A non-federated decentralized social protocol based on Git

103 点作者 petar大约 2 年前

13 条评论

I'm sorry but I believe I'm missing something here. How does this solve any of the problems that people commonly have with decentralized, federated social networks?* You're still either hosting your own, or at the whim of whomever hosts your repository. Mastodon.social or GitHub.* Hosting your own Git is not particularly easier than hosting your own GoTo Social or Akkoma.* What if you end up with either a big following, or a big follower list? Aren't you going to be rate limited by GitHub?* Is signing up for GitHub easier than signing up for mastodon.social, especially if Mastodon et al already have good mobile clients?* What about moderation?* What about media?And I mean... Isn't Git federated by nature? Multiple machines store multiple copies of the data. That's defederation isn't it?But OK, let's put the federated social networks we do have aside for a moment.The site says: Every user stores their application state in a git repo they own and control.But you don't do that if you're on GitHub, right? Not really, anyway. What is the benefit from doing this over git? What if I want to delete something? What is the overhead of the git protocol?If it's just a toy, then that's totally cool with me. But it says that Microsoft Research is involved. I'm a bit confused. What is this?

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csense大约 2 年前

The author is well-known for creating Kademlia [1], a distributed hash table used to resolve BitTorrent magnet links.[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia</a>

isoos大约 2 年前

> Every user stores their application state in a git repo they own and control. No other infrastructure is necessary!As a long-time user (and writer) of static site generators, I welcome these ideas, as I think these would allow us to organize static sites into some kind of decentralized social networks. Think of this as a bulkier version of RSS, because - for most practical cases - it is relative cheap to just fetch everything from a source and present it in a consistent way.Even if people were using centralized git repositories, a separate naming service could allow easy (and cheap/free) redirects, so data migration wouldn't be an issue.Can this be done with mastadon? Of course. But it requires a database server and other moving parts that need occasional maintenance. Treating the social network as a network of static sites makes operations (and federation) so much easier.Would this be this specific project that wins us over? Maybe not, we shall see. But I think the concept could evolve into something useful.

EGreg大约 2 年前

I know Petar Maymoukov and met w him when we started designing Intercloud.I wanted to know the design decisions behind how Kademlia worked in detail.Glad to see this… wondering why we need it if we have Dat/Hypercore and beaker browser, which already uses Secure Kademlia DHT for swarming and follows up with SLEEP protocol instead of Git. It is encrypted and secure, to boot.But those saying this is federated are wrong. It is peer to peer, just like Git is. Email is federated (the domain part is even a centrally controlled database). Having said that, git can be hosted even on your own computer!

NoraCodes大约 2 年前

Unless I misunderstand, this is federated - each instance stores data related to its user, and fetches from other instances the data it's interested in (from other users the user is following.)It also doesn't do much to address the reasons users in federated systems tend to congregate around large(r) servers, like discoverability and reliability.It's a neat PoC but I think the communication needs some work.

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petar大约 2 年前

The underlying software architecture and the motivation behind it are outlined in the whitepaper of the (more complex) gov4git project: <a href="https://github.com/gov4git/doc/blob/main/whitepaper/whitepaper.md">https://github.com/gov4git/doc/blob/main/whitepaper/whitepap...</a>

gtop3大约 2 年前

I am always highly skeptical of these applications that use git to store non-code data. Often many of the key features of git aren't applicable to other problem spaces and this makes everything less efficient.There is a big exception here. You sign commits, so each update comes with some proof of the identity of the author. I like how simple this is, and generally prefer it over the way Mastodon and other federated services handle identity.

usr1106大约 2 年前

I certainly support the idea that alternatives to what we currently have are needed. But I must admit even as a software developer I feel confused when looking at <a href="https://github.com/social4git/social4git/blob/main/doc/walkthrough.sh">https://github.com/social4git/social4git/blob/main/doc/walkt...</a> how this even works.Maybe some illustration would help to explain data and/or control flow?The number of pilot users would still deserve growing: <a href="https://github.com/social4git/social4git/blob/main/doc/directory.md">https://github.com/social4git/social4git/blob/main/doc/direc...</a>

superb-owl大约 2 年前

There are a few ideas that I really like here:- Managing data (push/pull/etc) in a common, widely-supported protocol (git)- which has a large, stable, and free-as-in-beer implementation (GitHub)- as well as some major competitors (Bitbucket/GitLab)- and is possible to self-host (gitea, OSS GitLab)What I'd love to see:- posts are currently in JSON format. Make it something more readable (like Markdown+YAML), at least optionally. That way people can interact _directly_ in GitHub, instead of using a janky client- The main problem with decentralized frameworks is always "search and discoverability". Someone needs to aggregate all the data in a centralized database and make it easy for others to pick through

cryptonector大约 2 年前

Are we reinventing Usenet?

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TimJRobinson大约 2 年前

What's the advantage of this over a design like Scuttlebutt / Farcaster? They have the same properties (signed messages, Merkel trees to ensure data isn't changed) but are engineered for social media.Nostr is another one that is more lightweight without the Merkel tree but is seeing some traction.