Hmm, the "legacy" interface to patchwork seems much nicer to me:
https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/applications.html#patchwork-class...
Curious what motivated the shift.
An off-grid social network
141–150 of 383 posts
Re: An off-grid social network
#142Why do all "social networks" have to be a feed of news? Couldn't anyone think of anything better than a system in which people are only encouraged to talk about themselves and try to get other people's approval? In which having more "friends" is always better, because you have more potential for self-agrandissement in your narcissistic posts?
That's your dystopian description of the current state of social networks and not the reality.
Re: An off-grid social network
#143So it seems there are two ways to exchange information: 1) be on the same wifi (presumably great for dissidents in countries with heavy-handed internet control, and inconvenient for everyone else) 2) use "pubs", which can be run on any server, and connected to ¿through the internet? So most users would use pubs, which are described as "totally dispensable" (a nice property). But how can users exchange information abo…
It depends if you want to use it like Twitter (public announcements) or like Facebook (closed small/medium circles). If you use like Facebook, then it's enough that one person among your circle of friends (probably the most tech-savvy one) would host a pub and use that for their friends. You can see how you would probably be connected to a few pubs, because you usually have different circles of friends. If you want to use it like Twitter, then indeed we might need a DHT, but the point there was the resilience of the network.
Re: An off-grid social network
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about this: you buy a physical device at Wal-Mart for $29.99, plug it in, hook it up to your wifi and leave it plugged into an outlet. It's got Mastodon or GNU Social on it and could look like this, but branded: http://thegadgetflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SmartPlu...
Then I have yet another device permanently plugged in and running, at a time where I and frankly all of us should try to reduce our energy consumption.
It's always going to be running somewhere.
Re: An off-grid social network
#145So it seems there are two ways to exchange information: 1) be on the same wifi (presumably great for dissidents in countries with heavy-handed internet control, and inconvenient for everyone else) 2) use "pubs", which can be run on any server, and connected to ¿through the internet? So most users would use pubs, which are described as "totally dispensable" (a nice property). But how can users exchange information abo…
There is indeed a list of pubs https://github.com/ssbc/scuttlebot/wiki/Pub-servers
Re: An off-grid social network
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the distributed identity piece is there a good reason not to rely on keybase.io? Also important that an initial smaller community would be targeted and that it would succeed there. FB did this will colleges, a federated one would in a world where FB already exists would have an even harder time.
> distributed identity piece is there a good reason not to rely on keybase.io Depends on your definition of "distributed", I suppose
My impression was that keybase is distributed? Can it be used without talking to keybase's servers?
Re: An off-grid social network
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, yes and no. The log will show a different id (public key) which authored the message. But the device itself (iPhone or Google Nexus or whatever) doesn't need to be mentioned.
That could leak information a user doesn't want to be leaked, like at which hours he is at work (using the work computer) etc. Which id belongs to which device could probably be inferred when the service is used actively. I understand that transparency might not be a design goal or techinically possible, I'm just raising the concern. Can't I just share my private key across multiple devices?
Nothing stops you from copy-pasting your asymmetric keys (it's a file) to different devices. I bet it's feasible, the biggest issue is also making sure your log stays the same, because a log shouldn't get forked.
Re: An off-grid social network
#148Wouldn't the size of diaries grow big - GBs and TBs over period of time and make it slow?
Yes, but not GBs. There are logs (diaries) and blobs. Images are stored in blobs and can be garbage collected.
Re: An off-grid social network
#149Why do all "social networks" have to be a feed of news? Couldn't anyone think of anything better than a system in which people are only encouraged to talk about themselves and try to get other people's approval? In which having more "friends" is always better, because you have more potential for self-agrandissement in your narcissistic posts?
The did, it was called Usenet and it was glorious.
$$$ MAKE MONEY FAST $$$
What I mean to say is, Usenet's social model hardly prevented it from drowning in a sea of low-value content.
Re: An off-grid social network
#150As a historical note, there used to be quite a few very popular solutions for supporting early social networks over intermittent protocols.
UUCP [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP] used the computers' modems to dial out to other computers, establishing temporary, point-to-point links between them. Each system in a UUCP network has a list of neighbor systems, with phone numbers, login names and passwords, etc.
FidoNet [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet] was a very popular alternative to internet in Russia as late as 1990s. It used temporary modem connections to exchange private (email) and public (forum) messages between the BBSes in the network.
In Russia, there was a somewhat eccentric, very outspoken enthusiast of upgrading FidoNet to use web protocols and capabilities. Apparently, he's still active in developing "Fido 2.0": https://github.com/Mithgol