Tent.is alpha

&#62; Tent.is will become a showcase for what is possible with Tent.<p>And 10 other sentences telling me that tent.is is for tent users and I still don't know what tent is. The information I'm looking for is under the fold and seems to be on :<p><a href="https://tent.io/" rel="nofollow">https://tent.io/</a><p>Otherwise it looks quite interesting, thanks ! (statusnet but for facebook-type content)

For a count of number of users, check out the following count for: <a href="https://tent.tent.is/" rel="nofollow">https://tent.tent.is/</a><p>Currently at 429 and growing quickly. That account auto-follows new users.<p>That's also a good way (for now) to explore the other accounts (<a href="https://tent.tent.is/followings" rel="nofollow">https://tent.tent.is/followings</a>).<p>The interesting thing is that Tent.is has a freemium business model compared to App.net which has no free tier. I expect Tent.is to surpass the number of users of App.net pretty quickly.<p>Follow me here: <a href="https://jyap.tent.is/" rel="nofollow">https://jyap.tent.is/</a>

What does HN think about using this protocol to build a distributed publishing system? Like I'vegot this software that facilitates publishing a certain kind of post type, and each node of the software can subscribe to any number of other nodes. The problem is that each <i>node</i> will represent a tent server, not every person publishing on said node. I'm not sure if this woud be a misuse of this protocol, but its features are really well-suited to what I want to do.

The tent.io protocol looks very interesting. Architecturally the way e-mail works, mixed with the functionality of social networks all done over JSON/REST.<p>I wonder if it would be possible to implement a tent.io -&#62; facebook/G+/Twitter bridge? A tent.io server, which instead of being backed by some sort of database, would instead read and write to somebodies existing social network profiles?

I'm surprised by some of the negativity here - it's a pretty neat service for an alpha. Sure there's kinks/ shortcomings, but it's very early days. They even seem to be ironing things out even as we speak (switched from 140 to 256 char status updates in front of my eyes).

How do users behind NAT run their own tent servers? If they can manage to run their own HTTPS servers from behind NAT, if they have those skills (not to mention a reachable IP), then why do they need tent? Couldn't they just host all their content on their own server? I can see tent as providing some sort of coordination of user data hosted on different servers, but I'm not seeing how tent enables users to host their own content and have full control over it. Maybe that's not the goal?<p>Correct me if I'm wrong but what this tent idea seems to lead to is a proliferation of tent service providers, not independent users running tent servers behind consumer ISP accounts. If that's true, then how can we be sure these service providers will not adopt the same sort of annoying monetization strategies of providers like Facebook and Twitter?<p>By no means am I suggesting tent could not be useful. I just want some clarification of what problem they are trying to solve. (There is no shortage of problems to choose from. :)

This is sort of a non sequitur, but the bootstrap UI makes this feel oddly like app.net.

The site is completely broken if you block 3rd party tracking scripts (Mixpanel). The registration form does nothing when I try to submit it.<p>$12 a month is way, way too much. Someone could host it themselves on a cheap VPS for &#60;$10 a month and not worry about 3rd parties tracking their activity.

How do you discover new content and find people to follow?<p>EDIT: OK, then <a href="https://spindritf.tent.is/" rel="nofollow">https://spindritf.tent.is/</a><p>EDIT2: Tent is available over ipv6, great to see.

While SaaS pricing is an ongoing discussion in other HN threads, this site is a good example of a terrible pricing strategy (IMHO). Their freemium model is useless for discovering what the service is capable of, since it only allows for a status post. The premium service is ridiculously over-priced as well -- if the "open sourced FB" model somehow becomes a viable product with a market, I'd expect GoDaddy and others to start offering it for $1-2/month or even less if paid annually.

I am so glad someone built out a Tent.io service so fast! This is exactly what I imagined it'd be like. People would host their own and people like this would host one for those who don't want to or don't know how to host their own. I see this and laugh whenever I hear a doubter say Tent will fail because "no one will run their own server". That's beside the point and Tent.is is the counterargument.

Ok, I took the bait and signed up. I went to the home page, and was presented with a spartan and VERY pretentious pricing/signup/(ad copy? description of the service?) layout.<p>After trying to figure out what a Tent is (still had no idea after reading), I signed up with blind faith that the Tent will tell me what to do next.<p>The next page was where I was expected to make a status update. Ok, so I enter some gibberish. Click the post button.<p>Yay, I made a post.<p>Have you ever showed up way to early to a sporting event or large classroom, and there is nobody there. I mean nobody. No sound, just you. You look around and think "am I supposed to be here?". "Is it Saturday?".<p>Looking at the post I made made me feel like that. Now that I wasted 10 minutes of my life on this, good luck with pitching your Tent.

I picked up support.tent.is. Probably should block that.

Too bad the docs are rather hard to understand :( I wish someone made some python source code or improved the docs. It seems the "server protocol" is basically just some sort of schema of JSON to be send over HTTP(s), but at the moment it seems rather unstructured.

For me the registration/login are broken even when I unblock mixpanel. Might be because I block third party cookies, or it's just allergic to NoScript or RequestPolicy, even if I unblock everything on their registration/login screens. I just get blank pages.

From <a href="http://tent.io" rel="nofollow">http://tent.io</a><p>&#62; 4. Alice's server sends the status to two friends (Bob's and Carol's) servers.<p>What happens when you have, say, a million friends, and want to post a status? Your server (or army of them) has to send one million API calls to one million servers. For every post.<p>What happens if you share a photo on your tent server, and your one million friends want to view it? That's a lot of bandwidth, and bandwidth isn't free.<p>It's a cool idea, but I just can't see it being efficient (especially in terms of cost) down the road.

Hey "be my friend" etc etc - <a href="https://ragmondo.tent.is/" rel="nofollow">https://ragmondo.tent.is/</a> - to see how well this works..

Do you have a date for when Tent will be released under an open license?

In case you are wondering how many users they have:<p><a href="https://cat.tent.is/followings" rel="nofollow">https://cat.tent.is/followings</a>

The UX for this is kind of terrible in its current iteration, and extremely confusing as to where I am, or what's going on.

Now all that i need is a proxy, that reliable allows me to use my own domain as a tent server, proxying to tent.is. ;-)

This makes @replies rather harder, doesn't it? You have to know both the username and the domain

Follow me at <a href="https://modarts.tent.is/" rel="nofollow">https://modarts.tent.is/</a> !

They just changed from 140 characters limitation to 256 with a blink of an eye!

What is the difference between a passphrase and a password? Good grief.

Tent.is is the most confusing domain name, ever. Hurts my brain when I read anything. Feels like bad grammar.<p>"Tent.is is the easiest..."<p>Not to mention I have no idea what "Tent.is" actually IS after reading the extremely confusing blurb.

$12/month is around the same ballpark as my water bill.

no unicode support

Tent is probably like CIA?

can't reply to a reply :-(

Limited in the free version? This isn't going to work in the battle against Facebook... Yes, I realize it's too early to 'battle', but if it's starting out like this already...