7 ms·

Git as a janky Twitter replacement

318 points by est 4y ago

udia 4y ago
danbmil99 4y ago
Very clever. I would be concerned however that GitHub may shut you down at some point and if this got serious it would have to be running on federated git servers and then you would need a secure synchronization protocol Etc pretty soon you're looking at Matrix
- yellowapple 4y ago
  > and then you would need a secure synchronization protocol Would you? Seems straightforward to point to multiple pushRemotes and federate that way, much like what's possible for any other sort of Git repo.
- sitta 4y ago
  A few months ago I started playing with using Matrix as a janky social media replacement. The idea was to setup a space with rooms that I post in. One room might be a public, unencrypted room that anyone can read (ala Twitter/Mastadon/etc), and another might be just for close friends, etc. Then, I just post to them like you would on any other platform. It's great because it's the only platform like this where you have the ability to encrypt if you want to, but it is of course missing some features. The biggest being the ability to share posts and have a meta feed. There are also smaller annoyances that would not scale well, such as the fact that people cannot make personal room name aliases. I still totally recommend it.
stolenmerch 4y ago
I've been doing this for the past couple of weeks after reading this tweet: https://twitter.com/obryant666/status/1395816947913138178 https://twitter.com/obryant666/status/1395816947913138178 It's oddly fulfilling.
mastazi 4y ago
If we're going minimal, then why not Finger as a Twitter replacement? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol) Finger communities/hosting: https://finger.farm/ https://finger.farm/ https://happynetbox.com/ https://happynetbox.com/ https://plan.cat/ https://plan.cat/ (thank you gbrown for reminding me of this) browsers that support finger (in addition to other protocols such as Gopher and Gemini): https://kristall.random-projects.net/ https://kristall.random-projects.net/ https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/
- angrygoat 4y ago
  Hah, those were the days. I remember using finger in the late 90s/early 00s to figure out whether people were at the computer club before I walked across campus for lunch :)
  - layer8 4y ago
    You mean “to finger out”. ;)
- prox 4y ago
  Is there an aggregator for fingers? So it becomes more RSS or like twitter in format?
  - mastazi 4y ago
    the home pages of happynetbox.com and plan.cat have a list of recent updates. It's worth saving them as bookmarks on your Finger client. finger://@happynetbox.com finger://@plan.cat Unfortunately finger.farm only has that feature available on its web mirror, but not on its native finger-protocol home page. In addition to those, over time I have also bookmarked some individual profiles, like this one which is one of my favourites finger://blast-rules@happynetbox.com Oh and also, in case you want to check the weather around the world: finger://@graph.no (web version: https://graph.no/ https://graph.no/ )
  - gojomo 4y ago
Jamie9912 4y ago
Definitely not decentralized, also don't tweet anything NSFW because Github will ban your account without hesitation, removing all issues you created, even for projects you don't own. Source: happened to me because I had an "NSFW" Github page that displayed randomly generated Imgur pictures.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  Just use a server other than GitHub. Boom, federated and NSFW-friendly.
  - xigoi 4y ago
    Then the tool for subscribing to all people won't be able to discover you.
    - rakoo 4y ago
      That's why you need to split "list of all people" (necessarily centralized for discovery) and actual storage (decentralized). Everyone can have their own repo anywhere as long as it's fetchable by git, and the creator of the tool can maintain a list of all repos branches
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      The tool would just need to add your server to its list of servers to scan.
uri4 4y ago
For development I would just recommend github issues with comments. Way more user friendly. Also separate identities, perhaps even different server. No need to get main account compromised, or to get banned from Github for spicy comments.
beAbU 4y ago
You can call this a blockchain driven twitter and you would only be about half wrong.
- rmnclmnt 4y ago
  Can you here the VCs coming?
  - smallerfish 4y ago
    I mean you joke, but look at slack. Make a reasonably nice web/phone frontend to it, and boom - you're on your way.
- lionkor 4y ago
  technically, its already on ycombinator now
habibur 4y ago
Very clever.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
quickthrower2 4y ago
Please don’t make a front end they say!
pfoof 4y ago
This has the potential to benchmark how many forks of a single project Github can handle, especially with `follow_everyone` script
- isitmadeofglass 4y ago
  Data sharing has close to a quarter of a million forks. This project would have to become an extremely popular experiment before it starts pushing that limit. That said, I hope it does; this is a great and fun project.
Ferret7446 4y ago
It's basically a janky blog+RSS. Architecturally, it's as if there were a simple/standard web/blogserver software that could be hosted freely. The key here is exploiting the standardization of Git and availability of free public Git hosting. Done properly, one could create some packaged blog(+RSS reader) container, but the free hosting support isn't there. You could use GCP free instances, but setting up a domain name+TLS is a barrier, even for some technical folks. The idea is neat, definitely a hack in the traditional sense.
