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ens
Discontinued Implementations for ENS core functionality: The registry, registrars, and public resolvers.
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No, this developer created a fake website claiming to represent the whole Fediverse, à la https://joinmastodon.org/. His version recommends the following instances, in order, with the message "Browse a small sample of Fediverse servers that are welcoming to newcomers below.":
• Literal Neo-Nazi site. Defederated by nearly all of Fedi because they are literal, card-carrying Nazis.
• Transphobia-even-if-it-means-misogyny site run by his wife. Defederated by most of fedi, for harassment campaigns. Defederated from my instance for harassing a cis woman who worked at a feminist charity for, as I recall, having pronouns in her bio, which is apparently too much like solidarity for them. (There were a couple of good people on that instance, last time I checked. Well, one good person. I think she messaged me later, saying she left.)
• His personal instance that basically nobody uses. (It's too obscure to be blocked by most of Fedi, but it's blocked by most of the instances he tries to interact with; he inevitably breaks their rules.)
• shitposter.club: A kinda-okay, but not moderated to my taste, instance. Blocked by some of fedi; probably on the list because they still federate with his personal instance.
• freespeechextremist.com: A barely moderated instance that… well, I trust its sysadmin – sorry, its BOFH. And it is friendly. But it's a "free speech zone", with all that entails; there are some total arseholes there, and the only thing keeping them from causing major damage is the relentless bullying they get from the other users until they leave.
The bottom two are legitimately part of the Fediverse – albeit the shady alleyways of the Fediverse – but we've almost universally shunned the top three. This developer used SEO hacks to get his fake near the top of the search results. (Please don't link it here; we don't need to give it more SEO juice.)
He does not represent the people who make the protocols; he does not represent the people who curate the communities; he does not represent the communities; and yet he claims to, all the while decrying how mean the community is being to him.
We just want to live our lives, and use the 'net to talk to each other. If anyone's making this political, it's him.
> What we really need in this landscape is dead simple services.
I'm working on exactly that: a service that acts as an ActivityPub server (code[1], example[2], example application running on top of it[3]) for users in the form of a static binary. It supports multiple storage backends that can be selected individually or all together at build time and it can be extended to many more.
[1] https://github.com/go-ap/fedbox
[3] https://littr.me
That's sad to hear, but it makes total sense to shut down the server given its sensitive data, rather than hand it off to another person.
Mastodon/ActivityPub is a poor fit for a social network IMHO.
- Accounts should not be tied a single server and their continued maintenance.
- Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather than entrusted with a single administrator.
- People don't want to self-host.
The core problem of a lot of social networks comes down to name aliasing, and who controls the name registry. In the case of nostr[1] this is not a problem because everything is using public keys. Another protocol is Farcaster[2] which plans to use a smart contract to maintain a name registry without requiring a single controller.
That's sad to hear, but it makes total sense to shut down the server given its sensitive data, rather than hand it off to another person.
Mastodon/ActivityPub is a poor fit for a social network IMHO.
- Accounts should not be tied a single server and their continued maintenance.
- Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather than entrusted with a single administrator.
- People don't want to self-host.
The core problem of a lot of social networks comes down to name aliasing, and who controls the name registry. In the case of nostr[1] this is not a problem because everything is using public keys. Another protocol is Farcaster[2] which plans to use a smart contract to maintain a name registry without requiring a single controller.
I think you could create a system that's resilient to such issues even with federation (not saying it's easy, though), and Matrix actually has a solution in the works for this – decentralised user accounts [1].
And all of this makes me wonder – maybe it's better to re-implement something like Mastodon on top of Matrix. If Matrix adopts decentralised user accounts, that would seemingly solve such issues automatically. There was a POC Matrix based Twitter clone demonstrating this, actually [2] (but without the decentralised accounts yet).
All fair/valid points to consider. The closest example so far that I've found of a truly P2P online community is Aether: https://getaether.net
>perhaps someone could have setup a central name server to avoid name collisions, but who would you trust to run it? what happens when it goes down? might as well just use dns.
ENS (https://ens.domains/) solves this problem rather elegantly. A single source of truth that is decentralized so any app can use it without trusting anyone. It wasn't around when Mastadon was being built unfortunately but is useful for developers of new apps and protocols.
I think the latest "cool" software is Misskey. https://misskey-hub.net/
(English version of that website available; just add /en/ to the end of the URL.)
Which processes up to 8k requests at a time, waiting up to 10 ms for a batch.
Similar techniques should work on read batching, but I haven't tried that. You can also speed that up some more with the COPY protocol, but IIRC you need to be more careful about escaping/SQL injection.
On my 6 year old mid-range desktop (this CPU[1] and this disk[2]) this program can process ~30k `create`s per second. For about $1500, I could buy a new computer with a Ryzen 9 7950 with 4x the core count/8x the thread count and 2x the single-threaded performance, so around ~10x more processing power, 128 GB of RAM, and a Samsung 980 Pro SSD, which can do 1M Write IOPS (25x more than my SSD) or 5GB/s sequential writes (10x more). So a $1500 computer with a single disk should be able to do around 300k/s. PCIe gen 5 is now coming out, which will allow for another doubling of disk performance.
128GB of RAM means you can keep at least 100M rows worth of index in memory. It's not that expensive (under $10k) to build a server with 1TB of RAM.
Totally feasible for a hobbyist to do without tons of tricky optimization; people spend $20k on a jetski or $80k on a truck. Like I said, the most expensive part is going to be the storage, but you could do something like only store the most recent 1000 tweets per person, and charge $10 to bump that up to the most recent 10 million tweets or something. You'd come out at a substantial profit with that model if you got a few thousand takers. Similarly you could charge to let someone follow more than a few thousand people so you could pay for a read replica or two.
[0] https://github.com/ndriscoll/twit/commit/19b245677b978b42a6f...
[1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-6600K...
[2] https://www.disctech.com/SanDisk-SDSSDHP-256G-256GB-SATA-SSD