7 ms·

Mastodon for Apple II

222 points by kirubakaran 3y ago

PaulHoule 3y ago
Might double the number of people who use Mastodon.
Almondsetat 3y ago
Save for encryption and video playback, if social media and chat protocols were public we could still comfortably use Facebook, Whatsapp, LinkedIn and whatever from computers from the 80s
- wang_li 3y ago
  On one hand this project just uses an Apple II as a front end for something running on a raspberry pi. On the other hand, the 80386 and 68000 are both '80s era CPUs. The 80486 just barely squeezed in in 1989, with the first systems available fourth quarter. Super VGA video cards were available by 1987. Macintosh system software had a TCP/IP stack in 1988. I would think that you could access modern social media from an '80s era computer if you went with the latter half of the decade. If you are talking about the first half? Not likely. A 1 MHz 6502 would have a hard time keeping up with SLIP over 9600 baud, let alone 56kb.
  - whartung 3y ago
    One of the beauties of USENET was it’s store and forward model. As such I had no real issues using USENET and email back in the day with a 2400 baud Hayes SmartModem. Also helped it was all lightweight text messages and, naturally, I didn’t download the entire feed, just the few topics I was interested in.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 8organicbits 3y ago
  If you're into this idea, here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NentMKyVGog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NentMKyVGog
- blowski 3y ago
  But would all those social networks then exist at all, with their massively broad user base? I’d love to believe they would - we still have SMTP and HTTP. But all open source social networks seem to believe complexity is a benefit, so put off most people, and the network effects don’t materialise.
  - spookie 3y ago
    Where does the complexity from Mastodon and other Fediverse social platforms come from? The fact that there are instances? Mastodon seems to streamline that experience pretty well. Honestly, curious for feedback
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      People come to Mastodon, in general, with experience from other, centralized social media networks, so they're bringing those expectations. Whether it works like email is irrelevant because it doesn't work like Twitter. Here are a few key ways in which it doesn't work like Twitter that are off-putting, and why they are hard to change, even if we wanted to. 1) Following another user because you liked one post: when that user isn't on your instance, you usually have to do a three-step dance: click on the user to get to their timeline (on another instance), click "follow," and now enter your username into a dialog box because you're on another server. That last step is weird and off-putting. It's also completely necessary, because different servers don't have a cross-domain trust to pass your username around so (we know as web devs) you must tell the other server who you are; the architecture is protecting your anonymity by design by not divulging that data. But, relative to Twitter, that's weird. I don't think it is fixable without a change to the domain-based trust model. And, of course, this is yet another example of how people say they want privacy and anonymity online, but when you implement it for them they get frustrated at the usability tradeoffs those concerns demand. 2) A defederation split between your node and another node means you could lose access to people you follow. There is an analogy in the Twitterverse... Someone you follow could get banned. But that's different than someone you follow going away because their "neighbor" was being a Nazi and your server admin axed the whole node in response. Twitter users don't have "neighbors." Everyone's a neighbor. Entirely new mental model moving to the Fediverse. This is, again, a feature... But it's a feature some people find extremely valuable and others find off-putting complexity. (Sidebar: I actually got into running my own node for this reason: I realized a good friend of mine wasn't followable from my first account because years ago my server admin had decided on a "no furries" rule and my friend's server happened to be furry-content friendly. Twitter doesn't make you build a red-string-map of historical drama to figure out what node to join). 