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The issue with federated services is that they operate from the assumption that everyone has an anarchist sysadmin in their friend group who is going to help ev

by woah 8y ago

The issue with federated services is that they operate from the assumption that everyone has an anarchist sysadmin in their friend group who is going to help everyone run the federated infrastructure. I’ll use SSB as an example. If you install the software and make an identity, you’ll soon find that you have to sign up with something called a “pub server” to actually get any of your friend’s updates. Where do you find such a pub server? There’s a wiki: https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-server/wiki/Pub-Servers https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-server/wiki/Pub-Servers. The author of the wiki has found that it is necessary to admonish people not to just pick the first pub server on the list, since there isn’t really any criteria by which to choose them. If there was a sudden influx of more than a few hundred new users, it would cause utter chaos on this list. Someone would need to spend a lot of money on hosting, with no way to earn revenue.

fenwick67 8y ago
The hosting cost problem becomes acceptable if the pub server is fast enough and hosting is cheap enough. Look at IRC.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  The cost would be zero if residential ISPs issued static ipv6 and allowed servers.
  - fenwick67 8y ago
    Yeah, the more I look at P2P applications the more I realize our infrastructure is not set up to support them without some serious work on the application side.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    The hosting cost would be negligible. The policing costs less so. Hygiene matters.
  - heavenlyblue 8y ago
    I don’t think static IPs are as relevant today. What I do for my home PC (that’s for ipv4, but it doesn’t matter) is I map my current external IP in Google Cloud DNS every 15 minutes with a TTL of 0. Of course I only make the change if needed, so I am easily below the paid threshold, too. In a properly p2p system the idea of certain servers being offline for short amounts of time is considered a norm. So should be OK either way.
  - Nextgrid 8y ago
    The “allowing servers” part is a non issue. By the time it becomes an issue, you’d already have more issues like the need of more bandwidth which would make you switch providers anyway.
riffic 8y ago
>Where do you find such a pub server? If it's anything like email, you would use the server your employer or organization you belong to created an account on for you to use.
staltz 8y ago
In SSB, pubs seem like an essential (and flawed) part of the network, and this may be true at the present time, but not forever. I'm working on a few alternatives to pub servers, one of them is a server that has no storage of data, it just acts as a meeting point for clients, and sets up tunnels between them. The other is a 1-feed pub, where the idea is to setup a mirror for your data in case you are a feed that has many thousands of followers. In both cases I want to make it easy (as in Heroku one click installer button) to start a server. The idea is that the easier it is to start a server, the more servers there will be in quantity. Off from the internet, SSB already has good mechanisms for sharing data (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), which other protocols don't seem to have. Its hard to grok how good this is unless you're living in poor internet environments. SSB on the internet is not as well designed as SSB off the internet.
- stdcli 8y ago
  Despite working with another protocol in the decentralized space, I have to say Andrew Staltz, who I assume is the person who made this comment based on the username, is doing such a great job with manyverse: https://www.manyver.se/ https://www.manyver.se/ and I recommend downloading it to try it out. It is one of the first breakout apps (in my opinion) in the space that feels user friendly and really makes it seem like theres a viable decentralized alternative to facebook. The bluetooth/wifi option helps alot with making it user friendly when it comes to pub servers, etc. I actually found out about manyverse last year when it was trending front page on hacker news and I'm glad I looked into it. He is being humble by not bringing up is app here despite it being a beautiful one that feels seemless, and being extremely responsive to his users (you can even submit issues to gitlab via by clicking a button in app) but listening to his podcasts on solarpunk, and in general, he seems like a humble guy so I'm not surprised. I am very interested to see how the features manyverse plans to roll out help push the user friendly aspects needed is the SB protocol space.
Animats 8y ago
That should be automated. Look at the way Bitcoin nodes find peers. (Which has nothing to do with the blockchain.) There are a few well known nodes, but they mostly redirect new nodes to other nodes.
zrm 8y ago
> The issue with federated services is that they operate from the assumption that everyone has an anarchist sysadmin in their friend group who is going to help everyone run the federated infrastructure. I'm not sure this is a real problem. Email is federated, scales to approximately everyone, and there is no shortage of email providers that all interoperate with each other. How to fund it when no one you know wants to operate it personally is also no great mystery. Either the server provider puts ads on it, or the users pay for the service. And the individual users can decide which of the various options they prefer but can still interact with everybody who makes a different choice.
- myself248 8y ago
  Funding community networks is one of the few use-cases I've seen that actually seem to make sense for cryptocurrency. The Althea wireless mesh is doing this -- you "load" your router with a certain amount of credit, and it tries to get you the lowest-cost transport. People running nodes have incentive to optimize their antenna placement and signal, so they can carry more traffic and get paid for it. I don't know if this directly applies to SSB since there's really nothing to "run", other than pubs which we've already established are only a stopgap solution anyway. Simply participating in the network (leaving your client running) is what provides the real "infrastructure", such as it is.
lucideer 8y ago
Pub servers are very much considered a temporary workaround in the Scuttleverse, and there is a lot of ongoing work to make onboarding both more directly user-friendly, and also less dependent on "having an anarchist sysadmin in your friend group". Right now, without pub servers you can: 1. find friends in your immediate vicinity over WiFi/Bluetooth/etc.-type nearby protocols. 2. if you have a friend (see #1), you can connect to friends-of-friends (#1 may seem extremely limiting at first, but it's actually only limiting for a technology which is not popular in your local area—network effect problems—so "in theory" it's not really so bad when you think about it. I've probably added a good portion of my FB friends in their presence) However, one of the main alternatives being actively worked on is DHT invites. This is basically the "torrent magnet link" equivalent for SSB. See various links to work on this below: [0] https://gitlab.com/staltz/ssb-dht-invite https://gitlab.com/staltz/ssb-dht-invite [1] https://gitlab.com/staltz/manyverse/issues/186 https://gitlab.com/staltz/manyverse/issues/186 [2] https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/pull/862 https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/pull/862 [3] %r6dTZ4WG7kuLFfGlUR1DAhyat7YEuX682mGI9UJXlc4=.sha256

by woah 8y ago

fenwick67 8y ago

The hosting cost problem becomes acceptable if the pub server is fast enough and hosting is cheap enough. Look at IRC.

