Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
It turns out that git has practically everything that's needed to act both as storage and protocol for a social network. Not only that, but it's very well-known within and used, deployed and maintained in the circles I navigate, it scales very well (see github), it's used for critical infrastructure (see kernel.org), it provides history, it's distributed by nature, etc. It's got *almost* everything, but not quite everything needed. So what's missing from git? A few basic things that it turns out aren't very hard to take care of: ability to 'follow', getting followee notifications, 'commenting' and an interface for viewing feeds. And instead of writing a whole online treatise of how this could be done, I asked my colleague Francois-Denis Gonthier to implement a proof and concept of this that we called 'gitgeist' and just published on github [https://github.com/opersys/gitgeist-poc]."
Posted Feb 20, 2019 19:08 UTC (Wed)
by roc (subscriber, #30627)
[Link] (15 responses)
Posted Feb 20, 2019 20:22 UTC (Wed)
by nevets (subscriber, #11875)
[Link] (7 responses)
The part I disagree with is the "all of your friends". This wouldn't be something I want all my friends to be on. This would be more something I would like to be a more technical network, where I would want to save all the posts and what was discussed, on my personal harddrives.
Thus, if you get a few people to start posting things that others would like to have access to, then it can be a success, without having "all your friends" being on it. And it being decentralized and open source, it would work with 10 people using it, or 10,000,000 people using it.
Posted Feb 20, 2019 23:03 UTC (Wed)
by pr1268 (guest, #24648)
[Link] (3 responses)
I agree with roc: Facebook, G+, and Twitter each already have a critical mass of users to be successful. These have flourished, in spite of the existence of the others, because of the specialization you mention. Whether Gitgeist finds its niche market and succeeds remains to be seen, but then again the article stresses that it's a proof-of-concept social network. Quite frankly I'm impressed with how well git can be abused this way. ;-)
Posted Feb 24, 2019 19:34 UTC (Sun)
by h2 (guest, #27965)
[Link] (2 responses)
So apparently the users here don't use g+ much. Even I, as a non user, knew it was shutting down since I had an account that I never used, and they emailed this notice out a month or two ago.
Sadly, there is a certain winner take all in these platforms, despite brave efforts to create more free alternatives.
I find the notion that git has to do everything kind of sad, but I guess there will always be people out there who think tacking on more use cases a tool is not designed for is a positive. Those are probably the same people who think using git to download a file is more sensible than using wget or curl...
Posted Feb 26, 2019 12:31 UTC (Tue)
by intgr (subscriber, #39733)
[Link] (1 responses)
Sounds terribly like web browsers of today. Not sure that replacing web apps with git apps would be such a bad thing. :)
Posted Feb 26, 2019 13:30 UTC (Tue)
by jani (subscriber, #74547)
[Link]
Which I like to paraphrase as, "If all you have is Excel, everything looks like a spreadsheet."
Posted Feb 20, 2019 23:21 UTC (Wed)
by roc (subscriber, #30627)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Feb 21, 2019 16:25 UTC (Thu)
by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
[Link] (1 responses)
Isn't it a general thing with entering a market that it makes sense to find an underserved niche which is not very interesting to the incumbent players?
Posted Feb 21, 2019 19:45 UTC (Thu)
by roc (subscriber, #30627)
[Link]
Posted Feb 20, 2019 21:05 UTC (Wed)
by nhippi (subscriber, #34640)
[Link]
Posted Feb 24, 2019 7:13 UTC (Sun)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (5 responses)
A lot of other web software also needs to back away from that race to the bottom.
Posted Feb 25, 2019 12:29 UTC (Mon)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (4 responses)
The problem is that in this area (as in many), the mediocre-but-easily-available is the enemy of the good-but-a-hassle-to-access. Right now everybody and their dog either has a Facebook account, or is two minutes of filling in a web form and checking some boxes away from one – and chances are that almost everyone they know is already on the service. What are a few pesky privacy scandals compared to that kind of convenience?
You could make available the greatest social network ever – free, stuffed with useful and convenient features, privacy-conscious to a fault, etc. – but require people to go out of their way just a little bit to get access to it (especially when it's not obvious they'll have anyone to network with once they're there) and they're not going to be interested.
Right now, if you want to be the next Facebook, or even a noticeable blip on the radar in the general area of Facebook, you have to be significantly and obviously better than Facebook for people to even take a second look – and since, privacy issues aside, Facebook is actually pretty good at what it does these days, that's not a trivial bar to clear.
Posted Feb 26, 2019 2:17 UTC (Tue)
by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
[Link] (2 responses)
I think you're wrong about this. Inconvenience lowers the number of people potentially interested, but it doesn't make the project completely untenable. What it needs is a core group of users who understand the advantages and are interested in socializing with each other. If you have those two things, you can have a social network that is capable of surviving. It may not thrive, but so long as the users can support the network by themselves, it doesn't need to be able to beat Facebook to survive.
It seems to me that what it really needs is a use case that can bring in enough user/developers to get it off the ground, and that the most likely use case is a replacement for email lists as a way for developers to communicate with each other. Developers who already use git will have a lower activation energy to get involved, since they already have key enabling technology handy. And as articles here on LWN keep pointing out, there are serious ongoing problems with email lists as a way of handling development. So what it really needs is a customizable back-end that lets it substitute for LKML as a development discussion platform, and it has both an application and a group of interested users together.
Posted Feb 26, 2019 7:16 UTC (Tue)
by karim (subscriber, #114)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 26, 2019 9:34 UTC (Tue)
by jani (subscriber, #74547)
[Link]
> 5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.
http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html
Posted Feb 27, 2019 9:15 UTC (Wed)
by jezuch (subscriber, #52988)
[Link]
The real solution, of course, is federation. But good luck getting the big players to open their silos.
