The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends
communitywiki.org
communitywiki.org
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 train station where everyone is always passing through and there are no shared values or experiences.
I did the VC funded thing and personally don't want to go back to it. I also don't really care about the high growth thing but being sustainable is important. Sustained growth and profitability at least means the thing can be around for a while. I also think it comes down to the values of the creators of any platform. At what point are they going to sell out and why. That really irks me now. Like everything is in the service of wealth creation as opposed to real value. I think the only way to mitigate that is structure the project and team in a way to support it. So if you get on the VC hamster wheel, there's no path but hyper growth. If you go against it and say, run a really normal business or even a social enterprise (aka non profit), maybe it actually benefits the people it's in service of.
This is the crux of why we can't have nice things, and I've been thinking a lot about it. There are so many dynamics that trend towards corporate consolidation and ultimately the alienating effects of modern technology. The money to be made combined with rapid global scalability and network lock-in effects, mean that it's an uphill fight the whole way.
The bright spot is that so many technologists are disgusted with the direction tech has taken, and we have the know-how and agency to build alternatives. In order to address the selling out problem, I think we need to establish some standardized and well understood commitments to shepherding projects, products and companies that have some real teeth while not requiring a vow of poverty to maintain.
The other key piece is finding the right hooks to get normals using these products and not just defaulting to the big tech alternatives due to friction. This is the hardest part by far, but I feel there is enough general frustration with big tech that will be possible to harness in some way. The key will be some kind of killer app that appeals to enough people to gain critical mass.
I feel you though, marginalia, and appreciate your work. I wrote a search engine too once and after a few months of me not using it myself, gave up. My results were too specific and not broad enough to include the world.
This! Why is it everything we build is to communicate with the world? The reality is we live in a certain physical space, we can only see, hear and speak at a certain distance and while technology has enabled a way to overcome that, it does feel like we're overwhelmed by the scale of humans we can communicate with. I want to go back to real, small, private connection. Hence micro.
> Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution.
Even if the whole world isn't built this way, much of it could be, especially groups and interactions.
It’s what you said. The real world. Meet a friend. It’s as private as it gets.
Pick a small friend for true micro experience. :D
Jokes aside, unplug. And it doesn’t have to be that we build things at a world scale. But isn’t it amazing that we can and do build stuff at this scale.
Devs often don’t use tech as much as regular users! They build, and forget the use.
The world still doesn't really exist. At least not in any where we can comprehend it. Since it is almost certainly incomprehensible and probably not even possible to capture the world as it is, then isn't the second best to build something that is nice?
That just as we went from hunting and gathering to farms and now cities, internet grew from a few people having access in universities and some tech corporations, to now phones in the hands of children in villages.
Let’s be more inclusive and dare I say progressive even?
I, for one, am not hankering to gather and hunt.
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 of time can refer to a similar influx (often complaining that everything has gone to crap since then).
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.
Man, with me on the edge to nuking or not nuking my reddit account with a couple of smaller communities, I didn't need more nostalgia back here. I was part of the "night crew" over on the old freenode in a few tech channels since I'm from europe and the times I have time ended up being when the US was asleep, haha. Learned to much about a couple of topics over that time as well. I still know way too many arcane weirdnesses and internals of python from stints on #python.
Or old TF2/Tremulous/CS1.6/Quake servers. Times when we could call truces over voice to get us another beer and the other guy wouldn't come 'round the corner. And then you'd discuss current brand choices for a second. Or when one of the local pros started to take you seriously and would start some impromptu coaching, which usually involved a lot of death on your side because now they were looking for you.
At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right?
Those were simpler times, I suppose. We were working with all the new frameworks of the day, and it was the grizzled old engineers alongside the young hotshots — and none of it mattered, because all anyone saw was your nick and your code. You'd put some interesting snippet up on one of those anonymous paste sites, and the critique would roll in.
I don't know how kids these days learn about dependency injection, the downsides of singleton architectures, the art of API design, or the nuanced tradeoffs of using an ORM to abstract over a relational model. But I rather enjoyed learning it all "on the streets" of IRC — frankly a far more welcoming and engineering-focused atmosphere than many tech companies.
There was some .. lets just call it, rather encouraged rebranding to libra.chat. And there is something else namesquatting the freenode name.
It was a netsplit.
