6 ms·

This suffers from the same problem that so so so many alternative social, federated, self-hosted ideas suffer from. Matrix, keybase, pgp, etc. It’s too dependa

This suffers from the same problem that so so so many alternative social, federated, self-hosted ideas suffer from. Matrix, keybase, pgp, etc. It’s too dependant on encryption. Yes, it’s a cool technical feat that stuff can be in the open but also private - but: 1. I want to be able to follow my freinds if my phone dies and i have to get a new one. 2. I am very technical, and idk exactly what a X25519 keypair is. I would like for people to come up with more stuff like this that is designed for small communities but not for very secure communication. Like I want something where it’s secured by a username and password, that i give to a server i am registered with - and that server handles the encryption business. If the server rotates keys, that’s for the admin to figure out and exchange keys with sibling servers. Idk I’m just making up specifics but this is the kind of ethos i think is needed to make things that can be successful with non-technical people in a way that can unseat big tech. In case i sound too critical - this is cool. It just isn’t something i can use with family and friends to replace facebook or even email.

remywang 8mo ago
1. Right after initialization you'll be prompted to export the private key and store it somewhere safe, e.g. your password manager 2. You don't need to know unless you want to implement the protocol! To use (the very barebones) implementation all you need to do is fork the repo & give access, which I admit can be too much for family/friends so you might have to set it up for them (and I bet they'd be stoked to have a website of their own!)
- pibaker 8mo ago
  > Right after initialization you'll be prompted to export the private key and store it somewhere safe, e.g. your password manager Having seen enough story in the vein of "if only I still have my bitcoin wallet from 2014" and "our storage server failed and when we tried to restore from backup we found out our last working backup was from two years ago," I have to say I have a rather dim view of how competent people actually are when it comes to keeping backups working. I am not saying cryptography isn't useful for safeguarding your data, I just think for perhaps 90% of the users out here the risk of being locked out of your data permanently is more realistic than your data being accessed by a bad actor. > which I admit can be too much for family/friends so you might have to set it up for them (and I bet they'd be stoked to have a website of their own!) From reading the website, I was under the impression this is a techie oriented project still looking for technically inclined early adopters instead of something you can readily tell grandma to hop on. I sincerely doubt the average friend and family member who needs other's help to set up a personal website knows what the protocol does or why should he or she use it instead of Instagram or Facebook, or Signal, if the point is just to keep in touch with people you already know.
  - prox 8mo ago
    This is a usual pattern, a tech savvy hacker creates this great tool, but if you don’t put in the interface work to make it easy, frictionless, it might as well not exist for the general public to consume. Grandma will never use this. Or not even a slightly technical person will. (And it’s fine if that isn’t your audience ofc) My call to any devs reading this: get an interface designer, put in the usability effort before adding new features.
  - andoando 8mo ago
    Authentication has gotten really annoying on the web. I don't even care if my data gets stolen for most sites. Like HN is just username and pass and I love that. I don't care if someone hacks my HN account. What are they going to do? Get all my public comments? I prefer that ease of use versus having had to 2FA every time for years.
  - diacritical 8mo ago
    The majority of users are not complete morons. If they understand the need to backup their private key (or wallet password, or whatever), they can do it. If they still don't do it, maybe they don't value their data. In 2026 even the proverbial grandma should know what a backup is, even if they don't understand exactly how a given private key or protocol works. We shouldn't cater to such users and make our communication less secure because people put off making backups.
    - xigoi 8mo ago
      > In 2026 even the proverbial grandma should know what a backup is https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
- bigiain 8mo ago
