Hacker News Reader

Comment by zimbatm | Hacker News Reader

> Movim is easy to deploy

> Movim is lightweight (only a few megabytes) and can be deployed on any server. We are providing a Docker image, a Debian package or a simple installation tutorial if you want to deploy it yourself.

I imagine a typical Tumblr user landing on this page and not getting a single word of the "easy to deploy" section. A lot of these distributed project suffer from this unfortunately. Developers not understanding what a typical user would look like.

Unless the user can click a button, enter a credit card and get an instance they are not going to use that service. And it has to look nice.

View on HN

One of the biggest misconceptions I had about the federated/decentralized web getting into it a decade ago was this customer v. service provider model we're so used to everywhere else. These free[0], decentralized services rarely prioritize building a big user base. Their goal is to liberate the web, most often for their own use, and so the approach is generally "do-ocratic": something bugs you, you fix it, or you wait for someone else to come by and try. The beauty of this approach is it weeds out the impatient, "I want this now, do it for me" types, leading to more intelligent, polite interactions on the service.

[0] Both as in free beer and as in freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre#%22Free_be...

So only programmers can be "intelligent, polite" users, in your view?
Of course you have to "do it for" the user. That's why you are the programmer and they are the user. If you're making something half-finished for other programmers to contribute to, that's very different from making a social network.

There are good people outside programming, lol. For example: me. I couldn't code if my life depended on it but I sure as heck contribute in other ways.[0] I get the gripe with unpolished projects though. Still, this comment continues the "they build it for us" trend that is quickly disappearing in the decentralized space (in my circles at least). More and more "noncoders" are "coding" and "nonhackers" "hacking" to customize their experience online : )
*[0] See the bit about "fanatics": https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

>So only programmers can be "intelligent, polite" users, in your view?
You are making an incorrect leap in logic. The commenter certainly didn't say that. Their statement is that ONLY patient people will get through a more technically challenging process. That is not the same as saying ALL patient people will get through the process which would be necessary for your conclusion.

Don't get me wrong, I am very much in that camp too and spend a lot of my time contributing to F/OSS projects. Having the freedom to tweak, debug and improve software is awesome.
My main objection here is that there are a lot of intelligent and polite people that are not developers and being left out in the cold. We need another option where users can rent out a server (from a multitude of providers) and install webapps as easily as installing phone apps. We are slowly getting there with Docker images but it's still very technical to do so.
EDIT: there is also https://sandstorm.io/ that tries to tackle this problem but isn't very popular yet

Hey, good for you, thank you for your work : ). Agreed on that point. And it's happening! I remember WordPress in the early days (yikes) and now my senior-citizen father is running his own blog without a hitch. Myself I first got into the decentralized space via Diaspora and the UI/UX development that project has seen over the last few years is just astounding.
EDIT: I'm so excited about these projects I started making a "decentralized social network scorecard": https://gitlab.com/qqn/dctrl (still in its very early stages, but constructive tips and -- even better -- collaboration always welcome!)

I'm not sure if the time for this is now but it certainly feels closer to "now" than ever before. The recent corporate censorship I believe has ignited a lot of interest in various segments of the "non-hacker" world. I think to harness this interest there needs to be a relatively user-friendly product that solves their problems.

There is also cloudron similar to sandstorm

"Liberating" the web doesn't seem that liberating when you need to know how to code in order to use it. Don't you know that 99.9% of the people in the world have no idea how to use these federated things?

The decentralised web is going to live and die by UX, and by the way it's looking so far, it's gonna be mostly the latter.
This is a thing with most P2P app makers for some reason — they have a vastly skewed understanding of what a normal user is capable of doing. It's safe to say if your instructions include compiling things, your target audience is not the general public.
Heck, I have a P2P app, too (though not a Tumblr replacement: https://getaether.net), and I worry about having to download an app is too much of a barrier. Which it probably is, compared to what centralised alternatives offer.

Maybe an interim step would be to get these things into softalicious, fantistico (if it's still a thing), and similar auto installers that ship with basic cpanel / plesk hosting backends.
I believe, and have used the auto installers many times with many different hosts to depoly a quick wordpress install.
It's easy to make a few step tutorial to show how to install / launch when using those tools.
Could be simple to set some sane defaults as well, like auto update daily, auto backup weekly.
Handing over the UX to an auto installer makes the ux easier in some ways, and could also get the necessary scripts, dependencies, DB setups, permissions and more auto handled by the other with experience,
and get the package pre-distributed onto thousands of shared hosting environments for easier discovery as well.

I think there already exists modern versions of those things, where you install a main 'thing' and that thing installs other things for you easily. But installing that first thing is usually the tough part.

