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Show HN: Vitriol – distributed, serverless publishing platform
- ai_ia 8y agoJust curious why did you name the platform Vitriol?
- hardlianotion 8y agoI like the idea, but came here to raise a similar point: Vitriol - a distributed abuse platform the snarks practically write themselves
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fm_throwaway 8y agoVisita Interiora Terrae Rectificandoque Invenies Occultum Lapidem The name could be a bit more polished.
- vitriolum 8y agoIt comes from "Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem", an alchemical motto. No reference to hate intended.
- CharlesW 8y agoWhatever the intent, how it will be perceived is effectively out of your control. Its current name is a headwind, actively working against its potential for success. If the project is important to you, you must rename it. https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/vitriol https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/vitriol
- eggy 8y agoI really like the idea. The load of the intro page took around 35 seconds. Could Erlang/Elixir/LFE be used instead of JS/React? I am not familiar enough with IPFS to know if this is a valid question.
- pmontra 8y agoLucky you. My experience ended with > There has been an unrecoverable error connecting to IPFS. Please retry again later.
- vitriolum 8y agoIPFS bootstrappers out there are still a bit unstable. Sorry about that - please retry.
- whyonearth 8y agoIPFS is a protocol, I don't think one can ascribe 30+ second latency to language choice.
- eggy 8y agoI should have been more clear: not language choice, but since it is distributed computing, I figured, perhaps incorrectly, that using one of these OTP/Beam languages would help with fault tolerance, and more efficient distribution across the peer-to-peer system. I am not a distributed computing expert, so my question was to gain an understanding, and your remark will spark me to look into this. Thanks.
- pmlnr 8y ago<offtopic> I wish we had a few years without tech buzzwords. Web 2.0, virtualization, devops, cloud, containers, microservices, serverless... I'd so, so much like to focus on something existing and make it work well. Maybe we wouldn't have 20+ crappy chat systems, but one good federated xmpp or matrix. </offtopic>
- Karunamon 8y agoHow many of those are buzzwords and how many of them are concrete descriptions of technology? Virtualization, containers, and microservices at least have commonly-accepted definitions and examples of those technologies are widely used, standardized, and work well at scale. VMs, now containers, and what they imply for technology are more important than yet another godforsaken chat protocol - YMMV.
- dec0dedab0de 8y agoIt can be both a buzzword and a concrete description of technology. It makes the jump into buzzword when people who don't really understand what the technology is start espousing it's benefits, and using the word to signal to each other that they're in the know. If you've ever heard a middle manager at a big company talk about the tech stack their teams use then you should understand.
- vinceguidry 8y agoThat's all well and good, but the examples you gave are problems of scale and economics, not invention. XMPP works as well as you want it to, and clients are on all the platforms, but Apple users want to use iMessage. That's not a problem that any kind of invention can solve. The buzzwords themselves are references to incremental improvements in the state of the tech ecosystem that allow more powerful solutions for all. An app we all have on our devices right now, Slack, was once buzzword soup. Now it's an actual solution used by businesses the world over. It's not perfect, but it works better for our collective needs than IRC ever did. What's going to replace the Slack's of today's tech world? I dunno, but I bet they'll be built on buzzwords.
- jtbayly 8y agoHow can I verify whether this is actually working as advertised? For all I know this is just a blog running on a central server with terrible URLs. And what happens if I create a piece of content, close the window, and then share the URL with somebody? Will they not be able to see it?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- vitriolum 8y agoYou can download the code from here: https://gitlab.com/vitriolum/vitriol-web https://gitlab.com/vitriolum/vitriol-web and serve it from whenever you want, even localhost.
- amoitnga 8y agodoesn't work
- whalesalad 8y ago> vitriol – cruel and bitter criticism. Really strange name choice.
- fredley 8y agoEspecially for a publishing platform. It's almost like you're trying to attract the very worst kind of online commentary.
- egwynn 8y agoWhen it first entered English from Latin, the word meant ‘glass’ (https://www.etymonline.com/word/vitriol#etymonline_v_7846 https://www.etymonline.com/word/vitriol#etymonline_v_7846). But that’s not a sense any modern English speaker could be expected to recognize.
- toufiqbarhamov 8y agoThey might make the connection with “Vitrification” if they’re inclined in that direction. They might realize that Vitr- is a common root, and might even guess what it is.
- egwynn 8y agoYeah, though it’s a stretch all the same. I’m not sure what the intention here is. The name is either a joke, just plain bad, or etymologically overoptimistic.