  I think a lot of even not very technical people have gotten used to TOTP QRCodes, and being able to store screenshots of them in password managers. (And having experience in losing 2FA keys that they'll go to some lengths to not repeat.) I wonder if there's a decent way to encode these private keys in QRCodes? You can jam about 4kB in a high density one from memory? (I know that'd be possible from a developer/technical point of view, but if this were my project I'd want a talented UX designer to have complete authority over how this is presented and explained to users.) One other idea - maybe implement a Shamir's Secret Sharing mechanism where your private keys get sharded and encrypted to a sufficient number of selected friends, so of you lose your s@ private key it can be re assembled by convincing - say - 8 out of 12 selected friends to give you their part? Or alternatively - automate a "recovery mechanism" where you set up a new key pair and publish it on a temporary domain/site, and can then ask a friend/follower who can authenticate your identity out-of-band - to export all you posts decryptable with your new key, then put you new key and all your old posts back into your main site.
hliyan 8mo ago
Many years ago, I had an idea to use specially formatted emails as a transport layer for a social network. Predictably, it too, went nowhere: https://medium.com/@hliyan/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-network-c33b175f3a9e https://medium.com/@hliyan/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-netw...
- nunobrito 8mo ago
  That is a very good concept, enjoyed reading it. On the original concept is restricted to share outside the participating people but could be relevant that people add more people that are interested in a topic. Email is a good transport layer. Nowadays people just imagine it as messages between large providers, but I'm in strong favour that small providers or self-hosting email can still be used.
- ochrist 8mo ago
  Some years ago I was involved with a society (club), and we wanted a webforum. But as we were geeks as well, we created a combination of a web-based solution, mail-lists and NNTP. These three solutions were syncronized, so it didn't matter which one you used. This worked well for several years.
- twobitshifter 8mo ago
  I had a similar idea, but it didn’t go very far beyond research. There are some special app interfaces that people have developed that remake email to look more modern like chat apps or social networks, by removing all the boilerplate. Some of the issues I was thinking about: Email clients by default block many types of messages and the allowed mime types are limited as is the support of html. So you really need your own email client to bring in the types of features we’d like to see, or, as you say, an intermediate format that is reinterpreted. There’s also the fact that gmail or outlook mail servers may simply block and blacklist the content. Email was designed to be decentralized but it has moved to a system where a few companies control the major mail servers. If you wanted to re-decentralize email and add some anonymity then everyone would become their own mail server but this would raise the problems of email viruses and spam - and it’s not as convenient as just using your existing email and app.
- 8mo ago
peter_retief 8mo ago
Cloudflare tunnels are an interesting alternative, self hosted but with external security
- dwedge 8mo ago
  Self hosted but with big tech having a backdoor into your local network, having your ssl private key, and dictating the terms and conditions of what you self host. I've never understood selfhosters fascination with cloudflare. They have some cool products but I have a feel 2026/27 is the time they start to show their evolving colours
  - icase 8mo ago
    cloudflare should never be trusted after what they did to kiwifarms.
    - peter_retief 8mo ago
      What did they do to them?
      - KomoD 8mo ago
        They were defending Kiwifarms for awhile but then the pressure became too much and then they blocked them. https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/
        gzread 8mo ago
        So are they bad because they didn't block them for a long time or are they bad because they did block them eventually?
    - kennywinker 8mo ago
      So you were ok with what they did to 8chan and the daily stormer but kiwifarms is where you draw the line??
jonahx 8mo ago
I could see myself making similar comments. On a practical level, they're valid. But maybe... If we are ever going to free ourselves of rent-seeking middle men, we simply have to make a cultural change where non-technical people do more for themselves. I don't even think it's about technical difficulty (most of the time). I think people just want someone else to take care of their shit.
