4 ms·

Socialhome: a federated personal profile with social networking functionality

68 points by jaywink 9y ago

frio 9y ago
https://github.com/jaywink/socialhome https://github.com/jaywink/socialhome is a link to the Github while the site seems to be struggling under load.
- dang 9y ago
  Ok, we'll change to that from https://socialhome.network/content/1198667/socialhome-080-released-this-release-focus/ https://socialhome.network/content/1198667/socialhome-080-re... for now. We also changed the title to a description taken from that page, since the project doesn't seem to have been discussed on HN before.
Jeff_Brown 9y ago
A detailed text description of what it's like to use it might be nice. There's a lot of technical documentation but it's hard for me to want to dive into that before I understand what the payoff is.
- Jeff_Brown 9y ago
  Also that poster is too hard for a guy with bad eyes to read.
  - ta12312333 9y ago
    Just in case anyone isn't aware of the feature, clicking onto the source image, then holding down control and scrolling up with the middle mouse button in Firefox will magnify the image (making it closer to readable, but still suffers from a lack of pixels).
    - Torwald 9y ago
      Instead of posting this here, you could have this written above the poster. This is called usability and it's a real thing!
- Torwald 9y ago
  I see this a lot with this kind of projects: the "techie" stuff is there, like for example the link to the github or so, but the five sentence explanation to the end user of what the heck is actually going on here is missing. I see a parallel here to other fields, for example OSS games, there seems to be a disconnect between the tech and the design community. Not enough designers on board.
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
I feel like GNU Social/Mastodon and the like is going to be the most successful in the space these days than Diaspora-based sites. I spend some time on Diaspora back in the day, and it felt like it's community was solely people who had likely been banned or pushed out of more mainstream sites. It lacked a lot of the appeal of a modern social network. I feel like the ActivityPub/OStatus crowd has done a better job reaching wide appeal, federated communities are small enough without multiple standards. It does look like Socialhome wants to include ActivityPub in the future, and that sounds like a big win.
- dane-pgp 9y ago
  I feel like the most useful feature a distributed social network needs is the ability to grant/deny access to people based on decentralised identifiers (such as the person's email addresses, although people may prefer to use a dedicated email address for this purpose). If such a distributed ID system were available, then it should even be possible to move away from one web host to another host, and still have access to your friends' pages, and have them find you. Alternatively you could instruct your current host to broadcast an "I'm about to move" message to your friends before you move your data to the new host. Perhaps the biggest hurdle standing in the way of this is the spam / privacy issue, since people don't want to have to prove they own a specific email address in order to read your posts on the niche site where you're hosting your profile. Also, if your posts are being pushed out to the sites where your friends have accounts, then you have to implicitly trust the privacy policies and security of all those sites.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    The current system the fediverse uses is, more or less, the same as email addresses... with the same downsides. I'm ocdtrekkie@mastodon.cloud ...My account at the server I'm at, just like email. And yeah, email migration is quite a frustrating process, and the best way to take control of it is to own your own domain name. Perhaps the solution is, like an MX record, for me to be able to assign my social traffic from my domain name to route to a different server, so I can assign it to the server I'm using, and move it at my leisure? This is why I have my personal domain pointed at FastMail for mail, it means I can move it without giving everyone a new address.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

68 points by jaywink 9y ago

frio 9y ago

https://github.com/jaywink/socialhome https://github.com/jaywink/socialhome is a link to the Github while the site seems to be struggling under load.

dang 9y ago
Ok, we'll change to that from https://socialhome.network/content/1198667/socialhome-080-released-this-release-focus/ https://socialhome.network/content/1198667/socialhome-080-re... for now. We also changed the title to a description taken from that page, since the project doesn't seem to have been discussed on HN before.

Jeff_Brown 9y ago

A detailed text description of what it's like to use it might be nice. There's a lot of technical documentation but it's hard for me to want to dive into that before I understand what the payoff is.

Jeff_Brown 9y ago
Also that poster is too hard for a guy with bad eyes to read.
- ta12312333 9y ago
  Just in case anyone isn't aware of the feature, clicking onto the source image, then holding down control and scrolling up with the middle mouse button in Firefox will magnify the image (making it closer to readable, but still suffers from a lack of pixels).
  - Torwald 9y ago
    Instead of posting this here, you could have this written above the poster. This is called usability and it's a real thing!
Torwald 9y ago
I see this a lot with this kind of projects: the "techie" stuff is there, like for example the link to the github or so, but the five sentence explanation to the end user of what the heck is actually going on here is missing. I see a parallel here to other fields, for example OSS games, there seems to be a disconnect between the tech and the design community. Not enough designers on board.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

I feel like GNU Social/Mastodon and the like is going to be the most successful in the space these days than Diaspora-based sites. I spend some time on Diaspora back in the day, and it felt like it's community was solely people who had likely been banned or pushed out of more mainstream sites. It lacked a lot of the appeal of a modern social network. I feel like the ActivityPub/OStatus crowd has done a better job reaching wide appeal, federated communities are small enough without multiple standards. It does look like Socialhome wants to include ActivityPub in the future, and that sounds like a big win.

dane-pgp 9y ago
I feel like the most useful feature a distributed social network needs is the ability to grant/deny access to people based on decentralised identifiers (such as the person's email addresses, although people may prefer to use a dedicated email address for this purpose). If such a distributed ID system were available, then it should even be possible to move away from one web host to another host, and still have access to your friends' pages, and have them find you. Alternatively you could instruct your current host to broadcast an "I'm about to move" message to your friends before you move your data to the new host. Perhaps the biggest hurdle standing in the way of this is the spam / privacy issue, since people don't want to have to prove they own a specific email address in order to read your posts on the niche site where you're hosting your profile. Also, if your posts are being pushed out to the sites where your friends have accounts, then you have to implicitly trust the privacy policies and security of all those sites.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  The current system the fediverse uses is, more or less, the same as email addresses... with the same downsides. I'm ocdtrekkie@mastodon.cloud ...My account at the server I'm at, just like email. And yeah, email migration is quite a frustrating process, and the best way to take control of it is to own your own domain name. Perhaps the solution is, like an MX record, for me to be able to assign my social traffic from my domain name to route to a different server, so I can assign it to the server I'm using, and move it at my leisure? This is why I have my personal domain pointed at FastMail for mail, it means I can move it without giving everyone a new address.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]