Freenode was sold to an heir of the former Korean monarchy. The idea that the network was even sellable did not resonate with several former staff calling it a hostile takeover, so Libera.Chat was formed as a moral successor.
The split caused a drop in user count from ~80k to ~45k. Some channels migrated to OFTC instead. See a user count history graph:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera_Chat#History
https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021
Since the decline of freenode, their user count statistics have looked unapologetically synthetic.
That doesn't happen in modern shooters. Heck, even MMORPGs rarely have that community feel anymore.
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 each, it doesnt make sense to me
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
I think the words "just trust" here are not right. No I don't want people to "just" trust me because I wouldn't "just" trust someone else. I think the E2E thing is important but we already have platforms that facilitate this really well. If it's technically feasible to do in a way that doesn't slow product development, sure we'd do it, but if it's going to take me months on end and it will largely hinder a lot of what we're trying to build feature wise, then it's not really worth it. I think where pure privacy on that level is important to people they really should pick signal or similar. For me, I think what's more important is, can I trust the people running this platform to host that infrastructure well, to continue to put the community first and to drive maybe an alternative path that a lot of people are about e.g self host the data part. Self hosting comes up a lot but in the context of "I want to host the whole thing", what if it was just, where the data lives. At the same time, we're really thinking consumer first and no consumer wants to host anything, they're quite happy using existing services and E2E is not the first thing they think about, it's the frictionless communication or the features of the service. In the case where the consumer really cares about E2E its because they're doing something they don't want anyone to know about. Saying all this, look if I'm putting my personal details into it, or family photos, etc. I want to know no one is going to see or touch that, but maybe it's as basic as we use AES-256 on the client side and a randomly generated secret, or we just delete the data after 30 days and that's the policy.
I think there are services that really focused heavily on E2E but their goal was purely communication whereas we're sort of pushing towards doing more around community coordination.
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 have to police all the inactive people in order to have room for active people. seems to create more overhead than i'd be comfortable with.
wechat groups have a limit of 500 people. it's big enough to allow some flexibility for groups that have lots of members but little communication, but don't allow the groups to get so large as to get out of hand. the ideal technical limit for me is somewhere between 100 and 500. less than that and i'd run into to many corner cases because some group somewhere hit the limit. most of the groups i am active in have less than 100 members, but many have more than 20, but i am also in some groups that have more than 200 members, most of which are just reading and a few contributing.
The other thing I noticed that in let's say "stable" communities (slow growth, many long term members) there is much more of self-policing going. If someone acts outside of the implicit or explicit rules there is bigger chance someone would respond to that in "hey, behave, we don't do that here" comment and 9/10 that's enough, no mod involvement is needed, no bans or other punishment needs to be applied.
When community is a lot of "random people off the street" (no effort to create account or join, just start writing) that happens much more rarely
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.
"Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships."
A place to share media reviews and recommendations. Wiki-like is OK, as long as table support is great.
Difficulty: it should be able to helpfully look up and create entries for any new media it encounters, using various online sources (IMDB, The Movie Database, TVDB, maybe the Musicbrainz DB, something else authoritative-ish for video games, books, and comic books). So if you want to add a title to a table of, say, sci-fi movies, and link that to a review of same, if it's already got the movie, it should recommend it based on the title you type in, and if not, it should find likely candidates to suggest, and fill in things like release year, director, actors, et c., from outside sources, automatically, when you select one of them. It should be able to find all mentions of a given piece of media within its system, such that one could look up a page for a given, say, album, and get a list of every page where it's mentioned on the site.
It should also maintain a watched/listened/played/read list for each user, and be able to import that from places like Letterboxd.
Basically, a Wiki with smart media metadata import.
It's the only thing we want to do that's not served adequately by chat.
I don't know of any software that does that, but the good thing is that maybe you don't need a new platform. Creating new platforms just splits the communities and is against the Unix philosophy we hold dear. Maybe a good first step is to be in the Fediverse, and create an actor per entry. That actor would contain all facts, potentially linking other entries. Anyone could @ movies, so you'd see the discussion about them. You can create lists, like "watched/listened/played/read" and add actors to those lists. Those actors don't post anything, they're just a "rallying point" for conversation. They're more encompassing than hashtags.