3) Smaller nodes change the risk model. There are tradeoffs to decentralization: if your node goes dead, the whole network hasn't gone dead. But if your node goes dead, that's hugely inconvenient... And with no money on the table and individual communities being smaller, nodes go dead more often than Twitter goes dead (the fact that Twitter is still there in spite of everything that's happened to it is a strong example of the stickiness of a corporate-backed venture with a war chest). Of the three, this is the least-concerning one... If you sign up for an account at mastodon.social, you'll probably be fine. But in general, the system working as intended asks the user to trade out the security of a large, capital-backed network for the responsibility of being aware of the ambient health of their own digital neighborhood. It's nothing more complex than the ancient BBS model, but that's the thing... A whole generation or two of computer users never used a BBS. They aren't used to having to find something else to do with their browsing habits because Frank is having a bad year and decided to shut down his server for his own mental health. It is worth noting, of course, that (2) and (3) aren't issues if you self-host. But I don't even think I need to put down a bullet point on why "You need to administer your own Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq, postgresql, and (fourth server I can't even remember right now) service behind its own public domain name" would be a non-starter for people.
- stavros 3y ago
  Doesn't this statement just mean "all 80s computers were good for was rendering text"? Encryption is a pretty big advantage of modern computing.
  - ksherlock 3y ago
    You said it -- encryption is a big deal but images and video aren't. Social media and chat are fine being entirely text based. Consider it a commentary on social media and chat, not on 1980s era graphics.
    - zozbot234 3y ago
      Even "text-based" gets iffy if you want to support i18n and proper text rendering of non-Latin scripts. We take that stuff for granted today, but it's probably infeasible on pre-mid-1990s hardware.
    - rsynnott 3y ago
      > images and video aren't. Social media and chat are fine being entirely text based ... I mean, speak for yourself. I think most social media and chat users would find lack of images to be a significant loss.
      - ksherlock 3y ago
        And here we are, discussing this on hacker news.
        sneak 3y ago
        Meanwhile, something like three or four orders of magnitude more people are scrolling on TikTok.
    - stavros 3y ago
      I vehemently disagree. If I couldn't send images and video to my friends, my experience would be orders of magnitude poorer. Case in point, I literally just finished making my foam cutting CNC machine two minutes ago, and all my friends around the world have already seen a video of it in action. That's worth a lot to me.
- softg 3y ago
  Just curious, wouldn't networking be a problem as well?
  - eschneider 3y ago
    Well, you could hook it to an AppleTalk network w/ stock hardware and then setup a Mac gateway to get it onto an Ethernet network. I think I've got a setup for that around here somewheres...
  - ksherlock 3y ago
    Ethernet cards and tcp/ip stacks are available. ip65 (https://github.com/cc65/ip65 https://github.com/cc65/ip65) for the 6502 supports 3 chips, 6 cards, and 3 platforms (Apple II, Atari, and C64). For under $5 you can buy a wiznet chip that has an onboard hardware tcp/ip stack.
- Maken 3y ago
  What would stop 80s computers from using encryption?
  - djxfade 3y ago
    Speed. A computer from the 80s wouldn't be able to encrypt/decrypt web traffic quick enough to be usable.
    - kibwen 3y ago
      Now I'm curious to know the actual difference in wall-clock time between decryption on a modern device and on an Apple II processor. Seconds, minutes, hours?
      - colinlm 3y ago
        According to people at CryptoAncienne (https://github.com/classilla/cryanc https://github.com/classilla/cryanc), a 25MHz 68030 needs about 22 seconds of maths to handshake a modern TLS server. During that time, most servers close connection. So on an 1MHz 6502, I think it'd be minutes just for handshaking.
        eschneider 3y ago
        It should be possible to drop in a coprocessor board to handle the encrypt/decrypt. It's compute bound rather than bus bound so it should speed up nicely.
        colinlm 3y ago
        Most of us throw that in the form of an HTTPS-stripping proxy on a Pi :)
        eschneider 3y ago
        I mean, that would be the sensible approach. I was just thinking that designing an FPGA board for my Apple II might be...fun.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
From just over a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37295884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37295884
vkoskiv 3y ago
Now I kind of want to buy a SuperSerial card for my II+ to try this thing out! Too bad any kind of Apple II hardware is really hard to find where I live. Edit: Now that I look at this closer, it looks to me like I'd also need to buy an 80-column card to run this on my system.
- colinlm 3y ago
  Hi! Author here. That was a requirement until this week-end, but I've done some work to support II+ without 80-column cards this week-end. The menu is toggled instead of being on the left.
  - vkoskiv 3y ago
    Very cool that you added support for that too! Now I'll 100% be sourcing a SuperSerial card for my II+!
zerojames 3y ago
This is impressive!

