Tent v0.1

Decentralizing things like this is never <i>ever</i> going to work. In terms of running it... my mom/sister/dad/cousin are not going to host this themselves. They might depend on me to do it, but even I'm not going to run a decentralized social network myself. There's too much liability involved. Not to mention, it's a pain in the ass.<p>I want to hack and work on my own ideas. That's why I trust my mail hosting to Google. Sure, they read all my emails and analyze me for marketing. That's a small price to pay though. I get a rad web client, Apple Mail + iPhone support, and never need to worry about my email server. Anyone remember qmailrocks.org? I used to sit for hours messing with and playing with qMail back in the day. I've done it. I've hosteed mail servers for friends and family. What a pain in the fucking ass!<p>Same for hosting. I <i>love</i> configuring infrastructure. I taught myself HAProxy, load balancing, nginx, and clustering years ago when people were still using mod_python. I built a FreeBSD box for fun with old parts an an old SSD the other weekend. I have quite a few linodes running right now. But it's also a pain in the ass. Because of that, I also enjoy pushing my personal site to Heroku and not worrying about it ever again. git push, boom done.<p>A lot of people take things like Facebook for granted. We all bitch and moan about all kinds of issues it has or features it lacks, but it's a gargantuous network that virtually everyone that I know or care to talk to is on it. My family and friends back home in LA where I grew up, my new friends in Sweden that I met while abroad recently. It's got a handy mobile app (that was luckily redeveloped recently) and best of all it's 100% free.<p>This decentralized stuff is nonsense. There's too many layers of crap. Even if there was a one-click-deploy social network for people where all they needed to do was rent a server somewhere... someone is still running that server and you need to worry about them snooping your data or whatever else the neckbeards are worried about.<p>Remember Diaspora? Hah.

Tentd seems to be based on Ruby and Rack. Since it's based on Rack, I'm assuming then that it operates over HTTP. Which leads me to my current frustration...<p>Why does everything have to be built on top of HTTP? Sure, I know you're going to say, because it works, and works well that's why.<p>But think about it. The reason why we have all these centralized services in large part is because of HTTP. HTTP has made it really easy for someone to build a centralized service, or application, like Facebook or Twitter. Before the days of HTTP, if I wanted to build a service, I probably would invent a protocol like Telnet, Gopher, SMTP, IRC etc., which is often naturally decentralized, instead of programming a web application.<p>Perhaps if we want more decentralized services, we should focus on frameworks that make it easier to construct TCP/UDP based protocols.<p>Just a thought.

I find the copy on the website to be rather vague or off-topic.<p>From the homepage:<p><pre><code> Tent is open, decentralized, and built for the future. Tent changes everything. Tent allows every user to run their own server, but like email and the web, most users will use a hosting service to handle it. </code></pre> and the blog:<p><pre><code> The documentation for Tent version 0.1 is now available along with a reference server, tentd. </code></pre> From halfway down the homepage:<p><pre><code> What is Tent? Tent is a protocol for open, decentralized social networking. </code></pre> I understand that the creators are busy building the product, but some marketing can really help create an excited community.<p>Is this project like Diaspora? How is this different from the competition. I'm excited to hear how this is unique and to see where the project goes.

How do we handle errors?<p>(I posted this as a reply to someone else but it deserves its own comment.)<p>The docs don't include any specs for handling push errors. If I push a new status and one of my followers' servers is down what do I do? Do I retry later? Do I continue to try pushing future updates? At what point do I stop trying to send updates to their missing/broken server?<p>If my server goes down how do I handle missed updates? Do I need to query everyone I follow? Can I fetch statues since the last one I received like Twitter? The docs say "There are a number of parameters available to limit the scope of the request" for GET /posts but don't specify what the parameters are.<p>Error handing is crucial for a decentralized network like this, especially one that pushes to other servers. Without a method for handling servers that go down and other errors it will absolutely not work.

"Developers: It's time to start writing apps for Tent and adding Tent support to existing projects based on the current specification. "<p>It's time for you to show me why I should invest my time in writing apps for your platform/protocol.

I found it interesting that this announcement said nothing about what Tent actually is. Without reading other pages on the site, all I could tell was that Tent involves "protocol, apps, and servers" in some way.

If you hit the #1 spot on HN, you are going to get a bunch of traffic from people you never got traffic from before.<p>I recommend putting a link to the tent.io homepage that says "new to Tent? Click here!"

