Hacker News Reader

Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of that specific problem, it would be wise to build upon an existing protocol (e.g. IPFS), because it would help prevent future problems AND it would increase traction of federated content sharing. The more people use a single protocol, the more all applications benefit in latency, speed, availability; but also in future development.

View on HN

It use ActivityPub for the federation part and WebTorrent (which just implement the BitTorrent protocol over websocket if I remember correctly).

It is using already using existing protocol.

WebTorrent uses WebRTC, not WebSocket.

This is the part that I find somewhat unfortunate about Peertube. This means that only ActivityPub clients that support WebRTC will be able to access Peertube media. Right now, I think this basically means just modern web browsers. It bothers me somewhat that an early, potentially major ActivityPub service is going to limit full functionality to the few existing major web browsers. That's the opposite of what I want from a federated protocol. (Someone correct me if I've got any of this wrong.)

Regardless, Peertube seems awesome, and I hope we keep seeing more and more services built on ActivityPub.

ActivityPub defines federation messages server to server and client to server. It is not a protocol per se, and rather a message exchange standard, which could perfectly be used only between servers, as is the case with federation of videos between PeerTube instances, and more recently for video comment feeds, that can interact with the larger fediverse (Hubzilla and Mastodon so far were tested).

In no way it defines how you access media. That is defined by the use of WebRTC, which is supported by a growing number of browsers, and anyway provides a fallback to direct streaming (HTTP), so that any browser can interact.

> and anyway provides a fallback to direct streaming (HTTP), so that any browser can interact.

Ah, that's awesome. That definitely assuages my fears somewhat.

> [ActivityPub] In no way it defines how you access media.

ActivityStreams (which ActivityPub builds on) does define an attachment property for messages [1]. Is this not a standard mechanism for clients to access ActivityPub media (via the attachment's type and url)?

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-attach...

It is, but I don't see how web browsers would need to interact directly with ActivityPub. That's just a way to settle on a json structure everyone will be using in their web application (that acts as AP client), as is the case in Mastodon.

Here with PeerTube the client interface doesn't interact with AP to watch videos or get them. It just requests the list directly to the server.

WebRTC libraries exist outside of browsers. What video-capable software are you hoping to use this with that isn't a browser and isn't able to be wired up to a library?

My concern isn't about any current AP clients; it's that we'd be cutting off a whole dearth of potential future AP clients by making it the general expectation that all viable AP clients support WebRTC, and thus the task of building a client goes from the relatively simple "support json over http" to "support those + WebTorrent/WebRTC", which (despite what you say) isn't trivial (unless the client is in-browser/webview). Even if "just hook up a library" were a viable solution, the requisite increase in complexity/LOC/bugs would be really unfortunate. If this were the case, it seems to me we'd lose a lot of potential future diversity in AP clients.

I'm having trouble finding any complete WebRTC implementations outside of browsers, do you have any examples?

It wisely is building on existing protocols.

This issue (i.e. not building upon an existing protocols such as IPFS or bit torrent tech) is persistent within the alt-net / distributed-net community and means that MANY services have fickle/hacked-together (in the bad way) feel to them. Even stuff like Riot.im (which is built on top of the Matrix protocol) has a sluggish/react-js-overload feel to it.. plus the deep&wide stack makes it incredibly hard to understand/trust the system in a meaningful way.

Also, I believe that part reason for the success of Hacker News and Reddit is largely their extremely simple, non-intrusive and non-animated interfaces - making flashy front-ends for distributed-net apps is a lost cause. Bittorrent took off because the tech was right; not because of a animated web interface that could correctly scale to mobile.

So speaking from the Riot/Matrix perspective, this is a really interesting phenomenon which we are painfully aware of. For context: we built centralised comms apps before creating Matrix. So we have a direct side by side comparison, and reckon it’s about 6x more effort to do the decentralised equivalent. On the UX side, our centralised apps were actually pretty polished and lightweight - sadly they are gone now (hence in part Matrix), but you can get an idea from stuff like https://web.archive.org/web/20170102145839/http://blah.com/.

So, how come decentralised apps can end up with worse UX than their centralised equivalents? My theory is:

* Harder tech means that more resources get focused on the decentralisation bit

* Harder to find UI/UX designers who understand the decentralisation requirements (although this is changing thanks to blockchain hype)

* Decentralised early users tend to be geeky and push the product in a geeky direction

But the key thing is that pre-decentralisation we probably had a 1:3 ratio of backend to frontend work. Then in Matrix it’s like 1:1, and the dilution on the frontend notices.

That said, this can be fixed, and obviously it’s critical to Riot to fix it. We’ve contracted a proper UI/UX designer at last a few weeks ago and are hunting for more frontend devs.

And evidence it can work: a good example of a decentralised project with decent UX is Mastodon.

(just to be clear: I’m responding to the “UX of decentralised apps is crap” bit of the parent post rather than “build on existing protocols”, given peertube and riot and mastodon etc all build on well defined protocols.)

Good to hear that you are dedicating attention to Riot's UI which is currently the only decentralized app I use :). Less often really is better when it comes to UI, case in point: having to admin Google Apps could be great but is in fact a pain due to sluggish JS redrawing plus constantly re-arranged navi-bar(s)/icons/text/etc. causing one to NEVER be properly fast with it which is a pain for anyone working on daily admin tasks for an organisation (me).

Also, thanks for drawing attention to my ignorance when it came to the protocol aspect: can see key players ARE built on proper protocols.

https://d.tube uses ipfs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com