222 points by kirubakaran 3y ago

Might double the number of people who use Mastodon.

Save for encryption and video playback, if social media and chat protocols were public we could still comfortably use Facebook, Whatsapp, LinkedIn and whatever from computers from the 80s

wang_li 3y ago
On one hand this project just uses an Apple II as a front end for something running on a raspberry pi. On the other hand, the 80386 and 68000 are both '80s era CPUs. The 80486 just barely squeezed in in 1989, with the first systems available fourth quarter. Super VGA video cards were available by 1987. Macintosh system software had a TCP/IP stack in 1988. I would think that you could access modern social media from an '80s era computer if you went with the latter half of the decade. If you are talking about the first half? Not likely. A 1 MHz 6502 would have a hard time keeping up with SLIP over 9600 baud, let alone 56kb.
- whartung 3y ago
  One of the beauties of USENET was it’s store and forward model. As such I had no real issues using USENET and email back in the day with a 2400 baud Hayes SmartModem. Also helped it was all lightweight text messages and, naturally, I didn’t download the entire feed, just the few topics I was interested in.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
8organicbits 3y ago
If you're into this idea, here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NentMKyVGog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NentMKyVGog
blowski 3y ago
But would all those social networks then exist at all, with their massively broad user base? I’d love to believe they would - we still have SMTP and HTTP. But all open source social networks seem to believe complexity is a benefit, so put off most people, and the network effects don’t materialise.
- spookie 3y ago
  Where does the complexity from Mastodon and other Fediverse social platforms come from? The fact that there are instances? Mastodon seems to streamline that experience pretty well. Honestly, curious for feedback
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    People come to Mastodon, in general, with experience from other, centralized social media networks, so they're bringing those expectations. Whether it works like email is irrelevant because it doesn't work like Twitter. Here are a few key ways in which it doesn't work like Twitter that are off-putting, and why they are hard to change, even if we wanted to. 1) Following another user because you liked one post: when that user isn't on your instance, you usually have to do a three-step dance: click on the user to get to their timeline (on another instance), click "follow," and now enter your username into a dialog box because you're on another server. That last step is weird and off-putting. It's also completely necessary, because different servers don't have a cross-domain trust to pass your username around so (we know as web devs) you must tell the other server who you are; the architecture is protecting your anonymity by design by not divulging that data. But, relative to Twitter, that's weird. I don't think it is fixable without a change to the domain-based trust model. And, of course, this is yet another example of how people say they want privacy and anonymity online, but when you implement it for them they get frustrated at the usability tradeoffs those concerns demand. 2) A defederation split between your node and another node means you could lose access to people you follow. There is an analogy in the Twitterverse... Someone you follow could get banned. But that's different than someone you follow going away because their "neighbor" was being a Nazi and your server admin axed the whole node in response. Twitter users don't have "neighbors." Everyone's a neighbor. Entirely new mental model moving to the Fediverse. This is, again, a feature... But it's a feature some people find extremely valuable and others find off-putting complexity. (Sidebar: I actually got into running my own node for this reason: I realized a good friend of mine wasn't followable from my first account because years ago my server admin had decided on a "no furries" rule and my friend's server happened to be furry-content friendly. Twitter doesn't make you build a red-string-map of historical drama to figure out what node to join). 