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Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

tent.io

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Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#51
post #35

"Tent servers can also be run as Tor hidden services to create a social darknet for at-risk organizers and activists."

So can anything, but it's awesome that they are promoting this. Speaking of which, does anyone know if there's a hidden service Twitter clone? This would be fun.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse are pictures and videos. Rather than including a URL to it, the 'push' includes the base64 encoded binary data. Hmm.

Posts have different "views" one of which is meta which would just have a URL pointing to the photo instead of including it in the post. See: http://tent.io/docs/post-types

Good, I was going to say, after evaluating PuSH I would have assumed that some things can be heavy pushes and other things can be light pushes.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#53

Random thought: it might be helpful to give Tent-the-protocol a different name than Tent-the-server-implementation. In other words, "Tent" means either the protocol you're specifying, or the server software you're planning on releasing, but not both. An analogue would be the naming distinction between HTTP, the protocol, and httpd, the first Web server ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_httpd ). That naming split ma…

Kind of a usability-meets-marketing problem. The good thing is that the word "tent" is a versatile one – maybe the server could become "Tentpole" or something along those lines.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#54
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We anticipate follower counts similar to the levels seen on Twitter today. Managing 1 few hundred followers isn't too difficult, thousands can be managed by cranking up the dynos on heroku. But yeah, Justin Bieber is going to need a hosted solution to handle that kind of load (like he has now with Twitter, YouTube, etc). We also have a setting in subscriber settings that control which types of posts are pushed in the…

What about allow a publisher to delegate a subscription endpoint via something like pubsubhubub? Then publisher just has to push to the aggregator, everybody does their pulls from them.

That only moves the load problem, doesn't solve it - given a decentralised system you're likely to be responsible for load on the aggregator server as well.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#55

Random thought: it might be helpful to give Tent-the-protocol a different name than Tent-the-server-implementation. In other words, "Tent" means either the protocol you're specifying, or the server software you're planning on releasing, but not both. An analogue would be the naming distinction between HTTP, the protocol, and httpd, the first Web server ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_httpd ). That naming split ma…

Definitely-- The first "Tent server implementation" will have it's own name, TBD. We spent a lot of time on nomenclature and still aren't 100% with any of the terms, they're effectively all in flux until v1.0. The wackier issue is whether users call their "Tent-servers" "Tents". If you have any suggestions on names for this or any other terms, we'd love to hear them!

edit: when the hosted version launches it will be on a different domain, to make clear tent.io is the protocol alone and we aren't monopolizing the hosting space (we're doing it more as a community service than as a business).

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#57

Random thought: it might be helpful to give Tent-the-protocol a different name than Tent-the-server-implementation. In other words, "Tent" means either the protocol you're specifying, or the server software you're planning on releasing, but not both. An analogue would be the naming distinction between HTTP, the protocol, and httpd, the first Web server ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_httpd ). That naming split ma…

I honestly kind of like "tentd" as a server name.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#58
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the API docs, it seems that every user needs their own URI to be uniquely identified. I wonder how this will work with the average user, just IP address? What about users with shared internet?

You're correct-- we anticipate users either registering their own domains (i.e. http://danielsiders.com ) or using a hosted service that provides subdomains ( http://danielsiders.tent.io ). If you're hosting at home (dream solution here is plug computers), then dynamic DNS pointing to your home IP/computer.

PageKite (pagekite.net) is another solution for self-hosted from a household. plug

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#59

This looks really neat. How are you going to get people to start using it? Anything more active than hoping that an app/user ecosystem develops?

We are starting with an easy-to-use hosted service that will launch in a few weeks. We are catering to the development community by offering a simple, standardized API that will be easy to use. Privacy is a first-class feature, and Tent is specifically designed to be usable by high-risk activists[1] and people in countries that block other social networks. [1] http://liberationtech.tumblr.com/post/13377461578/how-the…

I don't mean this in a cruel way (I'd really like this to succeed), but that's a list of features, not a plan for getting adoption.

Figuring out how to bootstrap network effects is critical.

Re: Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

#60
Thanks guys. Not a moment too soon. Humbly quoting the motivation:

> What is wrong with other social services? Centralized Social Service Providers limit what you can share and who you can share with. They only allow users to interact with other users on the same network. Because their products are centralized and maintained by a company, users are left in the cold when the company changes its products or shuts down. There's nothing wrong with a company offering users social services. But users shouldn't be limited by those companies. Imagine if you could only email other customers of your Internet Service Provider. Unfortunately Centralized Social Service Providers have done just that. You can only communicate directly with other users of their closed network.

> If you don't like a bank you can withdraw your money and deposit it somewhere else, including your own home. You could even start a new bank where you and your friends felt safe. You can still pay your bills and maintain your financial relationships, just tell them about your new account. We aren't talking about money. Your data is far more valuable– your family and friends' photos, locations, and private communications. You should be able to store them somewhere you trust, move them when you want, control who can and can't see them.

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