[ClawsOnPaws]

I'm sorry but I believe I'm missing something here. How does this solve any of the problems that people commonly have with decentralized, federated social networks?

* 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?

[creshal]

Git makes it easy to make copies, but its nature of having one designated "origin" remote per repository that serves as upstream source of truth (on platforms like github also across forks) makes it not really federated/decentralized the way Mastodon et al. are.

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.

[piedar]

> one designated "origin" remote

Git is not limited to a single remote. The default remote is called "origin" but there's nothing particularly special about it.

[juped]

To be more precise, git clone adds the origin cloned from as a remote named "origin", unless you override this with a configuration setting or the -o option.

The default is no remotes at all.

[creshal]

But git gives you nothing to handle more complicated topologies, all remotes you interact with have to result in a linear history with everything on all other remotes… unless you feel like doing a manual merge every time you update your social media feed. Making that work automagically needs another layer on top of git, none of which seems documented here.

[ClawsOnPaws]

> Git makes it easy to make copies, but its nature of having one designated "origin" remote per repository that serves as upstream source of truth (on platforms like github also across forks) makes it not really federated/decentralized the way Mastodon et al. are.

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.

[ilyt]

Kinda does look like round peg square hole situation.

"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

[blooalien]

> "Hosting your own Git is not particularly easier than hosting your own GoTo Social or Akkoma."

Easiest way I've found (so far) to "host your own git" is https://github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve

[jayd16]

>But you don't do that if you're on GitHub, right?

How do you push to github without a repo you own and control? Are people pushing patches through the web interface or something?

[numtel]

If you want decentralized without hosting your own servers, you can store data on a public blockchain. Each interaction pays a small amount of gas that grants them hosting indefinitely. Protocols are a progression from platforms since they can be ownerless. Blockchains enable protocols by acting as a general purpose database.

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.

[tedunangst]

It's a more difficult to use version of rss.

[ilyt]

RSS really feels where the whole distributed thing peaked. I can subscribe to who I want where I want and if I want to see some new stuff either follow "what people I follow link to in their blogs" or get RSS channel of some topical federator.

All it missed was similiar distributed way to conversate instead of just reading and maybe leaving a comment on a blog