[HN Gopher] The "smolnet", build for friends and friends of friends
___________________________________________________________________
The "smolnet", build for friends and friends of friends
Author : rglullis
Score : 169 points
Date : 2023-06-12 11:59 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (communitywiki.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (communitywiki.org)
| bamfly wrote:
| Main thing I want to self-host for friends, that's not served by
| any of a hundred chat apps:
|
| A place to share media reviews and recommendations. Wiki-like is
| OK, as long as table support is great.
|
| Difficulty: it should be able to helpfully look up and create
| entries for any new media it encounters, using various online
| sources (IMDB, The Movie Database, TVDB, maybe the Musicbrainz
| DB, something else authoritative-ish for video games, books, and
| comic books). So if you want to add a title to a table of, say,
| sci-fi movies, and link that to a review of same, if it's already
| got the movie, it should recommend it based on the title you type
| in, and if not, it should find likely candidates to suggest, and
| fill in things like release year, director, actors, et c., from
| outside sources, automatically, when you select one of them. It
| should be able to find all mentions of a given piece of media
| within its system, such that one could look up a page for a
| given, say, album, and get a list of every page where it's
| mentioned on the site.
|
| It should also maintain a watched/listened/played/read list for
| each user, and be able to import that from places like
| Letterboxd.
|
| Basically, a Wiki with smart media metadata import.
|
| It's the only thing we want to do that's not served adequately by
| chat.
| rakoo wrote:
| Chat is a very bad flow for this, because chat is a stream, not
| a garden. It's made for quick feedback. What you want is closer
| to a wiki, but I understand you need to share it with other
| people and discuss about it.
|
| I don't know of any software that does that, but the good thing
| is that maybe you don't need a new platform. Creating new
| platforms just splits the communities and is against the Unix
| philosophy we hold dear. Maybe a good first step is to be in
| the Fediverse, and create an actor per entry. That actor would
| contain all facts, potentially linking other entries. Anyone
| could @ movies, so you'd see the discussion about them. You can
| create lists, like "watched/listened/played/read" and add
| actors to those lists. Those actors don't post anything,
| they're just a "rallying point" for conversation. They're more
| encompassing than hashtags.
|
| Sounds like a weekend project for someone adventurous enough
| bamfly wrote:
| Yeah, I've considered slapping something together in Django
| or what have you--libraries exist to make a lot of this not
| _that_ hard--but... kids. And the new Zelda, for that matter
| :-)
| epiccoleman wrote:
| The new Zelda has utterly destroyed my progress on side
| projects and also playing guitar.
|
| That's ok though, this happens to me every now and then - a
| game will come out that is so good / compelling that I just
| need to drop everything else and jam all my free time into
| it. It's almost like something in my psychology is saying
| "play the shit out of this so that we can get over the
| obsession and get back to other pursuits quickly."
|
| I don't game all that much these days, so when something
| really good comes along, I just let myself go nuts on it.
| I've realized I seem to work in cycles, so after my Zelda
| obsession dies off, I'm sure I'll get back to other stuff.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| One could argue it's important to play it if virtually
| all of your friends are playing it too (as is my case.)
| "Cultural moments" and what have you: it won't reach OOT
| levels, but boy is it close!
| mawise wrote:
| I've thought about this in the work I've done on Haven[1].
| Today Haven is just self-hosted linear posting like a blog, but
| private and tied together with RSS. I've got ambitions of
| adding media/restaurant/service recommendations where you can
| post your recommendations and they can be separately
| searched/aggregated, probably even keeping RSS as the protocol.
| This gives you a Yelp that can't be gamed by companies because
| there is no central place for a company to go to game /manage
| the recommendations.
|
| [1]: https://havenweb.org
| newman8r wrote:
| For anyone else looking for solutions, I the use self-hosted
| Mattermost for my family and friends - been doing that for years
| and very happy with it.
| dizhn wrote:
| I don't get where to click to have something happen or what to
| download to run this myself. Is this an idea to implement
| ourselves?
| OmarShehata wrote:
| Yes, this is just a wiki about small communities. I guess one
| of the problems of small communities is that you probably can't
| just one that's advertised since it'll likely be full, so you
| have to make your own or get invited to one.
| nicbou wrote:
| Related concept: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-
| app/
| thih9 wrote:
| Does not load for me. Hug of death? If yes, is there an
| alternative instance or an article describing the platform?