To be more clear, I am saying that it may be beneficial for some / more of these p2p open source federated decentralized projects to become added into the auto installers that are already out there and installed on thousands of hosting accounts, and will likely be installed automatically on thousands more.
I'm not sure what is involved in getting softalicious to add your package into the mix, surely (hopefully) it's not too much work.
This way you can point basic web surfers to a list of hosting companies that auto deploy softalicious or whatever other auto installers in the backend automatically.
I'm pretty sure at least a dozen of the last 15 hosting accounts I setup came with at least one auto installer sometimes 2 or three. Almost all of the shared and vps hosting options that come with cpanel or plesk have had softalicious one click away in the main dashboard, with options to install scores of software packages.
I missed this functionality when I tried out DO and vultr. 2 out of 4 of the dedicated servers I paid for had softalicious installed, one offered it as a monthly cost add on, the fourth one said it's up to me to add on packages like that.
So most of the hosting I have done, and the kind of hosting that I recommend for most small clients, already comes with auto-installers setup.
So the tutorial for most poeple would be, if you are hosting with one these 100 web hosts and have a plan that includes softalicious, click the auto-install, scroll down to movim, briar, nextcloud, etc. Click install.
It will run it's magic and give you a web address to login and you are good to go.
This is one of the fastest ways to install a wordpress that auto backs up and updates.
(I know there are many horror stories about issues with wordpress having issues with autoinstallers doing code updates and not doing it the way a manual update may do things, but those are mostly long ago, and if there are a few backups already, then it's better for most people to get updates pushed compared to other alternatives in my experience).
So, most shared hosting setups our there have already installed the 'a main "thing"' - if your federated package is available via that thing, it's a couple clicks away.

This breaks a lot of things like being able to do auto updates, which is critical for security patches. The first version you install to Softalicious (or whatever else) better be good because you'll be living with that version on your network for a long time.
In my specific case, my app actually isn't federated, it's truly peer to peer — I don't have this problem at all. It doesn't require any servers, just install it to your computer like you'd install a regular app, and it'll work its magic.
It's basically Usenet, but your local computer (and everyone else's) is a server, and they patch their content graph from each other as it updates.

How is this platform called? I am very interested in something like this and even thought of making it, a number of times.

Aether - https://getaether.net

No doubt it could break things, and I am sure that some of the less popular packages installed via softalicious and the like may have that kindof problem - however I think that has been solved, and a while ago.
When you install wordpress via softalicious these days (maybe not this way some years ago) - but with most installs there are backend options within the softalicious isntaller you can check off like "auto update wordpress core, other checkboxes to auto update plugins" - auto backup weekly, monthly, etc.
Wordpress also has options within it's backend that allow you to manually update core or plugins and themes, all seperately, grouped, or at regular intervals with plugins or other settings - so updating things is an option even if the auto-installer won't do it for you.
There was a time some years ago when the WP people said auti-instllers srewed up updates and there were some real issues (like file permissions wrong) - but I have not seen any of those kinds of issues in years.
I like the way your app sounds - especially if it can run on phones and tablets in a similar way. I hope things like this become easier to add to routers.
The more easier to install things the better, so long as security patches are default easy too.

I consider what you are describing to be the fundamental difference between federated and peer-to-peer software.
Email is federated. It was designed to accommodate many hosting providers, all of which could interoperate and communicate. But it really isn't expected that every user will run their own server. The same goes for HTTP/HTML.
Gnutella and TOX are P2P. They were designed such that every client is a server, and there are typically no centralized servers apart from the clients.
There is value in both types of systems.

This is a choice that we made to show more the feature that Movim is providing as a user on the official website and let the information regarding the deployment available in our technical documentation.
Movim is a free software project developed by benevolent, we are focusing on packages and way to deploy it easily more than trying to invest time into building server architectures. Building a SaaS platform could be done with a partner (and I'd personally be glad to work on something like that) for example but it's not the goal of the project by itself.
The past few months were focused on cleaning up the PHP dependencies, porting Movim on SQLite (next to MySQL and PostgreSQL) and adapting the project to prepare a nice package for the upcoming Debian stable.

I was on your side for a minute and then I googled you. This is what I see when I google Movim:
Movim – Responsive web-based cross-platform XMPP client
That's your end user messaging?
I'm now more in GP's camp of "Developers not understanding what a typical user would look like."
Also your homepage is confusing: https://movim.eu/ I'm a developer, I read the article, and your homepage really contradicts my expectation that you provide Tumblr-like functionality.

I'm a bit confused since the "Install Movim" page says
Stable version
The Movim source code is not available in a packaged version for now, please follow the next paragraph.

The documentation has just been updated, thanks for the feedback.

I'm a fairly experienced sysadmin/dev and seeing this on their Docker image instructions means I likely won't bother if I have to set things up distinct from their Docker (hint: I'm looking at your Docker instructions because I want a nice simple self-contained build):
> Running this docker-compose file will build a stack comprising an nginx container, a PHP container (where Movim itself resides) and a PostgreSQL container. This setup assumes that you already have an XMPP server such as ejabberd or Prosody running somewhere else.

Because every webmail solution comes bundled with imap and smtp right.
Even then, you would still need to setup DNS (and potentially certificates if not LE).

A fair point; I partially retract my objections.

One of the things that Facebook and Twitter have going for them is that they're already in the cloud.
One way we could make this work is to have some sort of simple protocol with oauth support so that someone can just spin up a container with one click.
This way you could have DNS setup and the container running within just a few minutes.
The only UI that the typical person needs to understand is the credit card and browser URL or else it's not going to take over the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com