If anyone is looking to get involved I have (unoffically) started a project to write a testsuite against the protocol. Contributions would be appreciated.
Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
101–110 of 229 posts
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#102My 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…
I got four words into that site, found, "protocol," and knew someone was finally doing this right. They have defined the protocol and are working on an implementation. That made it immediately obvious that they were already miles ahead of Diaspora.
Good luck to them!
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#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 software and protocols with open governance models leading to a ratified standard. Tent will be released under an open license in the immediate future."
I am curious as to how retaining copyright will help them prevent fragmentation? Can they not elect themselves as project leaders of the opensource project and prevent fragmentation?
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#104I'm damn excited about this. I've been mulling this concept over in the last couple of years, because I really we need something post-blogs that isn't the walled garden facebook / twitter / G+ / et al model.
For the me the ultimate social network would be just blogs, RSS and a feed reader, with people either managing the blog themselves or using a third party to do it for them-- the point is it doesn't matter.
The problem is that blogging is complicated, anything with multiple options is complicated, and discovery is complicated. I know where to look to find a friend on facebook, I don't know where to look to find his blog.
I don't have time right now (work) to look into Tent in more detail, but it sounds like it's a definite step in the right direction.
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#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.
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"?
> Do you have any suggestion that provides the same features
Message passing.
That's all HTTP really is, but it's dressed up in a bunch of historical complexity and inefficiency centered around supporting web browsers.
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#107We're building something like this for a while at Qbix. It's not an easy problem to solve when it comes to privacy and security: http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20120110469#b Eventually to arrive at this: http://myownstream.com
Looks ambitious in liberating the user and their data, but it seems you've taken too long and have stumbled upon substantive problems on your own. The screenshot of the platform seems old fashioned, but eventually by liberating the user/data, you are making them stand on their own island, hence there will be no "networking" or connections in the true sense, as it is currently happening on a single platform like Facebook or Twitter. By attempting to set the data and user free in such manner and by eliminating the single and cohesive platform, we risk excluding ourselves out.
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd argue that -- for native client authors -- HTTP and REST are actually larger barriers than a simple non-HTTP protocol. I also don't understand the concern over "inventing" a new binary protocol. It's not like it's any more complicated or difficult than "inventing" a non-binary protocol. The framing rules just don't use ASCII/UTF-8 field delimiters. There are plenty of existing encodings to use, no more difficult…
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.
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No, I just have worse things to say about CORBA and the notion of distributed objects in general.
Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web
#110This 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…
[deleted]