|
| > Proxy Error
|
| > The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream
| server. The proxy server could not handle the request
|
| > Reason: Error reading from remote server
| gerikson wrote:
| I think this site received the hug of death.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230612115935/https://community...
| machrider wrote:
| One thing I've worried about with self-hosting small (or smol)
| services is that I'm responsible for securing them against
| attackers. Even if my circle is 15 people using a particular
| service, potentially thousands of malicious actors will be poking
| at it over the months and years I'm running it.
|
| I'm a big fan of self-hosting, especially things that I can run
| inside my home with no internet-facing ports. But anything that
| will be outward facing has to be sandboxed from everything else,
| kept up to date, and monitored for intrusions. It can be daunting
| unless you definitely have time to stay on top of it. I'm curious
| if any self-hosters have thoughts about this.
| kensanata wrote:
| As the "Administration" tag for my blog will attest, the
| sysadmin side does take a lot of work. Every now and then
| something is down, something needs defending (like the current
| HN users all clicking on the site which is running without any
| caches...), and on and on. In my experience, it's not so much
| cybercriminals that keep me busy but bad programmers that write
| spiders that treat every website in the world like corporate
| infrastructure. Stuff like git, cgit, radicale, a bunch of web
| apps, a netnews server, an IRC server, those things aren't
| tricky. But of course I also decided not to host mail, matrix,
| Next Cloud and so on. You need to pick your battles, too.
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| In the past I ended up in a place where I self-hosted
| virtually everything I consumed within my network that could
| be self-hosted. Right down to major OS software update
| caching.
|
| It's definitely exhausting and I hit upon a point where it
| felt like I couldn't distinguish between home and business
| infrastructure. I expanded to include family stuff, and that
| became a massive headache. When you do that, it's not always
| easy to extricate yourself either. It took several years to
| downsize so my services were only consumed by me again. Then
| a few more to fully move to non-self-hosted almost-
| everything.
|
| I used to host my mail but that eventually becomes a
| headache. It didn't become an admin headache, but overtime it
| became either/or (depending on the time) a technical
| liability or a security concern.
|
| These days I try to buy/pay for the services I consume
| instead of self-hosting. However I've been moving back to
| assuming a "self hosting first" mindset because it seems like
| so many tech companies are actively trying to alienate their
| user base lately.
|
| Tailscale does make sharing services amongst groups of
| technically minded friends _crazy_ simple.
| rglullis wrote:
| You seem like my dream customer for communick. What can I
| do to have you joining it?
| kornhole wrote:
| I have been running an SBC server at home for years with many
| publicly available services for friends and family. To keep
| everything secure and easy to maintain, I use Yunohost.org
| which is a distribution containing most of what you need to
| easily install, secure, update, backup, and manage the server.
| It includes fail2ban and other security measures. If you or
| your server would be target of a persistent attacker, using
| VLAN's or a VPS would be a good idea. I am sure somebody will
| comment on some tangents to go down a rabbit hole, but I am
| like probably 95% of self hosters whose servers contain nothing
| of any value for a hacker.
| elektor wrote:
| Looks like they're using "smol" servers; it crashed under a few
| hundred HN visits ;)
| gerikson wrote:
| To be honest, that's kind of the point. When you're "webscale"
| you're inevitably at a level where you have to pay a lot of
| money just to keep the site up. Smolnet is supposed to be run
| from someone's basement.
| coldpie wrote:
| My $100/year shared webhosting held up just fine to a front-
| page HN post. I don't think that's "a lot" a of money, though
| it is probably more expensive than the power usage of a small
| server in someone's basement.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| Maybe!
|
| In the UK $100/year gets you about a 20-40w constant load*.
|
| That's a fairly efficient machine, and then there's the
| router, modem etc.
|
| Granted some of that already exists, and a Raspberry Pi or
| similar would fit in that budget.
|
| * quick maths: $100/365 gives 27 cents a day or approx 1c
| per hour - at $0.50/kWh you have a 25w constant load and at
| $0.25/kWh you have 50w.
