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The “smolnet”, build for friends and friends of friends
- thih9 3y agoDoes not load for me. Hug of death? If yes, is there an alternative instance or an article describing the platform? > Proxy Error > The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request > Reason: Error reading from remote server
- gerikson 3y agoI think this site received the hug of death. https://web.archive.org/web/20230612115935/https://communitywiki.org/wiki/SmolNet https://web.archive.org/web/20230612115935/https://community...
- elektor 3y agoLooks like they’re using “smol” servers; it crashed under a few hundred HN visits ;)
- gerikson 3y agoTo be honest, that's kind of the point. When you're "webscale" you're inevitably at a level where you have to pay a lot of money just to keep the site up. Smolnet is supposed to be run from someone's basement.
- coldpie 3y agoMy $100/year shared webhosting held up just fine to a front-page HN post. I don't think that's "a lot" a of money, though it is probably more expensive than the power usage of a small server in someone's basement.
- throwaway22032 3y agoMaybe! In the UK $100/year gets you about a 20-40w constant load*. That's a fairly efficient machine, and then there's the router, modem etc. Granted some of that already exists, and a Raspberry Pi or similar would fit in that budget. * quick maths: $100/365 gives 27 cents a day or approx 1c per hour - at $0.50/kWh you have a 25w constant load and at $0.25/kWh you have 50w.
- zrail 3y agoHN traffic is honestly not that much. A recent thread puts it at between 10k and 30k visitors while you're in the top few slots, and assuming that lasts 4 hours or so is on the order of 2-5 rps, probably bursting up to 50 rps or so. Any halfway decent caching proxy is going to handle that without breaking a sweat.
- the_third_wave 3y ago> When you're "webscale" you're inevitably at a level where you have to pay a lot of money just to keep the site up This is true when thinking in centralised big-site terms but there are other ways to achieve a large reach, some of them already close to main-stream. Peertube [1] is an example of such, using a combination of Activitypub and peer to peer (here: bittorrent) to create a "web scale" platform without needing a lot of money. Does it work? A good question, Peertube itself certainly works fine but it would be an interesting test to see how far it actually scales. [1] https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
- hinkley 3y agoOne of my major beefs with IT conversations is the stubborn adherence to the manufacturing notion of 'economies of scale'. That's not how algorithms work. Most of the things we do are nlogn complexity. There are lots of breakpoints where 10x as many users cost you 11x as much in hardware, and we pretend it's going to cost us 8x. Any time your estimates are off by 40% should trigger your root cause analysis protocol. In particular we are lousy at statistics. We have to be right in the middle of the consequences of misreading them before we act. When you have 10 servers you might have to deal with a deployment race condition once a month. When you have 30 servers you might have to deal with one every week. That starts to materially affect your estimates when you have five of those sorts of things going on.
- nathants 3y agocloudflare workers + r2 is shockingly affordable.
- rcxdude 3y agoNot surprising considering there's a rant about the resource usage from web crawlers
- asim 3y agoI like this. Speaks to my own goal of creating "micro" communities. https://micro.mu https://micro.mu. We limit groups to 20 people. I think that's an ideal number for real connections. Need more, it's likely for a different type of communication.
- elektor 3y agoVery cool! Thanks for sharing. What’s the benefit of your service over a Signal group chat?
- asim 3y agoIt's not meant as a replacement to signal or WhatsApp but more a compliment for the "community" aspects which often just get lumped into a group. Community discussions usually breakdown by topic and so that's how micro chat is organised.
- stavros 3y agoTrying to use this, I get an error when entering a group. Seems like a cool idea, but it needs to have a lot more functionality to draw me in, I think.
- asim 3y agoYea sorry, there's some very random breakages happening right now. Working on it. Thanks for the feedback.
- bioxept 3y agoHow does this compare to a small discord server? What can it do better?
- asim 3y agoSo it's private and invite only by default. There is no element of "public" and the focus is on real connections with people you know rather than people you've never met in person. There's also no notifications or "is typing". The goal is really not to try emulate existing chat or bombard you with the need for immediate replies. It's a lot more focused on how most of our lives and mine personally operates now which is with less reaction and more laid back. Group sizes are also capped at 20.
- dizhn 3y agoI don't get where to click to have something happen or what to download to run this myself. Is this an idea to implement ourselves?
- OmarShehata 3y agoYes, this is just a wiki about small communities. I guess one of the problems of small communities is that you probably can't just one that's advertised since it'll likely be full, so you have to make your own or get invited to one.
- nicbou 3y agoRelated concept: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
- kensanata 3y agoI created a static copy of the page in order to save the wiki from death…
- newman8r 3y agoFor anyone else looking for solutions, I the use self-hosted Mattermost for my family and friends - been doing that for years and very happy with it.
