Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An off-grid social network

staltz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 383 posts

Re: An off-grid social network

#341

Post by ghkbrew »

nicky0 wrote: post #336
bigbugbag wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, oh why do we have smart individuals replacing internet with the word for the visual analogy we used to represent the internet to not knowing better people in position of power ? This is not a damn cloud ! This a remote computer you can access over the internet. Can we stop with this use of marketing lingo please ?

Sorry buddy, that ship has already sailed. Terms become popular because they are useful. We all know cloud means "a remote computer accessed over the internet", but that is rather cumbersome phrase. "Cloud" says it in 5 characters. Can you suggest a better term?

As a fan of both linguistic games and playing devil's advocate, how about:

"server"

Re: An off-grid social network

#342

Post by mseebach »

the8472 wrote: post #191
cjbprime wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're being uncharitable in attributing a misunderstanding. The OP used the phrase "in the first place", and it's mostly correct that if you don't have any cached nodes (hence that phrase), the bootstrap nodes do in fact act as a single point of failure for you. The multicast neighbor discovery is a neat idea. I wonder what percentage of clients/connections it results in successful bootstrapping for.

You can ship a client with a long list of "cached" nodes that were verified to be long-lived. I mean you need to obtain the client at some point, you can gather a fresh list of nodes along with it. From that point onward you keep your own cache fresh. You could also run your own bootstrap node on an always-up server if downtimes making the lists stale is a concern. You can also inject contacts when starting the clien…

> You can ship a client with a long list of "cached" nodes that were verified to be long-lived. I mean you need to obtain the client at some point, you can gather a fresh list of nodes along with it. From that point onward you keep your own cache fresh.

There is no semantic difference between the two. The only difference is when you connect to the single-point-of-truth bootstrap, at download time (well, technically build-time) or at first startup time. And the latter probably gives you a more current, and not limited to long-lived nodes, thus better, answer.

> You could also run your own bootstrap node on an always-up server if downtimes making the lists stale is a concern.

Which itself needs to be bootstrapped. And once it is, it's equivalent to your local cache.

Re: An off-grid social network

#343

Post by majewsky »

SolarNet wrote: post #299
chc4 wrote: post #15

This sounds like what I wanted from GNU Social when I first joined over a year ago. GNU Social/Mastodon is a fun idea, but it falls apart when you realise that you still don't own your content and it's functionally impossible to switch nodes like it advertised, along with federation being a giant mess. I tried to switch what server my account was on halfway through my GNU Social life, and you just can't; all your fol…

I mean, my view on the switching nodes thing is. It's not like you can just switch emails. Sure you can install a shim in there to forward everything, but there is no way to actually switch it. And that is the design GNU social uses.

Yeah, and that's also a pain point with email.

Re: An off-grid social network

#344

Post by JetSpiegel »

ICRqVNmDrU8FDi wrote: post #83

This wouldn't scale. If we replaced twitter with this right now, that's: 500 million tweets per day. 140 bytes (140 characters * 8-bit ASCII) per tweet. 140 bytes * 500 million = 70GB Thats 70GB per day before metadata. Use this social network for a month and we've exceeded the 1TB mark, twice. Remember this isn't just 70GB per day on one server, this is 70GB per day on every users PC.

You don't need to store everything uncompressed. Just gz everything and you gain several orders of magnitude.

Re: An off-grid social network

#345

Post by antocv »

jude- wrote: post #243
glasz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to me it always sounds like approaches like dht are the solution but i'm having difficulties diving into it for the purpose of implementing it for my own apps. are there any noteworthy resources for non-academics to get started?

Speaking as an academic who studies distributed systems, my advise is to stay away from anything that relies on a public DHT to work correctly. They're vulnerable to node churn, Sybil attacks, and routing attacks. The last two are particularly devastating. Even if the peers had a key/value whitelist and hashes (e.g. like a .torrent file), an adversary can still insert itself into the routing tables of honest nodes an…

What do you think of S/Kademlia, or the invite-based DHT Persea?

Re: An off-grid social network

#346

Post by gyros »

ghkbrew wrote: post #341
nicky0 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry buddy, that ship has already sailed. Terms become popular because they are useful. We all know cloud means "a remote computer accessed over the internet", but that is rather cumbersome phrase. "Cloud" says it in 5 characters. Can you suggest a better term?

As a fan of both linguistic games and playing devil's advocate, how about: "server"

6 characters, sorry ;-)

Re: An off-grid social network

#347

Post by fiatjaf »

Touche wrote: post #250
fiatjaf wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a point there. "Social content". What is "social content"? Is it people talking about themselves and what they think and showing pictures of themselves? Is that what you do with your best friends? You arrive at their houses and start talking about yourself without being asked?

No, that's not what I (and presumably you and others here) do. We are nerds. We like talking about things that make us think. But yes, for the majority of people, talking about themselves is exactly what they do . They talk about their vacation to the beach. They talk about the drama going on at work. They talk about their sister's date. They don't talk about advances in database design. I was at a live event (a play…

Ok, you're probably right, but I don't want to believe it.

Re: An off-grid social network

#348

Post by ezdiy »

0x445442 wrote: post #63
fiatjaf wrote: post #31

Why 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.

If you want a "modern web" example, nntpchan - despite the name, its not related to usenet directly, only uses the same method of federated pub/sub replication.

Re: An off-grid social network

#350

Post by ionwake »

hh2222 wrote: post #256
neves wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you still access it though Google? They've bought DejaVú!

Yes, you can still access newsgroups through Google, just search for your favorite group, e.g. comp.lang.lisp.

or you could use the site I built that reads HN/reddit/slashdot and any newsgroup you wish on a webpage. Its free if a little buggy - www.sagebump.com

you need the www

Post reply on HN