| zrail wrote:
| HN traffic is honestly not that much. A recent thread puts
| it at between 10k and 30k visitors while you're in the top
| few slots, and assuming that lasts 4 hours or so is on the
| order of 2-5 rps, probably bursting up to 50 rps or so. Any
| halfway decent caching proxy is going to handle that
| without breaking a sweat.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| > When you're "webscale" you're inevitably at a level where
| you have to pay a lot of money just to keep the site up
|
| This is true when thinking in centralised big-site terms but
| there are other ways to achieve a large reach, some of them
| already close to main-stream. Peertube [1] is an example of
| such, using a combination of Activitypub and peer to peer
| (here: bittorrent) to create a "web scale" platform without
| needing a lot of money. Does it work? A good question,
| Peertube itself certainly works fine but it would be an
| interesting test to see how far it actually scales.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
| hinkley wrote:
| One of my major beefs with IT conversations is the stubborn
| adherence to the manufacturing notion of 'economies of
| scale'.
|
| That's not how algorithms work. Most of the things we do are
| nlogn complexity. There are lots of breakpoints where 10x as
| many users cost you 11x as much in hardware, and we pretend
| it's going to cost us 8x. Any time your estimates are off by
| 40% should trigger your root cause analysis protocol.
|
| In particular we are _lousy_ at statistics. We have to be
| right in the middle of the consequences of misreading them
| before we act. When you have 10 servers you might have to
| deal with a deployment race condition once a month. When you
| have 30 servers you might have to deal with one every week.
| That starts to materially affect your estimates when you have
| five of those sorts of things going on.
| nathants wrote:
| cloudflare workers + r2 is shockingly affordable.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Not surprising considering there's a rant about the resource
| usage from web crawlers
| jacooper wrote:
| Good luck getting friends/family to use this instead of
| WhatsApp/iMessage(in the U.S.).
|
| I tried to switch everyone to Signal, but it utterly failed,
| people took forever to reply, if they even do, and never actually
| contact me on it.
|
| Matrix works because it has bridges.
| pwb25 wrote:
| So like a normal website as they always were before all those web
| 2.0 platforms?
|
| That then did a 180 from being platforms and started with
| "content creators"?
| digitalsushi wrote:
| I think so? I'm building the idea out myself as I learn what
| this is.
|
| If web 2.0 was the introduction of comment systems, and turned
| each web page into a performance upon a stage, with a goal of
| audience participation / loudness / re-sharing, and content
| creating being the evolution of publication to hustling... I
| think lots of people would be satisfied by a local internet of
| people they trust, to share ideas in a non-commercial, private,
| 'safe' way.
|
| But the real magic to me would be not worrying about it being
| hacked, or deployed, or monitored, or any of the pollutant
| infrastructure that we got good at, that unfortunately makes
| everything operational and robust.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Love this. I've been exploring (literally in the first few days)
| writing my own ActivityPub aggregator/client. I'm using similar
| motivations as this. Ie i want it to be stupidly easy to self
| host and allow for features that may not scale well to hundreds
| of thousands or millions of users.
|
| To me that's one area where some ActivityPub implementations
| fail. They take not-insignificant startup costs and that friction
| makes it less fun to self host.
|
| I feel like in a "fun" implementation you could spin it up on a
| $5/m VPS, plus a domain so if you're lean maybe $15 startup
| (domain + vps) with ~$6 monthly costs. That's filesystem storage
| with no persistent backup but rsync could get you a long way if
| you're trying to remain cheap. Plus the app could help you
| backup, offer encrypted backups to let the community help, etc.
|
| I know i know, ActivityPub suffers for small instances. It's an
| area i want to explore, and explore ways to augment the spec or
| go around it for efficiency.
|
| Regardless, i think we need to get more into these micro worlds.
| Yea, you could argue ActivityPub is not micro if it still
| connects everyone. I'm speaking micro in the sense of the "old
| web" though, where lots of independent websites formed a network
| of content, backlinking, etc. Tooling to embrace that, propagate,
| etc seems useful to me - but keeping micro also seems essential,
| to me.
| ryanmpierson wrote:
| I miss when BBS were all the rage.
| op00to wrote:
| I do and I don't. I miss the excitement, I miss the feeling of
| finding something new that's precious. You only had so much
| time on the phone in those days, even if you were sticking to
| your free dialing area.
|
| I also got exposed to a lot of stuff at a young age partially
| enabled by BBSes, and I wonder how it affected the adult I am
| today. I was in a LOT of precarious situations far outside what
| might be considered appropriate free range parenting.