stevage 4y ago
Does someone think there's a technology problem here to solve?
- cpach 4y ago
  I think they’re just having fun (^_^)
- est 4y ago
  You can ask the same question to 2007 twitter.
- amelius 4y ago
  Nope. But if you're holding a hammer ...
stargrave 4y ago
My blog (http://blog.stargrave.org/russian/ http://blog.stargrave.org/russian/) initially also used Git as a storage, where each commit is a post, and its log message is the content itself. If I add gitweb/cgit, when it will also feature web interface and Atom feed automatically. Later I added my own rendering engine to it: http://www.sgblog.stargrave.org/ http://www.sgblog.stargrave.org/ for efficiency and automatic transparent gopher/gemini protocols support. Each post also can have some dynamic tags/topics attached, that are stored in git's notes branch. And later I also added ability to leave comments, by sending email message, that is committed in another git-note branch in the form of recfile (https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/ https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/) plain-text comment. Everything is plain text, can be used with Git solely, but has an engine for better rendering and wider protocols support.
- bdhcuidbebe 4y ago
  > and its log message is the content itself That’s a curious design choice. Care to share more details, like why not commit the content? How do you deal with fixing typos?
  - xwowsersx 4y ago
    git commit --amend
  - dlqx 4y ago
    git rebase -i ...
GiorgioG 4y ago
Is Twitter going away? What did I miss? I know a lot of folks are taking Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter as a “the sky is falling” moment, but can we please have a reality check here? As a business Twitter was bloated and has stagnated over the past few years. I’m taking an optimistic view of where Twitter may go as a product/service. Take a deep breath folks. We don’t need a half assed Twitter replacement.
- rendall 4y ago
  > Is Twitter going away? What did I miss? Speaking as a person who has been generally well-disposed towards Elon Musk and like him also would describe myself as a left-leaning, centrist, free-speech absolutist, I think his behavior has been erratic lately. Perhaps his behavior has always been erratic, but it just never affected me personally. Speaking as a resident of a country neighboring Russia, his amateur diplomacy from a few weeks ago does affect me, and in my view was literally dangerous. He pontificated from a place of profound ignorance at best and continued to double down even in the face of very smart domain experts and ordinary Ukrainians asking him - begging him - to please zip it. Then he acted aggrieved and hurt when his "peace proposal" was not received well. I'm not sure what is being accomplished by the latest Twitter shenanigans, but I'm seeing the same behavior of his ignoring domain experts. For instance, moderation is a difficult social and technical problem irrespective of political view. Advertisers are not renewing their contracts with Twitter, not because of Musk's political views, but because they did not have confidence that their brands would not be tainted by association with unmoderated nastiness. Again, Musk attributed this to left-wing activists and not his own inability to reassure his business associates. He framed it as a free-speech issue when it is absolutely not. Then he threatened to "name and shame" the advertisers who declined to renew. He fired the domain experts who understand moderation, and so the institutional knowledge about it - arguably, what he bought when he bought Twitter - is gone, never to return. So, I don't think Twitter will recover from that. Perhaps if I had not experienced his amateur diplomacy directly, I would just continue to think of Musk as a fellow who is very good at business and is possibly playing multi-dimensional chess. But I cannot unlearn what I have learned. His personal brand is permanently tarnished, for me.
  - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wildcow 4y ago
This is a simple distributed ledger. I knew blockchain would soon take over Twitter. When is twatcoin going online? I need to make fast monies.
eurasiantiger 4y ago
GitHub is going to hate everyone who uses this.
- rexreed 4y ago
  You can host your own Git repository or Git commit on multiple Git repositories. When I started with Git, I just self-hosted. I only went to Bitbucket for search and the web interface.
AirStreamer27 4y ago
Yes this is a perfectly normal approach that I’m sure everybody popular will want to use
kyaghmour 4y ago
I proposed something like that a few years back: https://lwn.net/Articles/780365/ https://lwn.net/Articles/780365/ There is something to this idea ... using git as a distributed (micro-)blogging/publishing system.
voidz 4y ago
Alright, I'll be the one to ask the "what's next" question. What's next? A revival of Gopher?
- heminispathe 4y ago
  I can't tell if you're being ironic. Look up the Gemini protocol
rhabarba 4y ago
This would be just another use case for SCCS, actually.
papito 4y ago
Twitter does not have a technology problem - the prototype was famously put together with Ruby-on-Rails in a weekend. Most of the effort comes after that, with moderation and legal compliance. There is really no better reality check for those who delude themselves into writing a clone than this: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...
gigatexal 4y ago
Janky!?! It’s awesome
m3kw9 4y ago
Nobody is gonna go to a replacement without most of the people switching.