- rrr_oh_man 8mo ago
  > we simply have to make a cultural change Yeah...
  - MrBuddyCasino 8mo ago
    "one does not simply make a cultural change"
  - jonahx 8mo ago
    I mean, they're impossible, and yet they happen. I've seen cigarettes and seat belts change in my lifetime. As a former smoker and denizen of the world of ubiquitous airplane and restaurant smoking sections, I would have bet anything against the rapidity of change in norms and laws that occurred.
    - altmanaltman 8mo ago
      I mean cigarettes give you cancer and seatbelts can save your life. Both of them were supported by massive government initiatives and tax incentives. How is that even comparable to software middle men? The problem is not even on the same scale.
      - tim-projects 8mo ago
        Governments have started banning social media country-wide.
        8mo ago
iberator 8mo ago
Fully agree. Who's gonna sniff your traffic from home? NSA, your ISP? They already do. Same as in corporate networks: your data is MITM anyway. Fun should be unencrypted. It's not shopping or ssh into server.
- bberkgaut 8mo ago
  > Fun should be unencrypted. Five years ago I would totally agree. Now, when you do not want to share your fun thoughts with a border guard; a police person; an AI scavenger; a random jerk -- I would say, having a safe-ish space becomes almost a necessity
  - kennywinker 8mo ago
    I’m not actually suggested anything be un-encrypted. I’m just saying we manage keys on the server not the client. Tls secures the password transaction, then the server issues the client a key and everything works as s@ suggests. If the keys expire or the client loses them, you repeat the login process.
xg15 8mo ago
> Like I want something where it’s secured by a username and password, that i give to a server i am registered with - and that server handles the encryption business. If the server rotates keys, that’s for the admin to figure out and exchange keys with sibling servers. Isn't that basically Mastodon?
- kennywinker 8mo ago
  Sure. Yes. One of the most successful alternative/distrubuted/federated social networks out there? Yes exactly. More like that please!
dare944 8mo ago
> ... in a way that can unseat big tech. Where is it stated that this is a goal for this project? You and I both may want a way to break the influence of the dominant social media companies. But this doesn't have to be that in order to be successful. It just needs small groups of people to use it in a way that benefits their communities.
zahirbmirza 8mo ago
I tried to make a way of sharing posts with friends without having to be on a social network... I came up with NoteSub: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/notesub/id6742334239 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/notesub/id6742334239 I like it. And mass adaption is not required to use it. I would have loved to have made this a true social network in some regards, however, there are issues of moderation and storage that become very expensive at scale. Moreover, adoption of a new social network is super hard to promote. So many Twitter, Insta, etc clones have failed because they are just 'clones'. Not offering any thing new. It should be considered although Thiel talks of 0 to 1... A great deal of dramatic software/hardware progression comes from a highly evolved successor to an average pre-existing product. The iPhone was not a zero to one, nor was Apples GUI, they were just highly evolved versions of average or below average products that already existed. Social media apps are already highly evolved for their function. We need something better for edge cases, but the current state of social media platforms means that something supremely better is required before any adoption drive becomes meaningful. When such a product comes, mass adoption is inevitable; we crave and succumb to better ways of communication and contact.
- KomoD 8mo ago
  I don't understand what it has to do with sharing, it just seems to be a note-taking app? It even talks about being local, offline and can't even sync with your own devices unless you pay. But nothing obvious about your friends being able to see them.
  - zahirbmirza 8mo ago