- jacooper 3y agoGood luck getting friends/family to use this instead of WhatsApp/iMessage(in the U.S.). I tried to switch everyone to Signal, but it utterly failed, people took forever to reply, if they even do, and never actually contact me on it. Matrix works because it has bridges.
- bamfly 3y agoMain thing I want to self-host for friends, that's not served by any of a hundred chat apps: A place to share media reviews and recommendations. Wiki-like is OK, as long as table support is great. Difficulty: it should be able to helpfully look up and create entries for any new media it encounters, using various online sources (IMDB, The Movie Database, TVDB, maybe the Musicbrainz DB, something else authoritative-ish for video games, books, and comic books). So if you want to add a title to a table of, say, sci-fi movies, and link that to a review of same, if it's already got the movie, it should recommend it based on the title you type in, and if not, it should find likely candidates to suggest, and fill in things like release year, director, actors, et c., from outside sources, automatically, when you select one of them. It should be able to find all mentions of a given piece of media within its system, such that one could look up a page for a given, say, album, and get a list of every page where it's mentioned on the site. It should also maintain a watched/listened/played/read list for each user, and be able to import that from places like Letterboxd. Basically, a Wiki with smart media metadata import. It's the only thing we want to do that's not served adequately by chat.
- rakoo 3y agoChat is a very bad flow for this, because chat is a stream, not a garden. It's made for quick feedback. What you want is closer to a wiki, but I understand you need to share it with other people and discuss about it. I don't know of any software that does that, but the good thing is that maybe you don't need a new platform. Creating new platforms just splits the communities and is against the Unix philosophy we hold dear. Maybe a good first step is to be in the Fediverse, and create an actor per entry. That actor would contain all facts, potentially linking other entries. Anyone could @ movies, so you'd see the discussion about them. You can create lists, like "watched/listened/played/read" and add actors to those lists. Those actors don't post anything, they're just a "rallying point" for conversation. They're more encompassing than hashtags. Sounds like a weekend project for someone adventurous enough
- bamfly 3y agoYeah, I've considered slapping something together in Django or what have you—libraries exist to make a lot of this not that hard—but... kids. And the new Zelda, for that matter :-)
- TeMPOraL 3y agoWhat's with the sudden influx of "smol" things? Is this related to "smol" ML / "smol" AI models, and/or the HN user that (IIRC) is associated with them and likes to use the word "smol" in their comments?
- Kye 3y agoSmol webs, smol creatures, smol frens (often also creatures). Can't have too many.
- kodah 3y agoIt's just an internet culture word. Pubnix doesn't sound apparent to a lay user, smolnet might.
- falcolas 3y agoIt's a cat/dog/animal thing. At least that's where I see "smol" used the most, in relation to kittens and puppies and other newborn animals. And it's been brewing there for a few years now, and the word's escaping into more contexts.
- zikduruqe 3y ago> It's a cat/dog/animal thing And a pipi thing too.
- Shared404 3y ago'smol' is just a way of saying small that caught on in certain demographics which is starting to spread further, much like any other slang.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- klyrs 3y agoPeople love their neologisms.
- alex7734 3y ago
- machrider 3y agoOne thing I've worried about with self-hosting small (or smol) services is that I'm responsible for securing them against attackers. Even if my circle is 15 people using a particular service, potentially thousands of malicious actors will be poking at it over the months and years I'm running it. I'm a big fan of self-hosting, especially things that I can run inside my home with no internet-facing ports. But anything that will be outward facing has to be sandboxed from everything else, kept up to date, and monitored for intrusions. It can be daunting unless you definitely have time to stay on top of it. I'm curious if any self-hosters have thoughts about this.
- kensanata 3y agoAs the "Administration" tag for my blog will attest, the sysadmin side does take a lot of work. Every now and then something is down, something needs defending (like the current HN users all clicking on the site which is running without any caches…), and on and on. In my experience, it's not so much cybercriminals that keep me busy but bad programmers that write spiders that treat every website in the world like corporate infrastructure. Stuff like git, cgit, radicale, a bunch of web apps, a netnews server, an IRC server, those things aren't tricky. But of course I also decided not to host mail, matrix, Next Cloud and so on. You need to pick your battles, too.