3) Smaller nodes change the risk model. There are tradeoffs to decentralization: if your node goes dead, the whole network hasn't gone dead. But if your node goes dead, that's hugely inconvenient... And with no money on the table and individual communities being smaller, nodes go dead more often than Twitter goes dead (the fact that Twitter is still there in spite of everything that's happened to it is a strong example of the stickiness of a corporate-backed venture with a war chest). Of the three, this is the least-concerning one... If you sign up for an account at mastodon.social, you'll probably be fine. But in general, the system working as intended asks the user to trade out the security of a large, capital-backed network for the responsibility of being aware of the ambient health of their own digital neighborhood. It's nothing more complex than the ancient BBS model, but that's the thing... A whole generation or two of computer users never used a BBS. They aren't used to having to find something else to do with their browsing habits because Frank is having a bad year and decided to shut down his server for his own mental health. It is worth noting, of course, that (2) and (3) aren't issues if you self-host. But I don't even think I need to put down a bullet point on why "You need to administer your own Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq, postgresql, and (fourth server I can't even remember right now) service behind its own public domain name" would be a non-starter for people.
stavros 3y ago
Doesn't this statement just mean "all 80s computers were good for was rendering text"? Encryption is a pretty big advantage of modern computing.
- ksherlock 3y ago
  You said it -- encryption is a big deal but images and video aren't. Social media and chat are fine being entirely text based. Consider it a commentary on social media and chat, not on 1980s era graphics.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    Even "text-based" gets iffy if you want to support i18n and proper text rendering of non-Latin scripts. We take that stuff for granted today, but it's probably infeasible on pre-mid-1990s hardware.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    > images and video aren't. Social media and chat are fine being entirely text based ... I mean, speak for yourself. I think most social media and chat users would find lack of images to be a significant loss.
    - ksherlock 3y ago
      And here we are, discussing this on hacker news.
      - sneak 3y ago
        Meanwhile, something like three or four orders of magnitude more people are scrolling on TikTok.
  - stavros 3y ago
    I vehemently disagree. If I couldn't send images and video to my friends, my experience would be orders of magnitude poorer. Case in point, I literally just finished making my foam cutting CNC machine two minutes ago, and all my friends around the world have already seen a video of it in action. That's worth a lot to me.
softg 3y ago
Just curious, wouldn't networking be a problem as well?
- eschneider 3y ago
  Well, you could hook it to an AppleTalk network w/ stock hardware and then setup a Mac gateway to get it onto an Ethernet network. I think I've got a setup for that around here somewheres...
- ksherlock 3y ago
  Ethernet cards and tcp/ip stacks are available. ip65 (https://github.com/cc65/ip65 https://github.com/cc65/ip65) for the 6502 supports 3 chips, 6 cards, and 3 platforms (Apple II, Atari, and C64). For under $5 you can buy a wiznet chip that has an onboard hardware tcp/ip stack.
Maken 3y ago
What would stop 80s computers from using encryption?
- djxfade 3y ago
  Speed. A computer from the 80s wouldn't be able to encrypt/decrypt web traffic quick enough to be usable.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    Now I'm curious to know the actual difference in wall-clock time between decryption on a modern device and on an Apple II processor. Seconds, minutes, hours?
    - colinlm 3y ago
      According to people at CryptoAncienne (https://github.com/classilla/cryanc https://github.com/classilla/cryanc), a 25MHz 68030 needs about 22 seconds of maths to handshake a modern TLS server. During that time, most servers close connection. So on an 1MHz 6502, I think it'd be minutes just for handshaking.
      - eschneider 3y ago
        It should be possible to drop in a coprocessor board to handle the encrypt/decrypt. It's compute bound rather than bus bound so it should speed up nicely.
        colinlm 3y ago
        Most of us throw that in the form of an HTTPS-stripping proxy on a Pi :)
        eschneider 3y ago
        I mean, that would be the sensible approach. I was just thinking that designing an FPGA board for my Apple II might be...fun.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

From just over a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37295884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37295884

vkoskiv 3y ago

Now I kind of want to buy a SuperSerial card for my II+ to try this thing out! Too bad any kind of Apple II hardware is really hard to find where I live. Edit: Now that I look at this closer, it looks to me like I'd also need to buy an 80-column card to run this on my system.

colinlm 3y ago
Hi! Author here. That was a requirement until this week-end, but I've done some work to support II+ without 80-column cards this week-end. The menu is toggled instead of being on the left.
- vkoskiv 3y ago
  Very cool that you added support for that too! Now I'll 100% be sourcing a SuperSerial card for my II+!

zerojames 3y ago

This is impressive!