    You make a note, they are designed to look as good as any social media posts. You can share the note with whomever you wish, using what ever messaging system you you like, and the note will look as good as a social media post, ie how you designed the note. I am sorry, it does take a bit of imagination. I never wanted to pitch it as a social media app, but, its as close to personally controlled social sharing that I could conceive. You dont have to pay to use it. Very few people need to use cross device sync and those who do seem happy to pay for it. Ie, it is free, so if any ones wants to try it, I would love to hear.
ivanjermakov 8mo ago
Unpopular opinion: names like PKCS12, X.509, X25519, ECDSA, etc. hurt adoption making the world less private, secure and decentralized.
- kennywinker 8mo ago
  I agree 100%. E.g. 802.11a/b/c/etc wasn’t selling. Wifi however… Names matter. We can keep the technical stuff under the hood, while presenting a clean interface for those un-interested in the details. But we can only do that when the thing built right. Notice how you don’t have to share encryption keys when your friends want access to your home wifi? Even the password part is harder than it should be. Idk why routers don’t just have a button you press when someone wants on the wifi. They knock on the network, a light flashes - press button, they are let in. Would work for most home use.
  - extraduder_ire 8mo ago
    WPS is a thing that's exactly what you describe. People suggest disabling it these days because tools like reaver can use it to access a network in a few minutes. QR codes with wifi details kind of obsoleted it in the past few years. (last three routers I've gotten even came with stickers with the default password as a qr code) What I'm disappointed by is the lack of adoption of wifi standards that are encrypted, but don't require authentication to join. It's always a choice between no encryption, or password+encryption on hardware I've encountered.
johnisgood 8mo ago
> 2. I am very technical, and idk exactly what a X25519 keypair is. As in, you cannot describe it exactly, or you have never run into it? Additionally, you could just look it up if you care about the technical details.
pseudocomposer 8mo ago
This is what I built Jonline for. Haven’t maintained it for a while, but it’s quite functional as-is. Basically a very vanilla Twitter/Reddit-with-first-class-calendar-events, standard Rust web+gRPC server on Postgres DB, React web UI, and no encryption other than HTTPS/TLS. No server-to-server communication, just username/password auth. Super easy to understand APIs (https://jonline.io/docs https://jonline.io/docs). (I do need to build better cross-server auth, but this can be done in the FE only with the existing APIs.) Can boot it in a Docker container in seconds. A few “demo” instances I run are linked from the Readme: https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline
afavour 8mo ago
An encryption key could be stored in a QR code and the user could be sheltered from any technical issues. To be honest if we’re talking truly accessible, even usernames and passwords aren’t great. Users forget them. That’s why a lot of sites these days offer to email you “magic links” to log you in. And if you want to do that you need to make sure you’re running a server sending emails that won’t immediately go to spam. At a certain point if you want a truly scalable, decentralized platform you’re going to have to cut back on backend responsibilities. This is a logical answer to the problem.
giaour 8mo ago
In the FAQ at the bottom of the post, the author mentions that this proposal is just the AT protocol (BlueSky) without the active, "firehose" component. I don't think this is a real proposal, but more a thought experiment about how a static site could integrate into BlueSky. I saw a few similar efforts to integrate the "passive" components of ActivityPub into static site generators so that you could make your static blog consumable via the Fediverse. In reality, if you really wanted to publish your static site blog posts on BlueSky, this is probably a good place to start! As you mention, there are some serious usability issues with doing everything by hand, but you may find that acceptable or invest in workarounds. Maybe it's possible to use your BlueSky identity so that you aren't in the business of managing keys. Or maybe you could use a script or static site generator plugin to pull credentials from somewhere.
1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago
"1. I am very technical" What does this mean https://ianix.com/pub/x25519-deployment.html https://ianix.com/pub/x25519-deployment.html For example, does "technical" mean curious, enjoys learning, motivated to take things apart to understand them, ... Does it mean likes to create accounts, signs up for websites, apps, etc., heavy social media user, terminally online,... What does it mean

