A Personal API • Hacker News Board

Re: A Personal API

#91

Post by anchpop » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 12:54 AM UTC

eximius wrote: post #85

I've thought about this on and off for a long time. Urbit, Solid, Mastodon (anything ActivityPub), SecureScuttleButt, Matrix servers, etc. The biggest problem as I see it is cost. While I might want to have this for $60/year (or own my own hardware for a little more), the vast majority of people (whose adoption you need), don't want to pay for this. There are countless other UX and technical challenges, all interesti…

One of the main devs from SecureScuttleButt is working on something called Unwalled Garden [0] which is very similar to this but decentralized (you can host your site from your home computer and other people can seed it so it's still available when your computer is turned off).

If you have a few friends who will seed your page for you out of the goodness of their hearts, I imagine your site will have pretty good uptime without anyone having to buy a VPS.

[0]: https://unwalled.garden/

Re: A Personal API

#92

Post by oscargrouch » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 1:57 AM UTC

ivoras wrote: post #41

Interesting idea - but it boils down to being a workaround for the lack of persistently connected and pervasively VPN-ed personal devices around us. Yes, we could have a VPS per person being our fixed point on the Internet (and a fixed address...) but wouldn't it be better to return to the original idea of the Internet with devices always connected and routable? It might take an overlay network such as a DHT-like thi…

Im doing "this" using the chrome codebase and using DHT and torrents for content distribution.

The chrome codebase mostly help me for the multi-process IPC communication and reusing the UI compositor for UI and Web.

I wont say much more, because i want to keep some idea of novelty for when i launch this here on HN.

For me is what a mix of what a Browser + App platform should be, with the idea of people owning their data, devs distributing without centralized control, and without forcing you to use some hardware or specific OS.

Re: A Personal API

#93

Post by NetOpWibby » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 7:27 AM UTC

neilalexander wrote: post #86

NetOpWibby wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wouldn't it be better to return to the original idea of the Internet with devices always connected and routable? Yes. However, I'd still like to do something in the meantime. There's no telling how long an overlay network would take to implement and release.

Such overlay networks exist today, albeit in early form, but functional none the less.

Could you list the ones you know? I'm interested in learning more.

Re: A Personal API

#94

Post by NetOpWibby » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 7:28 AM UTC

captainill wrote: post #84

Props to the OP/author for both the article and receptivity to critique regarding UX here in comments.

Thank you! Just added a scroll toggle.

Re: A Personal API

#95

Post by neilalexander » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 7:28 AM UTC

NetOpWibby wrote: post #93

neilalexander wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such overlay networks exist today, albeit in early form, but functional none the less.

Could you list the ones you know? I'm interested in learning more.

Yggdrasil Network, cjdns, libp2p I think for a start.

Re: A Personal API

#96

Post by NetOpWibby » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 7:30 AM UTC

Man, I wish it was possible to sticky comments. Anyhoo, for those of you who had issues with or plain disliked the horizontal scrolling, I've added a site-wide toggle.

I intend to write more and post here so at least for future posts the convo can be on the content.

Re: A Personal API

#97

Post by mstaylorwebb » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 7:47 AM UTC

Great idea!

Re: A Personal API

#98

Post by karlicoss » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 9:41 AM UTC

I've got something like that, using python package as my personal API.

Here are some examples https://beepb00p.xyz/mypkg.html#examples . (the post is in draft stage and a bit rough, I will share it once it's done)

And link to the package: https://github.com/karlicoss/my

Re: A Personal API

#99

Post by lpellis » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 10:01 AM UTC

I started building something like this for my personal site*, the idea was I already had accounts at Github/Instagram etc, why not use that to keep my site up to date? Some of the services (looking at you Instagram) are making it harder to get your data out though, its a bit of a challenge. Hoping to eventually make this available for other people to use.

https://loftie.whoami.dev/activity

Re: A Personal API

#100

Post by fullstop » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 11:14 AM UTC

NetOpWibby wrote: post #63

fullstop wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a laptop without any sort of mouse wheel / scrolling capabilities. It sucks -- pressing space doesn't scroll to the next page. Page up and page down don't work either.

Damn, I didn't think of your use case. I'm on an iMac/MBP and use the Magic Mouse as my primary input device. I should add a button and/or keyboard shortcut to disable the horizontal scrolling.

I don't have a disability but plenty of people do. Not everyone can use a mouse, and that's a fairly important thing to remember in UX design.

Thanks for adding other options for scrolling!