fill its power vacuum" projects are tackling the problem slightly wrong - they all perfect the Twitter feature set, then hit the wall with user growth and content deprivation chicken and egg problem. People gather where there are others and that's still around the rotting whale.

That OpenAI timeline thing that just launched is more better approach, it solves content problem by just gathering data in background and feeding it to the user anyway. That particular implementation might not work but it sounds correct.

IMO, not much of value of Twitter for most users is in ability to post tweets, it's in data bandwidth. 99.9% of users don't post anything interesting, those might as well be local text file or oit of band shared filler content. The value is in content sourcing, so something like multi-social RSS reader with optional P2P should be the way to go. Just IMdimO, though...

Re: Open Social

#48

Post by igor47 »

drnick1 wrote: post #44

This "Open Social" stuff is too complicated I think. I don't see what's wrong with having your own website. It takes a couple of minutes with the help of GPT to write an HTML 1.1 basic page and host it from home on your own hardware. Or better yet, don't have an online presence at all.

I have my own site. But the people love engagement - it motivates a lot of content creation. Back in the day we had web log rings and WordPress comments, but that stuff is dead on the modern web, it's too adversarial an environment. My blog has no meaningful engagement, I don't even know if anyone ever reads it. It works for me since I write primarily for myself, but this is just not the case for most people

Re: Open Social

#49

Post by input_sh »

mcny wrote: post #4

Now here is a controversial question... Can we have a free of cost top level domain? What are the actual costs associated with registering a domain? If let's encrypt can provide secure certificates free of cost, why can't a different no profit provide domains free of cost as well? It doesn't have to be pretty. It could be a UUID v7 stacked on top of another UUID v7 for all I care but it would be globally unique and a…

.tk used to be free and was the top ccTLD in the world by the number of domains registered. You can imagine what it was mostly used for.

Facebook sued the operator (Dutch company called Freenom) for facilitating phishing and now we can't have that anymore.

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