Sounds like a weekend project for someone adventurous enough
That's ok though, this happens to me every now and then - a game will come out that is so good / compelling that I just need to drop everything else and jam all my free time into it. It's almost like something in my psychology is saying "play the shit out of this so that we can get over the obsession and get back to other pursuits quickly."
I don't game all that much these days, so when something really good comes along, I just let myself go nuts on it. I've realized I seem to work in cycles, so after my Zelda obsession dies off, I'm sure I'll get back to other stuff.
[1]: https://havenweb.org
Drupal had a very nice hybrid of forum and wiki, it was called "book" IIRC. It was possible to organize the pages in a hierarchy and at the same time it provided discussion in every node.
Being modular and open source, you could add the import thing. I've been working in importing stuff for a while so maybe I see it easier than it is. The community features were very good, with a nice permissions system.
To me that's one area where some ActivityPub implementations fail. They take not-insignificant startup costs and that friction makes it less fun to self host.
I feel like in a "fun" implementation you could spin it up on a $5/m VPS, plus a domain so if you're lean maybe $15 startup (domain + vps) with ~$6 monthly costs. That's filesystem storage with no persistent backup but rsync could get you a long way if you're trying to remain cheap. Plus the app could help you backup, offer encrypted backups to let the community help, etc.
I know i know, ActivityPub suffers for small instances. It's an area i want to explore, and explore ways to augment the spec or go around it for efficiency.
Regardless, i think we need to get more into these micro worlds. Yea, you could argue ActivityPub is not micro if it still connects everyone. I'm speaking micro in the sense of the "old web" though, where lots of independent websites formed a network of content, backlinking, etc. Tooling to embrace that, propagate, etc seems useful to me - but keeping micro also seems essential, to me.
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
https://web.archive.org/web/20230612115935/https://community...
I'm a big fan of self-hosting, especially things that I can run inside my home with no internet-facing ports. But anything that will be outward facing has to be sandboxed from everything else, kept up to date, and monitored for intrusions. It can be daunting unless you definitely have time to stay on top of it. I'm curious if any self-hosters have thoughts about this.
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.
In the UK $100/year gets you about a 20-40w constant load*.
That's a fairly efficient machine, and then there's the router, modem etc.
Granted some of that already exists, and a Raspberry Pi or similar would fit in that budget.
* quick maths: $100/365 gives 27 cents a day or approx 1c per hour - at $0.50/kWh you have a 25w constant load and at $0.25/kWh you have 50w.
This is true when thinking in centralised big-site terms but there are other ways to achieve a large reach, some of them already close to main-stream. Peertube [1] is an example of such, using a combination of Activitypub and peer to peer (here: bittorrent) to create a "web scale" platform without needing a lot of money. Does it work? A good question, Peertube itself certainly works fine but it would be an interesting test to see how far it actually scales.
That's not how algorithms work. Most of the things we do are nlogn complexity. There are lots of breakpoints where 10x as many users cost you 11x as much in hardware, and we pretend it's going to cost us 8x. Any time your estimates are off by 40% should trigger your root cause analysis protocol.
In particular we are lousy at statistics. We have to be right in the middle of the consequences of misreading them before we act. When you have 10 servers you might have to deal with a deployment race condition once a month. When you have 30 servers you might have to deal with one every week. That starts to materially affect your estimates when you have five of those sorts of things going on.
> Proxy Error
> The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request
> Reason: Error reading from remote server
And it's been brewing there for a few years now, and the word's escaping into more contexts.
And a pipi thing too.
I tried to switch everyone to Signal, but it utterly failed, people took forever to reply, if they even do, and never actually contact me on it.
Matrix works because it has bridges.
That then did a 180 from being platforms and started with "content creators"?
If web 2.0 was the introduction of comment systems, and turned each web page into a performance upon a stage, with a goal of audience participation / loudness / re-sharing, and content creating being the evolution of publication to hustling... I think lots of people would be satisfied by a local internet of people they trust, to share ideas in a non-commercial, private, 'safe' way.
But the real magic to me would be not worrying about it being hacked, or deployed, or monitored, or any of the pollutant infrastructure that we got good at, that unfortunately makes everything operational and robust.
I also got exposed to a lot of stuff at a young age partially enabled by BBSes, and I wonder how it affected the adult I am today. I was in a LOT of precarious situations far outside what might be considered appropriate free range parenting.
Anyway, agree man, I miss BBSes!