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An off-grid social network

staltz.com

51–60 of 383 posts

Re: An off-grid social network

#51
post #33

I'd like to see all my friends post updates and photos to blogs where I can subscribe via rss. This would be the best social network for me.

What blogging system? Who provides the infrastructure? Getting back to pull/subscriptions via RSS would make me happy to, but this doesn't solve the problem of who's platform are we all sharecroppers on.

Re: An off-grid social network

#52
This excites me. I'm probably naive, but I always imagine that one day I'll retire and spend my days trying to work on an open source mesh network (or something similar). I want future generations to live in a world where 'the internet' isn't a thing that authorities can grant/deny. A headless social network is a promising omen of a headless internet.

Re: An off-grid social network

#53
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?

presenting social content in a different format would be interesting, but I've not seen any compelling options. But the issues of looking for approval and social status are social issues - not sure how a social network tool could avoid that. Isn't that what a lot of people's casual relationships are like? What do most people do at parties and social events in person - they talk about themselves and each other...

Re: An off-grid social network

#56
post #30

I think that SPKI's name certs would be a good next step for this, so people could associate human-readable petnames with keys. C.f. http://theworld.com/~cme/spki.txt and RFCs 2692 & 2693.

Currently, a user can simply post an `about` message in the stream. Clients will then automatically use this name instead of the key.

Re: An off-grid social network

#57
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that is what they were talking about when I was following the project. Once that is done in patchwork, I might try using it again.

It will be a must once mobile is launched, which I'm working on.

Is it also possible to use multiple devices without leaking from which device each message was posted?

Re: An off-grid social network

#58
post #39

Earlier 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.

A Raspberry Pi is very low-powered though, it's completely insignificant compared to the power used by the webservices you use daily.

Re: An off-grid social network

#60
post #25

The storage requirements are tremendous, though, right? If I want to have access to everything that's been shared with me, I have to store it all. In the case of images, the storage burden can get large quickly.

There are basically two types of storage. Logs and blobs. Logs were described in the blog post, but blobs weren't. Blobs are mostly images that type of stuff, and are stored in leveldb. It can easily get to 1Gb or more. The trick is that blobs aren't sigchained, so they could be garbage collected, and that is something that we're working on. Logs can't be garbage collected, but they grow slower than blobs do, and are usually around 100 Mb or less.
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