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The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

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Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#61

Post by DANmode »

machrider wrote: post #26

One thing I've worried about with self-hosting small (or smol) services is that I'm responsible for securing them against attackers. Even if my circle is 15 people using a particular service, potentially thousands of malicious actors will be poking at it over the months and years I'm running it. I'm a big fan of self-hosting, especially things that I can run inside my home with no internet-facing ports. But anything…

If (all of) your users are worried about it, or can be convinced to, it's not difficult to put great measures in place today.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#63

Post by asim »

em-bee wrote: post #52
asim wrote: post #5

I like this. Speaks to my own goal of creating "micro" communities. https://micro.mu . We limit groups to 20 people. I think that's an ideal number for real connections. Need more, it's likely for a different type of communication.

20 seems a bit low. what happens if i want to invite 21 people? many groups have a few active people and many less active people. one group i am in has about 80 members, 10-20 or which are active and keep a steady stream of communication. if the group were to grow much beyond that, it would be to much. so you are right that 20 active people is a good group size but if there is a technical limit of 20 that means i hav…

The 20 limit was really based on personal experience in the sense that those are 20 really high fidelity connections with people you know and interact with in a way that's more powerful than the network of 100 interrelated people. So if I have a close friend group of less than 20, in fact more like 12-15, I know that's going to be a tight knit group. Whereas if I open that up to 100, it might be more generically based around some interest like "tech dads" with passive conversation but mostly dominated by the vocal minority. Maybe there's a place for that but I'd be interested to learn and see the limits myself before opening it up. Or just charge for that 100 member group.

I know in a community setting you have more passive members than not. I just don't know if I want to start out enabling that before having really solid admin and moderation tools.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#64

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

kensanata wrote: post #30
machrider wrote: post #26

One thing I've worried about with self-hosting small (or smol) services is that I'm responsible for securing them against attackers. Even if my circle is 15 people using a particular service, potentially thousands of malicious actors will be poking at it over the months and years I'm running it. I'm a big fan of self-hosting, especially things that I can run inside my home with no internet-facing ports. But anything…

As the "Administration" tag for my blog will attest, the sysadmin side does take a lot of work. Every now and then something is down, something needs defending (like the current HN users all clicking on the site which is running without any caches…), and on and on. In my experience, it's not so much cybercriminals that keep me busy but bad programmers that write spiders that treat every website in the world like corp…

In the past I ended up in a place where I self-hosted virtually everything I consumed within my network that could be self-hosted. Right down to major OS software update caching.

It’s definitely exhausting and I hit upon a point where it felt like I couldn’t distinguish between home and business infrastructure. I expanded to include family stuff, and that became a massive headache. When you do that, it’s not always easy to extricate yourself either. It took several years to downsize so my services were only consumed by me again. Then a few more to fully move to non-self-hosted almost-everything.

I used to host my mail but that eventually becomes a headache. It didn’t become an admin headache, but overtime it became either/or (depending on the time) a technical liability or a security concern.

These days I try to buy/pay for the services I consume instead of self-hosting. However I’ve been moving back to assuming a “self hosting first” mindset because it seems like so many tech companies are actively trying to alienate their user base lately.

Tailscale does make sharing services amongst groups of technically minded friends _crazy_ simple.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#65

Post by marginalia_nu »

bombcar wrote: post #56
marginalia_nu wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what ruins communities is large sustained growth and not size. Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days. What kills most mainstream social media is needing to show growth to investors. This turns them from a village with familiar faces into a tra…

It's assimilation speed and has been seen time and time again in various contexts. If I take my American family and move to Australia, we will become Australian over time. If I take my family and the entire city I live in to Australia, there will be an American city in Australia. Eternal September is just when the influx overwhelmed the "carrying capacity" of Usenet, and anyone who has been on any forum for a length…

It probably boils down to mathematics. If your average interaction is with someone you've never met before, it's very difficult for persistent relations to form.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#66

Post by Solvency »

asim wrote: post #5

I like this. Speaks to my own goal of creating "micro" communities. https://micro.mu . We limit groups to 20 people. I think that's an ideal number for real connections. Need more, it's likely for a different type of communication.

The big bubbly space-inefficient chatroom UI you're using seems so irrelevant/obsolete here. It already makes me stressed out, thinking of dealing with an SMS group on my iPhone of 20 people. It'd be the worst possible user experience to engage with a meaningful community in a meaningful way over time.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#67

Post by asim »

vitehozonage wrote: post #58
asim wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no end to end encryption right now but it's interesting the thought immediately goes there. This is not a replacement for signal, WhatsApp, etc. It's more like an advancement on forums or replacement for Facebook groups that takes things private in the sense that it's invite only and no one outside your group can talk to you. The recent community chats product from Facebook has also foregone end to end encryp…

Difficult to have "real connections" in a small, intimate group if you know you're being watched. Putting a 1984 telescreen in the room has a chilling effect. Without E2EE that's what you are building. Small, encrypted groups with people you know makes sense (like Signal). Large, unencrypted, open groups make sense (like reddit, facebook groups). I don't understand how you're trying to make something with parts of ea…