- TheNewsIsHere 3y agoIn the past I ended up in a place where I self-hosted virtually everything I consumed within my network that could be self-hosted. Right down to major OS software update caching. It’s definitely exhausting and I hit upon a point where it felt like I couldn’t distinguish between home and business infrastructure. I expanded to include family stuff, and that became a massive headache. When you do that, it’s not always easy to extricate yourself either. It took several years to downsize so my services were only consumed by me again. Then a few more to fully move to non-self-hosted almost-everything. I used to host my mail but that eventually becomes a headache. It didn’t become an admin headache, but overtime it became either/or (depending on the time) a technical liability or a security concern. These days I try to buy/pay for the services I consume instead of self-hosting. However I’ve been moving back to assuming a “self hosting first” mindset because it seems like so many tech companies are actively trying to alienate their user base lately. Tailscale does make sharing services amongst groups of technically minded friends _crazy_ simple.
- pwb25 3y agoSo like a normal website as they always were before all those web 2.0 platforms? That then did a 180 from being platforms and started with "content creators"?
- digitalsushi 3y agoI think so? I'm building the idea out myself as I learn what this is. If web 2.0 was the introduction of comment systems, and turned each web page into a performance upon a stage, with a goal of audience participation / loudness / re-sharing, and content creating being the evolution of publication to hustling... I think lots of people would be satisfied by a local internet of people they trust, to share ideas in a non-commercial, private, 'safe' way. But the real magic to me would be not worrying about it being hacked, or deployed, or monitored, or any of the pollutant infrastructure that we got good at, that unfortunately makes everything operational and robust.
- unshavedyak 3y agoLove this. I've been exploring (literally in the first few days) writing my own ActivityPub aggregator/client. I'm using similar motivations as this. Ie i want it to be stupidly easy to self host and allow for features that may not scale well to hundreds of thousands or millions of users. To me that's one area where some ActivityPub implementations fail. They take not-insignificant startup costs and that friction makes it less fun to self host. I feel like in a "fun" implementation you could spin it up on a $5/m VPS, plus a domain so if you're lean maybe $15 startup (domain + vps) with ~$6 monthly costs. That's filesystem storage with no persistent backup but rsync could get you a long way if you're trying to remain cheap. Plus the app could help you backup, offer encrypted backups to let the community help, etc. I know i know, ActivityPub suffers for small instances. It's an area i want to explore, and explore ways to augment the spec or go around it for efficiency. Regardless, i think we need to get more into these micro worlds. Yea, you could argue ActivityPub is not micro if it still connects everyone. I'm speaking micro in the sense of the "old web" though, where lots of independent websites formed a network of content, backlinking, etc. Tooling to embrace that, propagate, etc seems useful to me - but keeping micro also seems essential, to me.
- ryanmpierson 3y agoI miss when BBS were all the rage.
- op00to 3y agoI do and I don't. I miss the excitement, I miss the feeling of finding something new that's precious. You only had so much time on the phone in those days, even if you were sticking to your free dialing area. I also got exposed to a lot of stuff at a young age partially enabled by BBSes, and I wonder how it affected the adult I am today. I was in a LOT of precarious situations far outside what might be considered appropriate free range parenting. Anyway, agree man, I miss BBSes!
- samsquire 3y agoI enjoyed the point (paraphrased) "that just because it doesn't scale, doesn't mean it won't work". People (can) enjoy exquisite gourmet restaurant meal, an all you can eat inclusive holiday package or coffee in a coffee shop but it probably doesn't scale. We don't actually need complicated software or web application to run a community. Webrings were a way of navigating a very small web in the nascent days of the world wide web. People would link to eachother. I think invite based communities can be high quality without moderation. dang does a lot of work to moderate this community. If you curate everything you read, then you can ignore stuff you don't like. So I have a solution that is low tech too and doesn't require any protocols than what you're already using. Doesn't require your own web host or custom software, you can just use browser and you already know the website. I use an ultra low tech solution to sharing things I want to share. It costs me nothing, it doesn't require an elaborate technical stack that requires me to remember arcane commands, maintain it or upgrade it or run a server. It doesn't require moderation or spam filtering or hosting. I just use GitHub README.md as my blog and journals. Please do this too, then tell me about it. I would love to read other people's technical thoughts. So please do the same! I have 5 journal repositories on GitHub each with 100-800 entries on each of them because I'm interested in writing down my thoughts. I have a number of repositories on GitHub for different purposes: * blog: where my blog is hosted * ideas ideas2 ideas3 ideas4 ideas5: my idea journals. I write computer related thoughts into this every day until I get to 100-800 and then create a new repository. * wants: some things that I want to exist * personal-manifesto: my own code of conduct
- gilmore606 3y agoIf you want to build an insular community for your nerd friends, put up a MUD server. You can build silly text toys, write tiny pieces of code for stupid fun, and the best part is, normies can't even figure out your community exists or how to connect to it, because wtf is telnet? It's also effectively invisible to the three letter agencies and whomever else.