- conistonwater 8y agoThere is vitrine in French, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vitrine#French https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vitrine#French, and it means a glass display cabinet in English, although I've never heard anybody use that word.
- etxm 8y agoHave you tried the internet?
- 8y ago
- yosefzeev 8y agoHow does this differ from IPFS?
- weego 8y agoIt is IPFS based on the error that comes up
- econner 8y agoAKA Twitter
- vitriolum 8y agoMore like Medium, but distributed.
- irq-1 8y agoFrom gitlab: > ... your article will be accessible even if you're offline, as long as someone is reading (sharing) it.
- nathias 8y agolove the concept and the name, but it isn't working (IPFS error)
- vitriolum 8y agoSorry, IPFS bootstrappers are still a bit unstable. Should work now.
- hkt 8y agoWell, the name at least makes it clear that author of the system knows what it will be used for. I've reached the conclusion after years of crypto quackery and free speech nutjobs that actually, publishing platforms need to moderate what they are used for and by who. Free for alls like this attract some of the work people imaginable.
- GhostVII 8y agoWhy not give users more filtering options, rather than censoring certain views? Let the users choose what type of content they want to see, rather choosing for them.
- egwynn 8y agoBecause platforms are businesses and it’s sometimes cheaper to just ban the groups that are bad for business.
- matt4077 8y agoBecause platforms are businesses, and businesses are run by humans, some of whom manage to preserve their humanity, and don’t want to see their work being used by lowlifes spreading mindless hate.
- ajacksified 8y agoBecause sometimes one doesn't want to host a platform for, say, Holocaust denial. Platforms can, and should, moderate speech pursuant to the values of the company, which _can_ mean anything from heavy moderation to none at all. People who want to take part in "fringe" discussions, whether it goes agains the culture, or assholes (white supremacists) will end up on whatever platform they feel the most free and secure. But what happens when a group of antisemites discovers a Jewish community, and decides to comment on their posts, and harass them over PMs? The burden is placed on them to add filters for all of the users, or the content posted, which harms the growth of the group; a new member may visit the Jewish community, see it full of hate, and decide never to join. Through inaction, your platform has traded the safety and security of one group for another, and in my opinion, it's those who seek to harm others that should be removed, not the other way around. I worked at Reddit for three years (left two years ago), and it's taken me a long time to realize this.
- tiuPapa 8y agoSo there is one thing that I always think when I see something like this. So if an article is replicated and stored on every user who reads that article once wouldn't that mean after some point a user won't be able to read any more posts because they have run out of space? Also, isn't it just collectively more expensive than just paying for a centralized service? In the same note, where would I start if I knew nothing about p2p but wanted to build something like this?
- jbeard4 8y agoI got can error message on loading the user intro: "There has been an unrecoverable error connecting to IPFS. Please retry again later." Maybe not quite ready for prime time.
- eganist 8y agoI'm going to go out on a limb here... based on modestly more private conversations than this Hackernews thread, I'm inclined to read the name—Vitriol—and the fundamentally distributed architecture together as being an effective dogwhistle for already angry people further driven to extremism by the entirely appropriate blackholing of Gab. It may be a neat concept technically, but I already don't like the direction this is taking in setting up the future of this product.
- api 8y ago... which will kill it, or at least keep it a niche echo chamber for deranged hate and outrage addicts. If they don't want it to be a platform for rage porn vitriol is an awful name. The word addict here is somewhat serious. One thing I've been thinking for a while is that a lot of these hate and outrage trolls on the net are addicted to the brain chemicals these emotions trigger.
- revskill 8y agoWhy gitlab ?
- nenadg 8y agoit's great
- aboodman 8y agoThis also means that it will be impossible for third parties to limit access to your articles. ?? I don't understand. Somebody, somewhere is hosting the reading UI at vitriol.co, right? That's the chokepoint to attack. Political issues aside, it feels like this has to be client-side software in order to achieve what it sets out to - more like scuttlebutt.
- vitriolum 8y agoYou can download the code from here: https://gitlab.com/vitriolum/vitriol-web https://gitlab.com/vitriolum/vitriol-web and serve it from whenever you want, even localhost.
- fiatjaf 8y agoHow is it distributed and serverless if I'm pointing my browser to vitriol.co and getting stuff from there?
- fiatjaf 8y agoWhy aren't you storing the text content of the articles as text files? (If you were, they could be accessed from other places, not only through the Vitriol interface.)