|
| Anyway, agree man, I miss BBSes!
| asim wrote:
| I like this. Speaks to my own goal of creating "micro"
| communities. https://micro.mu. We limit groups to 20 people. I
| think that's an ideal number for real connections. Need more,
| it's likely for a different type of communication.
| Solvency wrote:
| The big bubbly space-inefficient chatroom UI you're using seems
| so irrelevant/obsolete here. It already makes me stressed out,
| thinking of dealing with an SMS group on my iPhone of 20
| people. It'd be the worst possible user experience to engage
| with a meaningful community in a meaningful way over time.
| asim wrote:
| Thanks, we're thinking about changing to a feed format but
| will take your comments into consideration.
| vitehozonage wrote:
| What did you use to implement end-to-end encryption?
| stavros wrote:
| Trying to use this, I get an error when entering a group. Seems
| like a cool idea, but it needs to have a lot more functionality
| to draw me in, I think.
| asim wrote:
| Yea sorry, there's some very random breakages happening right
| now. Working on it. Thanks for the feedback.
| bioxept wrote:
| How does this compare to a small discord server? What can it do
| better?
| asim wrote:
| So it's private and invite only by default. There is no
| element of "public" and the focus is on real connections with
| people you know rather than people you've never met in
| person. There's also no notifications or "is typing". The
| goal is really not to try emulate existing chat or bombard
| you with the need for immediate replies. It's a lot more
| focused on how most of our lives and mine personally operates
| now which is with less reaction and more laid back. Group
| sizes are also capped at 20.
| nathants wrote:
| no is-typing notifications is a killer feature. sold.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think what ruins communities is large sustained growth and
| not size.
|
| Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities
| with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a
| lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new
| members every few days.
|
| What kills most mainstream social media is needing to show
| growth to investors. This turns them from a village with
| familiar faces into a train station where everyone is always
| passing through and there are no shared values or experiences.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's assimilation speed and has been seen time and time again
| in various contexts.
|
| If I take my American family and move to Australia, _we will
| become Australian_ over time.
|
| If I take my family _and the entire city I live in_ to
| Australia, there will be an American city in Australia.
|
| _Eternal September_ is just when the influx overwhelmed the
| "carrying capacity" of Usenet, and anyone who has been on any
| forum for a length of time can refer to a similar influx
| (often complaining that everything has gone to crap since
| then).
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It probably boils down to mathematics. If your average
| interaction is with someone you've never met before, it's
| very difficult for persistent relations to form.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Assimilation speed versus rate of joining versus rate of
| people leaving all need to be kept in balance to have a
| long running, tight-knit community. An interesting example
| is university clubs: they have the intrinsic property that
| people's tenure in the club is very finite, typically a
| maximum of 4 years. Despite this constant turnover of
| membership, clubs tend to maintain a relatively constant
| culture. I posit that the main driver behind this is
| deliberate accelerated assimilation.
|
| Right out of the gates, you have selection bias in who
| wants to be in your club: probably people who share many of
| the same interests as the club. Then you have further
| selection pressure with inviting new membership: existing
| members are more likely to accept into the organization
| prospective members who are similar to themselves, or at
| least, an idealized version. Then, you have rituals,
| ranging from hazing to positive Big/Little type
| interactions, which proactively push new members to
| assimilate into the club.
| bombcar wrote:
| Those are good points; a university club almost by
| definition has 25% turn over each year, but it's
| scheduled, defined, and worked around. People don't
| usually just disappear; they hand off responsibilities
| and train, either explicitly or implicitly.
| tetha wrote:
| > Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy
| communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't
| active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one
| maybe two new members every few days.
|
| Man, with me on the edge to nuking or not nuking my reddit
| account with a couple of smaller communities, I didn't need
| more nostalgia back here. I was part of the "night crew" over
| on the old freenode in a few tech channels since I'm from
| europe and the times I have time ended up being when the US
| was asleep, haha. Learned to much about a couple of topics
| over that time as well. I still know way too many arcane
| weirdnesses and internals of python from stints on #python.