Posted Feb 21, 2019 11:27 UTC (Thu)
by tchernobog (guest, #73595)
[Link] (8 responses)
Posted Feb 21, 2019 13:13 UTC (Thu)
by excors (subscriber, #95769)
[Link] (1 responses)
But from the description of gitgeist, I don't see why that'd be a problem for it. It sounds like every user has their own independent git repository, they refer to other users by repository URL, and posts are represented by directories and files. None of it intentionally depends on commit hashes, so rewriting history should be fine: you can delete stuff from your own repository and continue participating in the network as normal, and if someone else has a cached copy of your now-deleted commits then that's not your problem. It doesn't seem to be depending on any unique properties of git, it's just using git as a database and as a data synchronisation protocol, so it's basically the same as if you used any other kind of database.
Posted Feb 21, 2019 15:19 UTC (Thu)
by jani (subscriber, #74547)
[Link]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime
Posted Feb 21, 2019 16:45 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (5 responses)
Something that the GDPR's detractors repeatedly "forget" - the GDPR does NOT NOT NOT apply to original material. It only applies to search engines and indexes.
So anything I post about me is not covered.
And anything I post that is defamatory / libellous / slanderous / whatever about someone else is already covered by other laws.
Americans seem to have this weird idea that everyone else's business is something they have a right to be interested in, and that no-one has a right to a protective wall where they can say "keep out".
The GDPR simply says that I have an interest in information about me, and I have the right to a say in how it is used. ESPECIALLY if it wasn't me that handed over the data in the first place - facebook, I'm looking at you !!!
Cheers,
Posted Feb 21, 2019 19:04 UTC (Thu)
by Karellen (subscriber, #67644)
[Link] (2 responses)
I'm not 100% sure you're correct there:
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/
> The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay [...]
That applies to all data controllers, where a controller is:
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/
> ‘controller’ means the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data; where the purposes and means of such processing are determined by Union or Member State law, the controller or the specific criteria for its nomination may be provided for by Union or Member State law;
So, if you "determine the purpose and means of the processing of personal data" - i.e. you have personal data about a "data subject" - a person, then that person has the right to request that data be erased, according to various criteria.
Note that that appears to apply to *all* data controllers, not "only search engines and indexes".
So if you post your address to a social media platform, and then you decide you don't want them to have that data, you should be able to file a GDPR erasure request to get them to delete the post.
However, I'm not sure how that works with a distributed system like git. If someone asks me to delete a git commit that has their personal information in it, that could be tricky. I think some people who were looking at different ways to add large file support came up with an idea to be able to tell git "hey, there should be a blob with hash #xxxxxx here, but it isn't here, just ignore it" - without it throwing a fit, so you could delete stuff without invalidating history. Or you could just delete the whole git tree, which would fulfill the erasure request too. But having fulfilled the erasure request, if you clone/pull from another user who did not get the erasure request, and get a fresh copy of the data - is that then OK?
Posted Feb 23, 2019 16:44 UTC (Sat)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
The GDPR if I have it right concerns the collection and processing of personal data. As such there is no "right to be forgotten", it's more "I don't want to be on your database, take me off" or "the info you have is wrong, fix it". Both are important - why should my details be on your database if I no longer want to "benefit" from it, or even more so if I didn't give you the information (and permission) in the first place! And especially so if said details are wrong!
The "right to be forgotten" is there to prevent old news being dragged back - in Europe we seem to have this quaint notion where convictions can be "spent" and no longer count against someone, and the right to be forgotten - quite deliberately - makes it *difficult* to find such information. But it does not give the subject the right to attempt to delete or alter primary sources. Do *you* think it right that an old man should be punished for the actions of a teenager? I don't think so, and the "right to be forgotten" would agree. And chances are, if the person really hasn't changed, there's a lot more recent stuff around that's easy to find.
Cheers,
Posted Feb 25, 2019 7:56 UTC (Mon)
by joncb (guest, #128491)
[Link]
Then almost certainly. There's a "journalistic, artistic, or literary exception" (Article 85) but it seems like that could be a legal nightmare of the "just cheaper to delete your account" kind.
Posted Feb 23, 2019 7:27 UTC (Sat)
by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
[Link]
Posted Feb 25, 2019 10:46 UTC (Mon)
by dunlapg (guest, #57764)
[Link]
This is absolutely false. Shortly after it was passed, a European court ruled that it applied to hand-written personal notes taken by Jehovah's Witnesses about their door-to-door visits -- notes that are not collected or shared anywhere, but only used by the person who wrote them to refresh their memory on follow-up visits.
Posted Feb 25, 2019 1:50 UTC (Mon)
by develop7 (guest, #75021)
[Link]
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
ou could make available the greatest social network ever – free, stuffed with useful and convenient features, privacy-conscious to a fault, etc. – but require people to go out of their way just a little bit to get access to it (especially when it's not obvious they'll have anyone to network with once they're there) and they're not going to be interested.
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
>
> Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you
> can't expect to hit that right away. Initially you have to choose
> between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users,
> or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take
> the first. It's easier to expand userwise than
> satisfactionwise. And perhaps more importantly, it's harder to
> lie to yourself. If you think you're 85% of the way to a great
> product, how do you know it's not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it's easy
> to know how many users you have.
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Wol
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Wol
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
It may have some difficulty applying generally but if a gitgeist poster :-
a) Doxxed someone
b) Posted pictures of them
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Something that the GDPR's detractors repeatedly "forget" - the GDPR does NOT NOT NOT apply to original material. It only applies to search engines and indexes.
To paraphrase, "everything is better with Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
BluetoothGit"