@kensanata @eladhen maybe it's time to recreate Hotline?

https://www.macworld.com/article/2031816/hotline-revisited.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications

@polychrome @eladhen Hah, that’s even stranger than Gopher!

@kensanata @polychrome
I'm thinking of something that won't be dependent on domain name providers and such... P2P net.

I really know nothing, of course...

@eladhen @kensanata @polychrome namecoin tried, but mostly failed, to provide decentralized domains. Plenty of other attempts too. Interop kills them every time :/

@lupine @kensanata @polychrome
I don't know what interop is... As I said – I know nothing.

@eladhen @kensanata @polychrome sorry! interoperability.

If you want to connect to a namecoin-accessible site, you need to be pretty deeply involved in namecoin.

You can set up a mirror in the usual DNS, but then the decentralization thing goes out of the window

@lupine @kensanata @polychrome
Namecoin? Is that cryptocurrency?

@eladhen @kensanata @polychrome unfortunately so

@lupine @kensanata @polychrome
But that's why I was thinking about BBSs. You don't need a domain (I mean, as far as I understand it...)

@eladhen @kensanata @lupine to be fair I suspect the approach of using domain names for reaching online services is already a faulty concept and distributing it won't help to fix it.

@eladhen @kensanata @lupine I had an idea awhile back that is kind of half baked but was generally based on the idea that every reachable node would have a DHT hash as its ID (for cases where you had to go by node rather than content) and distribute those IDs as PNG files with the DHT ID in the metadata chunks and possibly a QR with a vanity picture in the image data.

This way you could treat these files as contact cards on their own right.

@polychrome @kensanata @lupine
I won't pretend I understood that, but if the idea is to replace the domain system I'm all for it.

@kensanata @lupine @eladhen basically, in systems like Tox, IPFS, Retroshare & Tor you are identified using a "key" instead of a domain name. The key is a series of hex numbers and is not human friendly, but it is securely generated and verifyable.

To find the owner of the key you ask the decentralized network for the key owner.

My idea was to turn the keys into "business card"-like files by embedding the keys into the metadata field of PNG files, making sharing and collecting these keys more interesting.

@aag I’m on 1G symmetric so yay me and yay for the city of #Zurich. 😀 But Yes, in general you are right. Then again, shared hosting can be had for less money than the cost of electricity for your own server unless it’s a single Raspberry Pi, I think. So perhaps that’s not really an issue?

@kensanata @aag
damn it I wanna move to Zurich. How do I get Swiss citizenship?

@Wolf480pl @aag First you get a job. If you’re a EU citizen, that should be the first step.

@Wolf480pl Also, @deshipu moved from Poland to Switzerland. I think he also started with a job at an international company in Poland. Red Hat, I think?

@kensanata @Wolf480pl I actually quit Red Hat to move in here (my team didn't have the budget for the more expensive country), and then I got a 3 month temporary permit for finding a job. Eventually I went back to Red Hat (to a different team), but generally, if you are from EU, then it's really easy.

@kensanata @Wolf480pl When you have a job, you get a 5-year permit. When that runs out, if you are from Germany, Italy or France, you can get a permanent permit, otherwise you get another 5 years to learn the language, and then you can get permanent permit after an exam.

@kensanata @Wolf480pl I think you can apply for citizenship after 10 years. There is a language and familiarity with culture exam, and if you are not in a city, your neighbors have to accept it.

@aag @kensanata while i agree that the asymmetry sucks, in absolute terms the upstream is probably still bigger than the symmetric speeds most of us had in the 90s. A T1 was 1.5Mbps, iirc?

@aag @kensanata ISP firewalling and (especially) NAT obviously don't help, though I can see they have valid reasons (spam, address shortage) for wanting to

@telent @aag @kensanata nothing else comes close to NAT in terms of damaging free software's ability to put power in the hands of regular people.

as far as I can tell the only real progress being made is in SSB-land, which looks to me like a somewhat shaky technical foundation.

@technomancy

in my opinion, the only reason NAT is damaging is because of an inherent flaw in IP -- addresses are both locators and identifiers.

besides, with the processing power available to *every* network connected device, anything useful is going to be an overlay. who really cares about the underlay network?

so I'm back to "asymmetric bandwidth to the end user" is the biggest problem

@telent @kensanata

@aag @telent @kensanata sure; I'll agree that asymmetry in the network is the root cause. but bandwidth availability is only incidentally related to that.