|
| Or old TF2/Tremulous/CS1.6/Quake servers. Times when we could
| call truces over voice to get us another beer and the other
| guy wouldn't come 'round the corner. And then you'd discuss
| current brand choices for a second. Or when one of the local
| pros started to take you seriously and would start some
| impromptu coaching, which usually involved a lot of death on
| your side because now they were looking for you.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| Man, I learned _so much_ about good architecture from just
| hanging out on Freenode in a few programming channels.
|
| At some point, the business world called, and I stopped
| spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think
| something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded
| away, right?
|
| Those were simpler times, I suppose. We were working with
| all the new frameworks of the day, and it was the grizzled
| old engineers alongside the young hotshots -- and none of
| it mattered, because all anyone saw was your nick and your
| code. You'd put some interesting snippet up on one of those
| anonymous paste sites, and the critique would roll in.
|
| I don't know how kids these days learn about dependency
| injection, the downsides of singleton architectures, the
| art of API design, or the nuanced tradeoffs of using an ORM
| to abstract over a relational model. But I rather enjoyed
| learning it all "on the streets" of IRC -- frankly a far
| more welcoming and engineering-focused atmosphere than many
| tech companies.
| tetha wrote:
| > At some point, the business world called, and I stopped
| spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think
| something happened with Freenode, and the communities
| faded away, right?
|
| There was some .. lets just call it, rather encouraged
| rebranding to libra.chat. And there is something else
| namesquatting the freenode name.
| dizhn wrote:
| I think you got autocorrected. The name is libera.chat .
| sshine wrote:
| > something happened with Freenode, and the communities
| faded away, right?
|
| It was a netsplit.
|
| Freenode was sold to an heir of the former Korean
| monarchy. The idea that the network was even sellable did
| not resonate with several former staff calling it a
| hostile takeover, so Libera.Chat was formed as a moral
| successor.
|
| The split caused a drop in user count from ~80k to ~45k.
| Some channels migrated to OFTC instead. See a user count
| history graph:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera_Chat#History
|
| https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021
|
| Since the decline of freenode, their user count
| statistics have looked unapologetically synthetic.
| bovermyer wrote:
| There were definitely some TF2 servers that felt like
| familiar bars or chat rooms that happened to have gun
| mechanics on the side.
|
| That doesn't happen in modern shooters. Heck, even MMORPGs
| rarely have that community feel anymore.
| asim wrote:
| That's good insight and similar to my own experiences. I
| spent time on various forums in the late 90s and early 00s.
| It was a golden experience and I got to know a lot of the
| members there. You had the usual suspects chatting amongst
| all the lurkers. The model was far superior to the type chat
| systems were using today to build similar communities.
|
| I did the VC funded thing and personally don't want to go
| back to it. I also don't really care about the high growth
| thing but being sustainable is important. Sustained growth
| and profitability at least means the thing can be around for
| a while. I also think it comes down to the values of the
| creators of any platform. At what point are they going to
| sell out and why. That really irks me now. Like everything is
| in the service of wealth creation as opposed to real value. I
| think the only way to mitigate that is structure the project
| and team in a way to support it. So if you get on the VC
| hamster wheel, there's no path but hyper growth. If you go
| against it and say, run a really normal business or even a
| social enterprise (aka non profit), maybe it actually
| benefits the people it's in service of.
| dasil003 wrote:
| > _I also think it comes down to the values of the creators
| of any platform. At what point are they going to sell out
| and why. That really irks me now. Like everything is in the
| service of wealth creation as opposed to real value. I
| think the only way to mitigate that is structure the
| project and team in a way to support it._
|
| This is the crux of why we can't have nice things, and I've
| been thinking a lot about it. There are so many dynamics
| that trend towards corporate consolidation and ultimately
| the alienating effects of modern technology. The money to
| be made combined with rapid global scalability and network
| lock-in effects, mean that it's an uphill fight the whole
| way.
|
| The bright spot is that so many technologists are disgusted
| with the direction tech has taken, and _we have the know-
| how and agency to build alternatives_. In order to address
| the selling out problem, I think we need to establish some
| standardized and well understood commitments to shepherding
| projects, products and companies that have some real teeth
| while not requiring a vow of poverty to maintain.
|
| The other key piece is finding the right hooks to get
| normals using these products and not just defaulting to the
| big tech alternatives due to friction. This is the hardest
| part by far, but I feel there is enough general frustration
| with big tech that will be possible to harness in some way.
| The key will be some kind of killer app that appeals to
| enough people to gain critical mass.