What problem is this solving? I know users of social media who are unhappy with what they're using. But I've never heard my mom or any other Facebook user for that matter say: "You know what I want? A decentralized social network where I can own my content!"<p>For this to get traction, it'll need at least one server with a strong user base.

I don't see how the tent protocol has any hope of scaling to large numbers of users / servers. The notification traffic for anyone with a significant number of "followers" is going to be significant. I think the view that the tent spec authors are taking is a bit too simplistic if this protocol is intended to be Twitter or Facebook-scale.

IMO the Tent design is going to become obsolete with the arrival of WebRTC. With WebRTC, there is not going to be any reason to have servers running, as long as some of your friends are online. You can do everything by using public key cryptography and store-and-forward. You can authenticate with SRP/zero-knowledge password proofs. You don't need to have your private key with you, you can recover it from a quorum of your friends. Combine this with a public status/"who's online" server - could be any XMPP/web gateway for example - for bootstrapping the initial connection, and you can log in from any library/internet cafe computer. You can use broadcast encryption to address the privacy concerns of store-and-forward designs.<p>I wrote a series of blog posts about how such a system would work: <a href="http://carcaddar.blogspot.ca/search/label/ClearSky" rel="nofollow">http://carcaddar.blogspot.ca/search/label/ClearSky</a>

If they have any use for a command-line utility to manage the server, it should be named 'pitch'.

From the docs: "Tent is a protocol for decentralized social networking." I'm not sure why this is interesting? It's neither the first nor the last such protocol, can someone enlighten me?

I hope these guys are able to get some traction. Distributed social networks that can replace twitter and facebook are the only way forward.

Sounds like someone is trying to reinvent the unhosted[1] protocols. Unhosted is used in relatively popular apps like owncloud[2].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.unhosted.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.unhosted.org</a> [2] <a href="http://www.owncloud.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.owncloud.org</a>

"Protocol" "Reference Implementation" "API"<p>These are the highly encouraging words I keep seeing from Tent that I never saw from Diaspora.

I suggest that, whenever you make a post like this, you indicate WTF the software does, like this:<p><i>We're pleased to announce version 0.1 of Tent, &#60;insert description of WTF Tent is&#62;.</i><p>The description should preferably indicate not just what it does at a low level, but why you'd want to use it. In this context, the description on the documentation page, "Tent is a social layer over HTTP using JSON.", doesn't motivate Tent's existence particularly well. Something like this would be more instructive:<p><i>Tent &#60;why Tent exists&#62; by adding a social layer to HTTP.</i>

You lost me at "changes everything".

Are there any protections against spam? (unsolicited notifications)<p>Are there any authorization &#38; authentication measures? (so you know a notification is really from whom it claims to be)<p>I see mention of HMAC in the overview, (how) does it solve those problems? I know basics of TLS, RSA - how is it related? I'd be grateful for hints. Also, I remember some alternative mentioned in old threads about Diaspora, which was reportedly devised by some security guys (?) and tried to have good security model - do you know the name of this project? Some GNU one?

Decentralizing would be an easier sell on a mass scale as a hardware solution. I can't imagine asking my parents to implement open source routing software but they bought a wireless router on their own.<p>Maybe Tent should think about a strategic partnership with a raspberry pi or another one of the many great cheap computing solution available today.<p>Write some basic stuff into it, and sell the device as a plug into your router and go social network device.

This protocol seems to miss a secure routing of messages inside of its network, insead offering point-to-point interaction. However, this will be required in order to build indeed a decentralised social network. Something that was developed in Tonika project: <a href="http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~petar/5ttt.org/" rel="nofollow">http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~petar/5ttt.org/</a>

Tent should take a page from Jabber and create gateways which will post for you on other social networks much like Jabber had for non-Jabber IM services.<p>That way you could have a backup of all your social data, stored on your server if you wanted but broadcasted to the other servers.

That website needs a major redesign. I can tell you that most people spend three seconds on a web page before they decide to move on or not, and there is no way a generic bootstrap website is going to grab anyone's attention in that three seconds.

This sounds a lot lie XMPP; Why not just extend that instead?

This seems like a pretty clear example of HN comments being full of flat criticism and naysaying with very little in the way of helpful feedback.

Saw the link header bit and was instantly reminded of Riak - is that what the servers are running? Makes sense I suppose..

Is their documentation page made with Sphinx? If so, does anybody know that theme? It looks really nice.

Has anyone put up a public server yet?

you should check out <a href="http://secushare.org/" rel="nofollow">http://secushare.org/</a>

This has the potential to replace Facebook. And it might do just that with a couple of endorsements.