318 points by est 4y ago

udia 4y ago

Very clever. I would be concerned however that GitHub may shut you down at some point and if this got serious it would have to be running on federated git servers and then you would need a secure synchronization protocol Etc pretty soon you're looking at Matrix

yellowapple 4y ago
> and then you would need a secure synchronization protocol Would you? Seems straightforward to point to multiple pushRemotes and federate that way, much like what's possible for any other sort of Git repo.
sitta 4y ago
A few months ago I started playing with using Matrix as a janky social media replacement. The idea was to setup a space with rooms that I post in. One room might be a public, unencrypted room that anyone can read (ala Twitter/Mastadon/etc), and another might be just for close friends, etc. Then, I just post to them like you would on any other platform. It's great because it's the only platform like this where you have the ability to encrypt if you want to, but it is of course missing some features. The biggest being the ability to share posts and have a meta feed. There are also smaller annoyances that would not scale well, such as the fact that people cannot make personal room name aliases. I still totally recommend it.

stolenmerch 4y ago

I've been doing this for the past couple of weeks after reading this tweet: https://twitter.com/obryant666/status/1395816947913138178 https://twitter.com/obryant666/status/1395816947913138178 It's oddly fulfilling.

mastazi 4y ago

If we're going minimal, then why not Finger as a Twitter replacement? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol) Finger communities/hosting: https://finger.farm/ https://finger.farm/ https://happynetbox.com/ https://happynetbox.com/ https://plan.cat/ https://plan.cat/ (thank you gbrown for reminding me of this) browsers that support finger (in addition to other protocols such as Gopher and Gemini): https://kristall.random-projects.net/ https://kristall.random-projects.net/ https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/

angrygoat 4y ago
Hah, those were the days. I remember using finger in the late 90s/early 00s to figure out whether people were at the computer club before I walked across campus for lunch :)
- layer8 4y ago
  You mean “to finger out”. ;)
prox 4y ago
Is there an aggregator for fingers? So it becomes more RSS or like twitter in format?
- mastazi 4y ago
  the home pages of happynetbox.com and plan.cat have a list of recent updates. It's worth saving them as bookmarks on your Finger client. finger://@happynetbox.com finger://@plan.cat Unfortunately finger.farm only has that feature available on its web mirror, but not on its native finger-protocol home page. In addition to those, over time I have also bookmarked some individual profiles, like this one which is one of my favourites finger://blast-rules@happynetbox.com Oh and also, in case you want to check the weather around the world: finger://@graph.no (web version: https://graph.no/ https://graph.no/ )
- gojomo 4y ago

Jamie9912 4y ago

Definitely not decentralized, also don't tweet anything NSFW because Github will ban your account without hesitation, removing all issues you created, even for projects you don't own. Source: happened to me because I had an "NSFW" Github page that displayed randomly generated Imgur pictures.

yellowapple 4y ago
Just use a server other than GitHub. Boom, federated and NSFW-friendly.
- xigoi 4y ago
  Then the tool for subscribing to all people won't be able to discover you.
  - rakoo 4y ago
    That's why you need to split "list of all people" (necessarily centralized for discovery) and actual storage (decentralized). Everyone can have their own repo anywhere as long as it's fetchable by git, and the creator of the tool can maintain a list of all repos branches
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    The tool would just need to add your server to its list of servers to scan.

uri4 4y ago

For development I would just recommend github issues with comments. Way more user friendly. Also separate identities, perhaps even different server. No need to get main account compromised, or to get banned from Github for spicy comments.

beAbU 4y ago

You can call this a blockchain driven twitter and you would only be about half wrong.

rmnclmnt 4y ago
Can you here the VCs coming?
- smallerfish 4y ago
  I mean you joke, but look at slack. Make a reasonably nice web/phone frontend to it, and boom - you're on your way.
lionkor 4y ago
technically, its already on ycombinator now

habibur 4y ago

Very clever.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

quickthrower2 4y ago

Please don’t make a front end they say!

pfoof 4y ago

This has the potential to benchmark how many forks of a single project Github can handle, especially with `follow_everyone` script

isitmadeofglass 4y ago
Data sharing has close to a quarter of a million forks. This project would have to become an extremely popular experiment before it starts pushing that limit. That said, I hope it does; this is a great and fun project.