| vincnetas wrote:
| And one more thing to think of, how to make this new good
| product resistant to EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish).
| Because you want to make it open, this means it's open to
| multi billion corporations who can throw lots of $$$ and
| build a nicer client really fast. And from there, well we
| know how it goes.
| ajani wrote:
| In ye olden days the whole world didn't exist. Maps indicated
| 'here be dragons'.
|
| I feel you though, marginalia, and appreciate your work. I
| wrote a search engine too once and after a few months of me
| not using it myself, gave up. My results were too specific
| and not broad enough to include the world.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Well yeah, sure.
|
| The world still doesn't really exist. At least not in any
| where we can comprehend it. Since it is almost certainly
| incomprehensible and probably not even possible to capture
| the world as it is, then isn't the second best to build
| something that is nice?
| ajani wrote:
| Aw come on now, don't play coy, you know what I meant :)
|
| That just as we went from hunting and gathering to farms
| and now cities, internet grew from a few people having
| access in universities and some tech corporations, to now
| phones in the hands of children in villages.
|
| Let's be more inclusive and dare I say progressive even?
|
| I, for one, am not hankering to gather and hunt.
| asim wrote:
| > In ye olden days the whole world didn't exist
|
| This! Why is it everything we build is to communicate with
| the world? The reality is we live in a certain physical
| space, we can only see, hear and speak at a certain
| distance and while technology has enabled a way to overcome
| that, it does feel like we're overwhelmed by the scale of
| humans we can communicate with. I want to go back to real,
| small, private connection. Hence micro.
| bombcar wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
|
| > Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that
| holds that social and political issues should be dealt
| with at the most immediate or local level that is
| consistent with their resolution.
|
| Even if the whole world isn't built this way, much of it
| _could_ be, especially groups and interactions.
| ajani wrote:
| You know what's really truly private?
|
| It's what you said. The real world. Meet a friend. It's
| as private as it gets.
|
| Pick a small friend for true micro experience. :D
|
| Jokes aside, unplug. And it doesn't have to be that we
| build things at a world scale. But isn't it amazing that
| we can and do build stuff at this scale.
|
| Devs often don't use tech as much as regular users! They
| build, and forget the use.
| em-bee wrote:
| 20 seems a bit low. what happens if i want to invite 21 people?
|
| many groups have a few active people and many less active
| people. one group i am in has about 80 members, 10-20 or which
| are active and keep a steady stream of communication. if the
| group were to grow much beyond that, it would be to much.
|
| so you are right that 20 active people is a good group size but
| if there is a technical limit of 20 that means i have to police
| all the inactive people in order to have room for active
| people. seems to create more overhead than i'd be comfortable
| with.
|
| wechat groups have a limit of 500 people. it's big enough to
| allow some flexibility for groups that have lots of members but
| little communication, but don't allow the groups to get so
| large as to get out of hand. the ideal technical limit for me
| is somewhere between 100 and 500. less than that and i'd run
| into to many corner cases because some group somewhere hit the
| limit. most of the groups i am active in have less than 100
| members, but many have more than 20, but i am also in some
| groups that have more than 200 members, most of which are just
| reading and a few contributing.
| em-bee wrote:
| what would be interesting is a feature where the moderators
| can limit the group size. start with 20, and if that limit is
| almost reached, have an option to raise it. by that time a
| moderator will have an idea if the group can handle more
| growth or not.
| ilyt wrote:
| I think that's spot on.
|
| The other thing I noticed that in let's say "stable"
| communities (slow growth, many long term members) there is
| much more of self-policing going. If someone acts outside of
| the implicit or explicit rules there is bigger chance someone
| would respond to that in "hey, behave, we don't do that here"
| comment and 9/10 that's enough, no mod involvement is needed,
| no bans or other punishment needs to be applied.
|
| When community is a lot of "random people off the street" (no
| effort to create account or join, just start writing) that
| happens much more rarely
| theptip wrote:
| Demmings number seems to be a good coordination point, ie the
| group size where you can know everyone's name. Around
| 100-125.
| marttt wrote:
| Excellent reference; I think it was Dunbar's number,
| though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
|
| "Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the
| number of people with whom one can maintain stable social
| relationships--relationships in which an individual knows
| who each person is and how each person relates to every
| other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s
| by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a
| correlation between primate brain size and average social
| group size. By using the average human brain size and
| extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed
| that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable
| relationships."
