* You're still either hosting your own, or at the whim of whomever hosts your repository. Mastodon.social or GitHub.
* Hosting your own Git is not particularly easier than hosting your own GoTo Social or Akkoma.
* What if you end up with either a big following, or a big follower list? Aren't you going to be rate limited by GitHub?
* Is signing up for GitHub easier than signing up for mastodon.social, especially if Mastodon et al already have good mobile clients?
* What about moderation?
* What about media?
And I mean... Isn't Git federated by nature? Multiple machines store multiple copies of the data. That's defederation isn't it?
But OK, let's put the federated social networks we do have aside for a moment.
The site says: Every user stores their application state in a git repo they own and control.
But you don't do that if you're on GitHub, right? Not really, anyway. What is the benefit from doing this over git? What if I want to delete something? What is the overhead of the git protocol?
If it's just a toy, then that's totally cool with me. But it says that Microsoft Research is involved. I'm a bit confused. What is this?
And I don't reaaally see how this tool solves that problem. Or any of the other problems you mentioned.
But that said, Mastodon/ActivityPub don't really feel like mature solutions yet. It's incredibly opaque how instances interact, and self-hosting is an exercise in frustration as you try to figure out why A sees your reactions but B does not and you can get notifications for C's reactions but not A's, but B's replies and not… I gave up after a while. It's more opaque than even email self-hosting, at least exim and postfix have fairly verbose error logging.
Git is not limited to a single remote. The default remote is called "origin" but there's nothing particularly special about it.
That makes sense. Each Activitypub server might also be considered the source of truth for any given post, but since you're usually going to fetch them from your own instance that your account lives on you're not getting it directly from there unless you specifically do it yourself.
> But that said, Mastodon/ActivityPub don't really feel like mature solutions yet.
Yeah, that makes sense. I think this is partly because Activitypub is both quite opinionated, but also gives you quite some wiggle room with how you implement different functionality, like defederation. And of course the most well known software in that space is effectively what all others have to follow.
Git is probably a more stable protocol, but then again ActivityPub is served over HTTP, which is also pretty stable. I believe the same issues would befall this as well, since Git, to me, doesn't seem to be the biggest factor in this, and more the append-only nature of it. I've never been a big fan of append-only social networks.
I've been running a Mastodon server for a couple of years now and have had relatively few federation issues, luckily. But I do agree that trudging through the logs and figuring out what's going on is not exactly ideal, not to mention debugging other issues like if something went wrong during the key exchange with your server and a remote one, or if you accidentally lose your key and suddenly can't talk to any other instance since they won't trust your old domain with the new key. But you might run into similar issues with this, right?
Edit: If it came across as downplaying the project or it's author then that wasn't my intention at all. These were just some thoughts that immediately popped into my head when I saw this. They may well have thought through answers to my not thought through questions, and I certainly don't mean to pretend like I know better.
"Federated network" could be modeled by a stream of posts (comments, tweets, whatever else) that are either a start ("root") of conversation or reply to one or more previous post(s), so it does form a graph. Then a bunch of "indexes" like "each post with this tag", usually ordered via some kind of filter (time, how popular the twat posting it is, removing any offensive or NSFW ones etc).
But there is really nothing to merge and not much else common to git aside from sitting on its store and protocol
Easiest way I've found (so far) to "host your own git" is https://github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve
How do you push to github without a repo you own and control? Are people pushing patches through the web interface or something?
This is what I'm doing with https://nonphysical.systems
It's still under construction so it's on Polygon mumbai testnet therefore gas is free. The source is linked in the first message board.
All it missed was similiar distributed way to conversate instead of just reading and maybe leaving a comment on a blog
As a long-time user (and writer) of static site generators, I welcome these ideas, as I think these would allow us to organize static sites into some kind of decentralized social networks. Think of this as a bulkier version of RSS, because - for most practical cases - it is relative cheap to just fetch everything from a source and present it in a consistent way.
Even if people were using centralized git repositories, a separate naming service could allow easy (and cheap/free) redirects, so data migration wouldn't be an issue.
Can this be done with mastadon? Of course. But it requires a database server and other moving parts that need occasional maintenance. Treating the social network as a network of static sites makes operations (and federation) so much easier.
Would this be this specific project that wins us over? Maybe not, we shall see. But I think the concept could evolve into something useful.
I wanted to know the design decisions behind how Kademlia worked in detail.
Glad to see this… wondering why we need it if we have Dat/Hypercore and beaker browser, which already uses Secure Kademlia DHT for swarming and follows up with SLEEP protocol instead of Git. It is encrypted and secure, to boot.
But those saying this is federated are wrong. It is peer to peer, just like Git is. Email is federated (the domain part is even a centrally controlled database). Having said that, git can be hosted even on your own computer!
It also doesn't do much to address the reasons users in federated systems tend to congregate around large(r) servers, like discoverability and reliability.
It's a neat PoC but I think the communication needs some work.
Would you call git federated or decentralized?
There is a big exception here. You sign commits, so each update comes with some proof of the identity of the author. I like how simple this is, and generally prefer it over the way Mastodon and other federated services handle identity.
Maybe some illustration would help to explain data and/or control flow?
The number of pilot users would still deserve growing: https://github.com/social4git/social4git/blob/main/doc/direc...
- Managing data (push/pull/etc) in a common, widely-supported protocol (git)
- which has a large, stable, and free-as-in-beer implementation (GitHub)
- as well as some major competitors (Bitbucket/GitLab)
- and is possible to self-host (gitea, OSS GitLab)
What I'd love to see:
- posts are currently in JSON format. Make it something more readable (like Markdown+YAML), at least optionally. That way people can interact _directly_ in GitHub, instead of using a janky client
- The main problem with decentralized frameworks is always "search and discoverability". Someone needs to aggregate all the data in a centralized database and make it easy for others to pick through
Nostr is another one that is more lightweight without the Merkel tree but is seeing some traction.