Ferret7446 4y ago

It's basically a janky blog+RSS. Architecturally, it's as if there were a simple/standard web/blogserver software that could be hosted freely. The key here is exploiting the standardization of Git and availability of free public Git hosting. Done properly, one could create some packaged blog(+RSS reader) container, but the free hosting support isn't there. You could use GCP free instances, but setting up a domain name+TLS is a barrier, even for some technical folks. The idea is neat, definitely a hack in the traditional sense.

stevage 4y ago

Does someone think there's a technology problem here to solve?

cpach 4y ago
I think they’re just having fun (^_^)
est 4y ago
You can ask the same question to 2007 twitter.
amelius 4y ago
Nope. But if you're holding a hammer ...

stargrave 4y ago

My blog (http://blog.stargrave.org/russian/ http://blog.stargrave.org/russian/) initially also used Git as a storage, where each commit is a post, and its log message is the content itself. If I add gitweb/cgit, when it will also feature web interface and Atom feed automatically. Later I added my own rendering engine to it: http://www.sgblog.stargrave.org/ http://www.sgblog.stargrave.org/ for efficiency and automatic transparent gopher/gemini protocols support. Each post also can have some dynamic tags/topics attached, that are stored in git's notes branch. And later I also added ability to leave comments, by sending email message, that is committed in another git-note branch in the form of recfile (https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/ https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/) plain-text comment. Everything is plain text, can be used with Git solely, but has an engine for better rendering and wider protocols support.

bdhcuidbebe 4y ago
> and its log message is the content itself That’s a curious design choice. Care to share more details, like why not commit the content? How do you deal with fixing typos?
- xwowsersx 4y ago
  git commit --amend
- dlqx 4y ago
  git rebase -i ...

GiorgioG 4y ago

Is Twitter going away? What did I miss? I know a lot of folks are taking Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter as a “the sky is falling” moment, but can we please have a reality check here? As a business Twitter was bloated and has stagnated over the past few years. I’m taking an optimistic view of where Twitter may go as a product/service. Take a deep breath folks. We don’t need a half assed Twitter replacement.

rendall 4y ago
> Is Twitter going away? What did I miss? Speaking as a person who has been generally well-disposed towards Elon Musk and like him also would describe myself as a left-leaning, centrist, free-speech absolutist, I think his behavior has been erratic lately. Perhaps his behavior has always been erratic, but it just never affected me personally. Speaking as a resident of a country neighboring Russia, his amateur diplomacy from a few weeks ago does affect me, and in my view was literally dangerous. He pontificated from a place of profound ignorance at best and continued to double down even in the face of very smart domain experts and ordinary Ukrainians asking him - begging him - to please zip it. Then he acted aggrieved and hurt when his "peace proposal" was not received well. I'm not sure what is being accomplished by the latest Twitter shenanigans, but I'm seeing the same behavior of his ignoring domain experts. For instance, moderation is a difficult social and technical problem irrespective of political view. Advertisers are not renewing their contracts with Twitter, not because of Musk's political views, but because they did not have confidence that their brands would not be tainted by association with unmoderated nastiness. Again, Musk attributed this to left-wing activists and not his own inability to reassure his business associates. He framed it as a free-speech issue when it is absolutely not. Then he threatened to "name and shame" the advertisers who declined to renew. He fired the domain experts who understand moderation, and so the institutional knowledge about it - arguably, what he bought when he bought Twitter - is gone, never to return. So, I don't think Twitter will recover from that. Perhaps if I had not experienced his amateur diplomacy directly, I would just continue to think of Musk as a fellow who is very good at business and is possibly playing multi-dimensional chess. But I cannot unlearn what I have learned. His personal brand is permanently tarnished, for me.
- 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wildcow 4y ago

This is a simple distributed ledger. I knew blockchain would soon take over Twitter. When is twatcoin going online? I need to make fast monies.

eurasiantiger 4y ago

GitHub is going to hate everyone who uses this.

rexreed 4y ago
You can host your own Git repository or Git commit on multiple Git repositories. When I started with Git, I just self-hosted. I only went to Bitbucket for search and the web interface.

AirStreamer27 4y ago

Yes this is a perfectly normal approach that I’m sure everybody popular will want to use

kyaghmour 4y ago

I proposed something like that a few years back: https://lwn.net/Articles/780365/ https://lwn.net/Articles/780365/ There is something to this idea ... using git as a distributed (micro-)blogging/publishing system.

voidz 4y ago

Alright, I'll be the one to ask the "what's next" question. What's next? A revival of Gopher?

heminispathe 4y ago
I can't tell if you're being ironic. Look up the Gemini protocol

rhabarba 4y ago

This would be just another use case for SCCS, actually.

papito 4y ago

Twitter does not have a technology problem - the prototype was famously put together with Ruby-on-Rails in a weekend. Most of the effort comes after that, with moderation and legal compliance. There is really no better reality check for those who delude themselves into writing a clone than this: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

gigatexal 4y ago

Janky!?! It’s awesome

m3kw9 4y ago

Nobody is gonna go to a replacement without most of the people switching.