Another approach to a new distributed social network:
It turns out that git has practically everything that's needed to act both as storage and protocol for a social network. Not only that, but it's very well-known within and used, deployed and maintained in the circles I navigate, it scales very well (see github), it's used for critical infrastructure (see kernel.org), it provides history, it's distributed by nature, etc. It's got almost everything, but not quite everything needed.
Via https://lwn.net/Articles/780365/
https://www.karimyaghmour.com/blog/2019/02/gitgeist-a-git-based-social-network-proof-of-concept.html
It turns out that git has practically everything that's needed to act both as storage and protocol for a social network. Not only that, but it's very well-known within and used, deployed and maintained in the circles I navigate, it scales very well (see github), it's used for critical infrastructure (see kernel.org), it provides history, it's distributed by nature, etc. It's got almost everything, but not quite everything needed.
Via https://lwn.net/Articles/780365/
https://www.karimyaghmour.com/blog/2019/02/gitgeist-a-git-based-social-network-proof-of-concept.html
Interesting. Seems a bit complicated for the less technically inclined.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's a proof of concept. Github and Gitlab show that you can easily make that sort of thing available to the less technically inclined. At the end of the day all social networks that are federated will need people who are willing to host instances.
ReplyDeleteAndrew Pam Github and gitlab seem pretty technically inclined to me (I'm pretty technically inclined, myself.)
ReplyDeleteThat depends what you're using them for. People who just interact with the issue management, for example, don't seem to find it that complicated. So it's a question of having a suitable UI for different kinds of user - which I notice Hubzilla is also attempting. Gitgeist doesn't have much of a UI yet, but I'm sure it can be developed further.
ReplyDeleteIt's nice but not very privacy, i try to enter a fake email on github and it knew it was fake.
ReplyDeleteWould scale badly.
ReplyDeleteThey did make a library collection for one programming language over this idea, and Githab had to threaten them with ban, cause they overloaded their servers.
And those were not all the Earth population but only programmers and only in one pf programming languages
Bigattck Firecat also notice that by definition you can not delete anything from DVCS after it was published, only delete the whole repository.
ReplyDeleteArioch The Gitgeist would only scale badly if run centralised, like Github. I was only mentioning Github as an example of a (somewhat) user-friendly UI for git; Gitgeist is not intended to have all instances running on a single centralised server.
ReplyDeleteArioch The You most certainly can delete from a DVCS. You can rewrite the history and do a "force-push", though other people who have cloned the repository may still have copies of the deleted content if they pulled prior to the deletion. The same is true even if you delete the whole repository - any distributed system has that property.
ReplyDeleteAndrew Pam force-push moves pointers, "tags" to point at different hash, it does not mean old hash ceases to exist. There are even git howto-s about setting HEAD and other pointers onto arbitrary hash.
ReplyDeleteNo, it would always scale badly. Just you mean to avoid scaling, to only make it one-user hosting platform. Why not SVN then? Apart of git, SVN has native integration with HTTP servers, that was one of their design points.
Probably best if you take it up with the author of Gitgeist. I only posted it here because I thought people might be interested.
ReplyDeleteAndrew Pam It is interesting. Thx for posting.
ReplyDeleteI am a bit busy. I am working on a project to move Linux hosting and development into Wordpress. Guees it can replace that awkward git, why not. Linux developement should be as easy and accessible as posting cat photo.
ReplyDeleteAlso, if a very idea of marrying DVCS with blog look something thrilling, then there already is SQLite, whose DVCS was from ground designed to be web-hosting platform.
ReplyDeletewww.fossil-scm.org/
What Gitgeist adds is the "social" aspect, the ability for people to follow each other. Feel free to take that and add it to fossil-scm or any other project.
ReplyDeleteNice. But would people um... commit to it?
ReplyDelete"We don't generally like the idea of actually pushing to others' git repos directly but it was just easy to implement."
ReplyDeleteOh, great, so just to put the comment i have to pull(download) all the repository/blob first. Great idea.
....or would it be "shallow copy" ? But that was exactly why CocoaPods got restricted on github.
I'm a huge fan of this notion.
ReplyDeleteGarry Knight Plenty of blame to go around if they don't.
ReplyDeleteThis is very interesting to me.
ReplyDeleteGarry Knight Is there a joke in there somewhere?
ReplyDeleteThom Thomas I'll only answer that if pushed.
ReplyDeleteGarry Knight Or if someone pulls ... your finger?
ReplyDeleteRight, let's stash the git puns for now, shall we?
ReplyDeleteGarry Knight lol ;)
ReplyDeleteyeah, I'm not digging this #branch of the discussion.
ReplyDelete(see what I did there? hash? tag?)