remywang 8mo ago

1. Right after initialization you'll be prompted to export the private key and store it somewhere safe, e.g. your password manager 2. You don't need to know unless you want to implement the protocol! To use (the very barebones) implementation all you need to do is fork the repo & give access, which I admit can be too much for family/friends so you might have to set it up for them (and I bet they'd be stoked to have a website of their own!)

pibaker 8mo ago
> Right after initialization you'll be prompted to export the private key and store it somewhere safe, e.g. your password manager Having seen enough story in the vein of "if only I still have my bitcoin wallet from 2014" and "our storage server failed and when we tried to restore from backup we found out our last working backup was from two years ago," I have to say I have a rather dim view of how competent people actually are when it comes to keeping backups working. I am not saying cryptography isn't useful for safeguarding your data, I just think for perhaps 90% of the users out here the risk of being locked out of your data permanently is more realistic than your data being accessed by a bad actor. > which I admit can be too much for family/friends so you might have to set it up for them (and I bet they'd be stoked to have a website of their own!) From reading the website, I was under the impression this is a techie oriented project still looking for technically inclined early adopters instead of something you can readily tell grandma to hop on. I sincerely doubt the average friend and family member who needs other's help to set up a personal website knows what the protocol does or why should he or she use it instead of Instagram or Facebook, or Signal, if the point is just to keep in touch with people you already know.
- prox 8mo ago
  This is a usual pattern, a tech savvy hacker creates this great tool, but if you don’t put in the interface work to make it easy, frictionless, it might as well not exist for the general public to consume. Grandma will never use this. Or not even a slightly technical person will. (And it’s fine if that isn’t your audience ofc) My call to any devs reading this: get an interface designer, put in the usability effort before adding new features.
- andoando 8mo ago
  Authentication has gotten really annoying on the web. I don't even care if my data gets stolen for most sites. Like HN is just username and pass and I love that. I don't care if someone hacks my HN account. What are they going to do? Get all my public comments? I prefer that ease of use versus having had to 2FA every time for years.
- diacritical 8mo ago
  The majority of users are not complete morons. If they understand the need to backup their private key (or wallet password, or whatever), they can do it. If they still don't do it, maybe they don't value their data. In 2026 even the proverbial grandma should know what a backup is, even if they don't understand exactly how a given private key or protocol works. We shouldn't cater to such users and make our communication less secure because people put off making backups.
  - xigoi 8mo ago
    > In 2026 even the proverbial grandma should know what a backup is https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
bigiain 8mo ago
I think a lot of even not very technical people have gotten used to TOTP QRCodes, and being able to store screenshots of them in password managers. (And having experience in losing 2FA keys that they'll go to some lengths to not repeat.) I wonder if there's a decent way to encode these private keys in QRCodes? You can jam about 4kB in a high density one from memory? (I know that'd be possible from a developer/technical point of view, but if this were my project I'd want a talented UX designer to have complete authority over how this is presented and explained to users.) One other idea - maybe implement a Shamir's Secret Sharing mechanism where your private keys get sharded and encrypted to a sufficient number of selected friends, so of you lose your s@ private key it can be re assembled by convincing - say - 8 out of 12 selected friends to give you their part? Or alternatively - automate a "recovery mechanism" where you set up a new key pair and publish it on a temporary domain/site, and can then ask a friend/follower who can authenticate your identity out-of-band - to export all you posts decryptable with your new key, then put you new key and all your old posts back into your main site.

hliyan 8mo ago

Many years ago, I had an idea to use specially formatted emails as a transport layer for a social network. Predictably, it too, went nowhere: https://medium.com/@hliyan/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-network-c33b175f3a9e https://medium.com/@hliyan/email-re-skinned-as-a-social-netw...

nunobrito 8mo ago
That is a very good concept, enjoyed reading it. On the original concept is restricted to share outside the participating people but could be relevant that people add more people that are interested in a topic. Email is a good transport layer. Nowadays people just imagine it as messages between large providers, but I'm in strong favour that small providers or self-hosting email can still be used.
ochrist 8mo ago
Some years ago I was involved with a society (club), and we wanted a webforum. But as we were geeks as well, we created a combination of a web-based solution, mail-lists and NNTP. These three solutions were syncronized, so it didn't matter which one you used. This worked well for several years.
twobitshifter 8mo ago
I had a similar idea, but it didn’t go very far beyond research. There are some special app interfaces that people have developed that remake email to look more modern like chat apps or social networks, by removing all the boilerplate. Some of the issues I was thinking about: Email clients by default block many types of messages and the allowed mime types are limited as is the support of html. So you really need your own email client to bring in the types of features we’d like to see, or, as you say, an intermediate format that is reinterpreted. There’s also the fact that gmail or outlook mail servers may simply block and blacklist the content. Email was designed to be decentralized but it has moved to a system where a few companies control the major mail servers. If you wanted to re-decentralize email and add some anonymity then everyone would become their own mail server but this would raise the problems of email viruses and spam - and it’s not as convenient as just using your existing email and app.
8mo ago

peter_retief 8mo ago

Cloudflare tunnels are an interesting alternative, self hosted but with external security

dwedge 8mo ago
Self hosted but with big tech having a backdoor into your local network, having your ssl private key, and dictating the terms and conditions of what you self host. I've never understood selfhosters fascination with cloudflare. They have some cool products but I have a feel 2026/27 is the time they start to show their evolving colours
- icase 8mo ago
  cloudflare should never be trusted after what they did to kiwifarms.
  - peter_retief 8mo ago
    What did they do to them?
    - KomoD 8mo ago
      They were defending Kiwifarms for awhile but then the pressure became too much and then they blocked them. https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/
      - gzread 8mo ago
        So are they bad because they didn't block them for a long time or are they bad because they did block them eventually?
  - kennywinker 8mo ago
    So you were ok with what they did to 8chan and the daily stormer but kiwifarms is where you draw the line??