| theptip wrote:
| Quite right!
| telotortium wrote:
| For Wechat specifically, I think that the group size limit of
| 500 may be related to Chinese law. They want group sizes to
| remain somewhat small to prevent news from spreading too
| quickly.
| asim wrote:
| The 20 limit was really based on personal experience in the
| sense that those are 20 really high fidelity connections with
| people you know and interact with in a way that's more
| powerful than the network of 100 interrelated people. So if I
| have a close friend group of less than 20, in fact more like
| 12-15, I know that's going to be a tight knit group. Whereas
| if I open that up to 100, it might be more generically based
| around some interest like "tech dads" with passive
| conversation but mostly dominated by the vocal minority.
| Maybe there's a place for that but I'd be interested to learn
| and see the limits myself before opening it up. Or just
| charge for that 100 member group.
|
| I know in a community setting you have more passive members
| than not. I just don't know if I want to start out enabling
| that before having really solid admin and moderation tools.
| elektor wrote:
| Very cool! Thanks for sharing. What's the benefit of your
| service over a Signal group chat?
| asim wrote:
| It's not meant as a replacement to signal or WhatsApp but
| more a compliment for the "community" aspects which often
| just get lumped into a group. Community discussions usually
| breakdown by topic and so that's how micro chat is organised.
| kensanata wrote:
| I created a static copy of the page in order to save the wiki
| from death...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| What's with the sudden influx of "smol" things? Is this related
| to "smol" ML / "smol" AI models, and/or the HN user that (IIRC)
| is associated with them and likes to use the word "smol" in their
| comments?
| kodah wrote:
| It's just an internet culture word. Pubnix doesn't sound
| apparent to a lay user, smolnet might.
| falcolas wrote:
| It's a cat/dog/animal thing. At least that's where I see "smol"
| used the most, in relation to kittens and puppies and other
| newborn animals.
|
| And it's been brewing there for a few years now, and the word's
| escaping into more contexts.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| > It's a cat/dog/animal thing
|
| And a pipi thing too.
| Shared404 wrote:
| 'smol' is just a way of saying small that caught on in certain
| demographics which is starting to spread further, much like any
| other slang.
| samsquire wrote:
| I enjoyed the point (paraphrased) "that just because it doesn't
| scale, doesn't mean it won't work". People (can) enjoy exquisite
| gourmet restaurant meal, an all you can eat inclusive holiday
| package or coffee in a coffee shop but it probably doesn't scale.
|
| We don't actually need complicated software or web application to
| run a community. Webrings were a way of navigating a very small
| web in the nascent days of the world wide web. People would link
| to eachother.
|
| I think invite based communities can be high quality without
| moderation. dang does a lot of work to moderate this community.
| If you curate everything you read, then you can ignore stuff you
| don't like.
|
| So I have a solution that is low tech too and doesn't require any
| protocols than what you're already using. Doesn't require your
| own web host or custom software, you can just use browser and you
| already know the website.
|
| I use an ultra low tech solution to sharing things I want to
| share. It costs me nothing, it doesn't require an elaborate
| technical stack that requires me to remember arcane commands,
| maintain it or upgrade it or run a server. It doesn't require
| moderation or spam filtering or hosting.
|
| I just use GitHub README.md as my blog and journals. Please do
| this too, then tell me about it. I would love to read other
| people's technical thoughts. So please do the same! I have 5
| journal repositories on GitHub each with 100-800 entries on each
| of them because I'm interested in writing down my thoughts.
|
| I have a number of repositories on GitHub for different purposes:
|
| * blog: where my blog is hosted
|
| * ideas ideas2 ideas3 ideas4 ideas5: my idea journals. I write
| computer related thoughts into this every day until I get to
| 100-800 and then create a new repository.
|
| * wants: some things that I want to exist
|
| * personal-manifesto: my own code of conduct
| gilmore606 wrote:
| If you want to build an insular community for your nerd friends,
| put up a MUD server. You can build silly text toys, write tiny
| pieces of code for stupid fun, and the best part is, normies
| can't even figure out your community exists or how to connect to
| it, because wtf is telnet? It's also effectively invisible to the
| three letter agencies and whomever else.
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