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Show HN: Mu – The Micro Network

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Re: Show HN: Mu – The Micro Network

#21

Post by asim »

GaryBluto wrote: post #10

Why am I unable to test any of it's features without being prompted to install a Chromium "app"?

Sorry trying to fix that. It's an installable PWA but you can still use it as a website like any other. I have it installed on my phone. I guess I catered for my on usecase. Hopefully its partially fixed.

Re: Show HN: Mu – The Micro Network

#22

Post by asim »

safety1st wrote: post #16
GaryBluto wrote: post #10

Why am I unable to test any of it's features without being prompted to install a Chromium "app"?

Is this why nothing happens when I click on any of the services in Firefox? There is no feedback at all. I don't know that there's much value to, for example, creating another web based YouTube front-end when Invidious exists

Fair point, I'm not an Invidious user but I also feel like Video is part of a suite of services that I personally use, so I wanted to incorporate that way. There's lots of single purpose solutions to many things, I don't think that's the goal here. The idea is to look at the multiple habits that occur across social and put them in one place in a simple consumable format that just gives you what you need rather than promoting idle scrolling/clicking, etc

Re: Show HN: Mu – The Micro Network

#23

Post by asim »

Pufferbo wrote: post #13
Pufferbo wrote: post #12

Is this related to the defunct mu.app from a few years back?

Answer: yes it is, I think

Yes, I did try this once before and had to "check" my own motivations at the time. After making an attempt to raise funding again I realised I wasn't honest in my intentions, so I shut it down and tried to cut back my social usage and figure out what else to work on. Guess I still felt there was something here.

Re: Show HN: Mu – The Micro Network

#25

Post by asim »

modelorona wrote: post #3
uka wrote: post #2

Ambitious. Very hard to achieve. But if we use go, github and discord for building the "anti big tech" stack - then we have failed from the start.

Why go?

I've been writing software with Go for over a decade now so it's just down to ease of use and what I know. It's performant, straightforward, compiled. It's a no nonsense language and does what it says. I'm not the type to get into language wars. I have a tool, I use it, that's it. Thanks for the question.

Re: Show HN: Mu – The Micro Network

#26

Post by DoctorOW »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #9
kennywinker wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is a programming language. It’s not exactly pushing google’s ad agenda. Your criticism of using github and discord are somewhat valid, but asking people to re-invent the wheel while they re-invent the bicycle seems like arbitrarily making up rules so everyone fails. Is there some influence you expect to leak into their platform thru github or discord?

They are standing on the shoulders of giants. There's nothing wrong with the ideals and the motivation, but it begs the question: Could Mu exist without go? could go exist without google? Could Mu exist without google? And all of that culminates with: Could the level of technology and the internet reach the state it is today without big tech? And if not, was the price we paid to get here worth it?

> but it begs the question: Could Mu exist without go? could go exist without google? Could Mu exist without google?

No, it doesn't.

Obviously Mu could exist without Go, if Google stopped development on the language, its current state could be forked (Go 2). Lots of programming languages exist without Google's support, there are even programming languages older than Google.

Re: Show HN: Mu – The Micro Network

#27

Post by rodolphoarruda »

I've been catching myself thinking about this idea for the last two years. Maybe it's my old obsession with PKI and "personal digital infrastructures" that were both promised to us in the early days of the commercial Internet, but never turned concrete for various reasons.

IMHO, the best we could have today in terms of digital infrastructure is a personal/family level custom Mastodon node with basic Internet services like email, posts, tasks, chat, IM etc. but implemented in a way that all data would be portable to other services (open standards) and its storage would be "bottomless", meaning that users wouldn't have to worry about storage limitation for photos/videos for instance, as they would be sharing resources with other nodes worldwide. There would have to be some monetary incentive(s), of course, but they would be secondary to the bigger cause of keeping a true cyber interconnected community outside big tech.

Re: Show HN: Mu – The Micro Network

#30

Post by asim »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #27

I've been catching myself thinking about this idea for the last two years. Maybe it's my old obsession with PKI and "personal digital infrastructures" that were both promised to us in the early days of the commercial Internet, but never turned concrete for various reasons. IMHO, the best we could have today in terms of digital infrastructure is a personal/family level custom Mastodon node with basic Internet services…

I agree with a lot of that. I think the hard part is, who runs the nodes. If you hand a piece of hardware that people run in their house that's one thing. But if you expect them to run it themselves in the cloud it never goes well unless you have an engineer in the family. Maybe automation can allow the ability to spin up these nodes but ultimately it might be easier to support multitenancy and let a group of people run it e.g like every other saas service. But I guess the difference is the values on which it's founded. Every commercial or VC funded product goes the same way. Whereas stuff like Let's Encrypt has gone in a different direction. I'm not saying I have all the answers but some of these things we always seem to struggle to overcome. One thing I will say, the people who run it matter. Their motivations and their morale flexibility affects direction e.g ChatGPT has led OpenAI in a very different direction than first intended. Why is that?
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