jonahx 8mo ago

I could see myself making similar comments. On a practical level, they're valid. But maybe... If we are ever going to free ourselves of rent-seeking middle men, we simply have to make a cultural change where non-technical people do more for themselves. I don't even think it's about technical difficulty (most of the time). I think people just want someone else to take care of their shit.

rrr_oh_man 8mo ago
> we simply have to make a cultural change Yeah...
- MrBuddyCasino 8mo ago
  "one does not simply make a cultural change"
- jonahx 8mo ago
  I mean, they're impossible, and yet they happen. I've seen cigarettes and seat belts change in my lifetime. As a former smoker and denizen of the world of ubiquitous airplane and restaurant smoking sections, I would have bet anything against the rapidity of change in norms and laws that occurred.
  - altmanaltman 8mo ago
    I mean cigarettes give you cancer and seatbelts can save your life. Both of them were supported by massive government initiatives and tax incentives. How is that even comparable to software middle men? The problem is not even on the same scale.
    - tim-projects 8mo ago
      Governments have started banning social media country-wide.
      - 8mo ago

iberator 8mo ago

Fully agree. Who's gonna sniff your traffic from home? NSA, your ISP? They already do. Same as in corporate networks: your data is MITM anyway. Fun should be unencrypted. It's not shopping or ssh into server.

bberkgaut 8mo ago
> Fun should be unencrypted. Five years ago I would totally agree. Now, when you do not want to share your fun thoughts with a border guard; a police person; an AI scavenger; a random jerk -- I would say, having a safe-ish space becomes almost a necessity
- kennywinker 8mo ago
  I’m not actually suggested anything be un-encrypted. I’m just saying we manage keys on the server not the client. Tls secures the password transaction, then the server issues the client a key and everything works as s@ suggests. If the keys expire or the client loses them, you repeat the login process.

xg15 8mo ago

> Like I want something where it’s secured by a username and password, that i give to a server i am registered with - and that server handles the encryption business. If the server rotates keys, that’s for the admin to figure out and exchange keys with sibling servers. Isn't that basically Mastodon?

kennywinker 8mo ago
Sure. Yes. One of the most successful alternative/distrubuted/federated social networks out there? Yes exactly. More like that please!

dare944 8mo ago

> ... in a way that can unseat big tech. Where is it stated that this is a goal for this project? You and I both may want a way to break the influence of the dominant social media companies. But this doesn't have to be that in order to be successful. It just needs small groups of people to use it in a way that benefits their communities.

zahirbmirza 8mo ago

I tried to make a way of sharing posts with friends without having to be on a social network... I came up with NoteSub: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/notesub/id6742334239 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/notesub/id6742334239 I like it. And mass adaption is not required to use it. I would have loved to have made this a true social network in some regards, however, there are issues of moderation and storage that become very expensive at scale. Moreover, adoption of a new social network is super hard to promote. So many Twitter, Insta, etc clones have failed because they are just 'clones'. Not offering any thing new. It should be considered although Thiel talks of 0 to 1... A great deal of dramatic software/hardware progression comes from a highly evolved successor to an average pre-existing product. The iPhone was not a zero to one, nor was Apples GUI, they were just highly evolved versions of average or below average products that already existed. Social media apps are already highly evolved for their function. We need something better for edge cases, but the current state of social media platforms means that something supremely better is required before any adoption drive becomes meaningful. When such a product comes, mass adoption is inevitable; we crave and succumb to better ways of communication and contact.