Do you believe slack messages are private? Or DMs on twitter? How about the content you store on Notion or Google docs. I guess what I'm saying is there's a lot of places where it doesn't matter as long as your data is stored securely and privately in a way that no one can access it and the operators are not mistreating it. At the end of the day we still need a way to ensure certain terrible content never exists on the platform which is illegal but we're also doing this because we're not happy with the state of corporate run systems at the moment. I think there's the potential for a "community interest" platform where we actually trust the people who run it and they're totally aligned in doing it for the public good. I'm still figuring out how to convey that message more broadly to people.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#68

Post by OkayPhysicist »

bombcar wrote: post #56
marginalia_nu wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what ruins communities is large sustained growth and not size. Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days. What kills most mainstream social media is needing to show growth to investors. This turns them from a village with familiar faces into a tra…

It's assimilation speed and has been seen time and time again in various contexts. If I take my American family and move to Australia, we will become Australian over time. If I take my family and the entire city I live in to Australia, there will be an American city in Australia. Eternal September is just when the influx overwhelmed the "carrying capacity" of Usenet, and anyone who has been on any forum for a length…

Assimilation speed versus rate of joining versus rate of people leaving all need to be kept in balance to have a long running, tight-knit community. An interesting example is university clubs: they have the intrinsic property that people's tenure in the club is very finite, typically a maximum of 4 years. Despite this constant turnover of membership, clubs tend to maintain a relatively constant culture. I posit that the main driver behind this is deliberate accelerated assimilation.

Right out of the gates, you have selection bias in who wants to be in your club: probably people who share many of the same interests as the club. Then you have further selection pressure with inviting new membership: existing members are more likely to accept into the organization prospective members who are similar to themselves, or at least, an idealized version. Then, you have rituals, ranging from hazing to positive Big/Little type interactions, which proactively push new members to assimilate into the club.

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#69

Post by samsquire »

I enjoyed the point (paraphrased) "that just because it doesn't scale, doesn't mean it won't work". People (can) enjoy exquisite gourmet restaurant meal, an all you can eat inclusive holiday package or coffee in a coffee shop but it probably doesn't scale.

We don't actually need complicated software or web application to run a community. Webrings were a way of navigating a very small web in the nascent days of the world wide web. People would link to eachother.

I think invite based communities can be high quality without moderation. dang does a lot of work to moderate this community. If you curate everything you read, then you can ignore stuff you don't like.

So I have a solution that is low tech too and doesn't require any protocols than what you're already using. Doesn't require your own web host or custom software, you can just use browser and you already know the website.

I use an ultra low tech solution to sharing things I want to share. It costs me nothing, it doesn't require an elaborate technical stack that requires me to remember arcane commands, maintain it or upgrade it or run a server. It doesn't require moderation or spam filtering or hosting.

I just use GitHub README.md as my blog and journals. Please do this too, then tell me about it. I would love to read other people's technical thoughts. So please do the same! I have 5 journal repositories on GitHub each with 100-800 entries on each of them because I'm interested in writing down my thoughts.

I have a number of repositories on GitHub for different purposes:

* blog: where my blog is hosted

* ideas ideas2 ideas3 ideas4 ideas5: my idea journals. I write computer related thoughts into this every day until I get to 100-800 and then create a new repository.

* wants: some things that I want to exist

* personal-manifesto: my own code of conduct

Re: The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends

#70

Post by vitehozonage »

asim wrote: post #67
vitehozonage wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difficult to have "real connections" in a small, intimate group if you know you're being watched. Putting a 1984 telescreen in the room has a chilling effect. Without E2EE that's what you are building. Small, encrypted groups with people you know makes sense (like Signal). Large, unencrypted, open groups make sense (like reddit, facebook groups). I don't understand how you're trying to make something with parts of ea…

Do you believe slack messages are private? Or DMs on twitter? How about the content you store on Notion or Google docs. I guess what I'm saying is there's a lot of places where it doesn't matter as long as your data is stored securely and privately in a way that no one can access it and the operators are not mistreating it. At the end of the day we still need a way to ensure certain terrible content never exists on t…

>Do you believe slack messages are private? Or DMs on twitter? How about the content you store on Notion or Google docs.

No, so I would never choose to use them for communications with my intimate small groups, and nobody should.

>securely and privately

You cannot do that without E2EE. There are hacks constantly, if you have any security awareness.

>At the end of the day we still need a way to ensure certain terrible content never exists on the platform which is illegal

E2EE is not illegal and in reasonable jurisdictions you can simply have a report function so users can report something if they see it in their groups.

>totally aligned in doing it for the public good

Given your posture on E2EE, you seem to have a completely different alignment than me and I would expect most hackers who tend to see the issues with mass surveillance and how difficult it is to make a secure platform. You seem to be intent on wanting people to just trust that you'll never sell the business and all the communication history, for confusing reasons

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