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
The cost would be zero if residential ISPs issued static ipv6 and allowed servers.
- fenwick67 8y ago
  Yeah, the more I look at P2P applications the more I realize our infrastructure is not set up to support them without some serious work on the application side.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  The hosting cost would be negligible. The policing costs less so. Hygiene matters.
- heavenlyblue 8y ago
  I don’t think static IPs are as relevant today. What I do for my home PC (that’s for ipv4, but it doesn’t matter) is I map my current external IP in Google Cloud DNS every 15 minutes with a TTL of 0. Of course I only make the change if needed, so I am easily below the paid threshold, too. In a properly p2p system the idea of certain servers being offline for short amounts of time is considered a norm. So should be OK either way.
- Nextgrid 8y ago
  The “allowing servers” part is a non issue. By the time it becomes an issue, you’d already have more issues like the need of more bandwidth which would make you switch providers anyway.

riffic 8y ago

>Where do you find such a pub server? If it's anything like email, you would use the server your employer or organization you belong to created an account on for you to use.

staltz 8y ago

In SSB, pubs seem like an essential (and flawed) part of the network, and this may be true at the present time, but not forever. I'm working on a few alternatives to pub servers, one of them is a server that has no storage of data, it just acts as a meeting point for clients, and sets up tunnels between them. The other is a 1-feed pub, where the idea is to setup a mirror for your data in case you are a feed that has many thousands of followers. In both cases I want to make it easy (as in Heroku one click installer button) to start a server. The idea is that the easier it is to start a server, the more servers there will be in quantity. Off from the internet, SSB already has good mechanisms for sharing data (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), which other protocols don't seem to have. Its hard to grok how good this is unless you're living in poor internet environments. SSB on the internet is not as well designed as SSB off the internet.

stdcli 8y ago
Despite working with another protocol in the decentralized space, I have to say Andrew Staltz, who I assume is the person who made this comment based on the username, is doing such a great job with manyverse: https://www.manyver.se/ https://www.manyver.se/ and I recommend downloading it to try it out. It is one of the first breakout apps (in my opinion) in the space that feels user friendly and really makes it seem like theres a viable decentralized alternative to facebook. The bluetooth/wifi option helps alot with making it user friendly when it comes to pub servers, etc. I actually found out about manyverse last year when it was trending front page on hacker news and I'm glad I looked into it. He is being humble by not bringing up is app here despite it being a beautiful one that feels seemless, and being extremely responsive to his users (you can even submit issues to gitlab via by clicking a button in app) but listening to his podcasts on solarpunk, and in general, he seems like a humble guy so I'm not surprised. I am very interested to see how the features manyverse plans to roll out help push the user friendly aspects needed is the SB protocol space.

Animats 8y ago

That should be automated. Look at the way Bitcoin nodes find peers. (Which has nothing to do with the blockchain.) There are a few well known nodes, but they mostly redirect new nodes to other nodes.

zrm 8y ago

> The issue with federated services is that they operate from the assumption that everyone has an anarchist sysadmin in their friend group who is going to help everyone run the federated infrastructure. I'm not sure this is a real problem. Email is federated, scales to approximately everyone, and there is no shortage of email providers that all interoperate with each other. How to fund it when no one you know wants to operate it personally is also no great mystery. Either the server provider puts ads on it, or the users pay for the service. And the individual users can decide which of the various options they prefer but can still interact with everybody who makes a different choice.

myself248 8y ago
Funding community networks is one of the few use-cases I've seen that actually seem to make sense for cryptocurrency. The Althea wireless mesh is doing this -- you "load" your router with a certain amount of credit, and it tries to get you the lowest-cost transport. People running nodes have incentive to optimize their antenna placement and signal, so they can carry more traffic and get paid for it. I don't know if this directly applies to SSB since there's really nothing to "run", other than pubs which we've already established are only a stopgap solution anyway. Simply participating in the network (leaving your client running) is what provides the real "infrastructure", such as it is.

lucideer 8y ago

Pub servers are very much considered a temporary workaround in the Scuttleverse, and there is a lot of ongoing work to make onboarding both more directly user-friendly, and also less dependent on "having an anarchist sysadmin in your friend group". Right now, without pub servers you can: 1. find friends in your immediate vicinity over WiFi/Bluetooth/etc.-type nearby protocols. 2. if you have a friend (see #1), you can connect to friends-of-friends (#1 may seem extremely limiting at first, but it's actually only limiting for a technology which is not popular in your local area—network effect problems—so "in theory" it's not really so bad when you think about it. I've probably added a good portion of my FB friends in their presence) However, one of the main alternatives being actively worked on is DHT invites. This is basically the "torrent magnet link" equivalent for SSB. See various links to work on this below: [0] https://gitlab.com/staltz/ssb-dht-invite https://gitlab.com/staltz/ssb-dht-invite [1] https://gitlab.com/staltz/manyverse/issues/186 https://gitlab.com/staltz/manyverse/issues/186 [2] https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/pull/862 https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/pull/862 [3] %r6dTZ4WG7kuLFfGlUR1DAhyat7YEuX682mGI9UJXlc4=.sha256