KomoD 8mo ago
I don't understand what it has to do with sharing, it just seems to be a note-taking app? It even talks about being local, offline and can't even sync with your own devices unless you pay. But nothing obvious about your friends being able to see them.
- zahirbmirza 8mo ago
  You make a note, they are designed to look as good as any social media posts. You can share the note with whomever you wish, using what ever messaging system you you like, and the note will look as good as a social media post, ie how you designed the note. I am sorry, it does take a bit of imagination. I never wanted to pitch it as a social media app, but, its as close to personally controlled social sharing that I could conceive. You dont have to pay to use it. Very few people need to use cross device sync and those who do seem happy to pay for it. Ie, it is free, so if any ones wants to try it, I would love to hear.

ivanjermakov 8mo ago

Unpopular opinion: names like PKCS12, X.509, X25519, ECDSA, etc. hurt adoption making the world less private, secure and decentralized.

kennywinker 8mo ago
I agree 100%. E.g. 802.11a/b/c/etc wasn’t selling. Wifi however… Names matter. We can keep the technical stuff under the hood, while presenting a clean interface for those un-interested in the details. But we can only do that when the thing built right. Notice how you don’t have to share encryption keys when your friends want access to your home wifi? Even the password part is harder than it should be. Idk why routers don’t just have a button you press when someone wants on the wifi. They knock on the network, a light flashes - press button, they are let in. Would work for most home use.
- extraduder_ire 8mo ago
  WPS is a thing that's exactly what you describe. People suggest disabling it these days because tools like reaver can use it to access a network in a few minutes. QR codes with wifi details kind of obsoleted it in the past few years. (last three routers I've gotten even came with stickers with the default password as a qr code) What I'm disappointed by is the lack of adoption of wifi standards that are encrypted, but don't require authentication to join. It's always a choice between no encryption, or password+encryption on hardware I've encountered.

johnisgood 8mo ago

> 2. I am very technical, and idk exactly what a X25519 keypair is. As in, you cannot describe it exactly, or you have never run into it? Additionally, you could just look it up if you care about the technical details.

pseudocomposer 8mo ago

This is what I built Jonline for. Haven’t maintained it for a while, but it’s quite functional as-is. Basically a very vanilla Twitter/Reddit-with-first-class-calendar-events, standard Rust web+gRPC server on Postgres DB, React web UI, and no encryption other than HTTPS/TLS. No server-to-server communication, just username/password auth. Super easy to understand APIs (https://jonline.io/docs https://jonline.io/docs). (I do need to build better cross-server auth, but this can be done in the FE only with the existing APIs.) Can boot it in a Docker container in seconds. A few “demo” instances I run are linked from the Readme: https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline

afavour 8mo ago

An encryption key could be stored in a QR code and the user could be sheltered from any technical issues. To be honest if we’re talking truly accessible, even usernames and passwords aren’t great. Users forget them. That’s why a lot of sites these days offer to email you “magic links” to log you in. And if you want to do that you need to make sure you’re running a server sending emails that won’t immediately go to spam. At a certain point if you want a truly scalable, decentralized platform you’re going to have to cut back on backend responsibilities. This is a logical answer to the problem.

giaour 8mo ago

In the FAQ at the bottom of the post, the author mentions that this proposal is just the AT protocol (BlueSky) without the active, "firehose" component. I don't think this is a real proposal, but more a thought experiment about how a static site could integrate into BlueSky. I saw a few similar efforts to integrate the "passive" components of ActivityPub into static site generators so that you could make your static blog consumable via the Fediverse. In reality, if you really wanted to publish your static site blog posts on BlueSky, this is probably a good place to start! As you mention, there are some serious usability issues with doing everything by hand, but you may find that acceptable or invest in workarounds. Maybe it's possible to use your BlueSky identity so that you aren't in the business of managing keys. Or maybe you could use a script or static site generator plugin to pull credentials from somewhere.

1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago

"1. I am very technical" What does this mean https://ianix.com/pub/x25519-deployment.html https://ianix.com/pub/x25519-deployment.html For example, does "technical" mean curious, enjoys learning, motivated to take things apart to understand them, ... Does it mean likes to create accounts, signs up for websites, apps, etc., heavy social media user, terminally online,... What does it mean