@telent

well, of course. but we didn't have machines that could process, or software that required, much more bandwidth than that in the 90s.

NAT destroying the end to end principle was unfortunate, but many a protocol designer has over come that a few times over (with varying degrees of success)

@kensanata

@skiant @kensanata Hey Alexes :) Have you looked into https://datproject.org?

@aral @skiant Just a little bit. As far as I understand it, it builds a Merkle tree and that seems to lead to two properties I dislike: you can’t delete old revisions and so how do you deal with unwanted content in old revisions? And you always get the full “repo” if you download a blog, for example. How will that scale, over the years? It feels like bitcoin where you have to download all the transactions since forever if you want to trust the current status.

@kensanata @skiant Hey Alex, it does use a directed acyclic graph/merkle tree but it isn’t a blockchain. It tombstones and garbage collects deleted content but afaik, not from revision history (see https://github.com/beakerbrowser/specs/issues/12 – I was confused about this also). Regarding always getting the full repo: you don’t have to do a full replication, DAT supports sparse archives and replication.

@skiant @kensanata I’m still early in my process of learning the protocol/ecosystem but it does 99% of what I need and I’d much rather learn it and try to contribute than recreate the wheel (especially given that I’m about 1/10th as clever as Mathias and the rest of the DAT crew) ;)

@aral @skiant I’ll take another look!

@aral @kensanata @skiant Afterall the great gift of free software is to allow everyone to build on the work that came before them without asking for permission.

I wouldn't have gotten anywhere in Odysseus without WebKit, SQLite, GNOME & elementary.

@aral @skiant ah, this is exactly the issue I was having! Thanks, Aral!

@aral @skiant @kensanata Is this anything like IPFS?

@aidalgol @skiant @kensanata Take IPFS and remove the VC-funded organisation that builds it (https://protocol.ai/team/) and replace it with a nonprofit organisation (https://codeforscience.org/about) and yes, somewhat (also: far more focussed and doing things for the right reasons).

@eleanor @kensanata this is brilliant

@brook @kensanata

THIS article (same site, different guy) is more what you're looking for:

https://0xadada.pub/2017/02/18/encourging-individual-sovereignty-and-a-healthy-commons/

@eleanor @brook Yeah, that’s @aral writing like he’s on fire and I love it!

@eleanor @brook @aral “That is the world that I wake up every day to work towards. Not because it is charitable. Not because I’m a philanthropist. In fact, for no reason at all other than because that is the world that I want to live in.” – Aral Balkan.
Hell Yeah!

@eleanor I like it! «The platform takes our real authentic friendships and first commodifies them, reifies them, and then sells them back to us as an “image of friendship”, but one that is bankrupt of any genuine social value.»
Capitalism at work extracting value in novel ways!

@kensanata @eleanor it reminded me of the importance of, call it daydream time. This is when ideas happen, when things get figured out. I very much need unstructured time where I can just drift, wander, not really focus on anything. I used to do that on my walks, but more recently I’ve listened to podcasts instead while walking. And social media also eats so easily away at that time; so often we just open the distraction apps instead of just sitting and drifting.

@brook @eleanor Yeah! We all need more leisure. The kind of leisure classical Greek philosophers talked about except not financed by slavery.

@gekitsu exactly.

@ajroach42 @kensanata Neocities is so cool! Definitely something for the non-seriousDevelopers to check out.

@kensanata Although, at the moment, my focus is pretty squarely on non-internet networks.

I've been toying with the idea of setting up a diaulup BBS (but I don't even have a physical phone line anymore, so it'd need to support VoIP, which seems ridiculous.)

@kensanata
I have been tinkering (and soon, with @freakazoid's help, I'll do more than just tinker) with intranets/captive-portals that network with one another.

The idea being that you connect to your local node, and interact with the files and services it offers and with anyone else who is currently connected to the local node. (think BBS or Librarybox)

@ajroach42 @freakazoid @kensanata That's Freifunk or other mesh networks without the uplink...