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by ninthfrank07 4422 days ago
Check out https://tent.io and https://cupcake.io. There's not much going on at the moment because everybody is waiting for the next version of the Tent protocol (0.4), which will be released in a few months.

I am also excited by http://maidsafe.net in the long term, because it replaces the web altogether.
2 comments
steveklabnik 4422 days ago
Has tent fixed the massive issues with their protocol? When it first came out, I opened about 30 issues on the repository. They basically let them all get quiet and then closed them without comment. One or two had a bunch, though.

EDIT: turns out it was 18, not 30: https://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues/created_by/steveklabn...

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ninthfrank07 4422 days ago
I think the major issue with Tent was that their development efforts had always been divided between two Tent servers. Tentd, the reference implementation used by self-hosters, and their proprietary multi-tenant server that powers https://micro.cupcake.io. But in a blog post in November 2013 (https://cupcake.io/blog/2013/new-tent-server), they announced that they will stop the development of Tentd and open source their multi-tenant server. The development of https://flynn.io (another Cupcake project) will simplify the deployment of the multi-tenant server. The first preview release of Flynn was announced two weeks ago (https://cupcake.io/blog/2014/flynn-preview-release).

There hasn't been much updates on Tent since the last office hours in January (https://tent.io/officehours/2014-01-28), but Daniel said a few hours ago that they will announce May office hours in the next few days (https://micro.cupcake.io/posts/https%3A%2F%2Fdaniel.cupcake....).

I'm really excited for the new features in Tent 0.4 (https://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues?labels=v0.4&page=1&so...) and I can't wait to self-host Tent on the new multi-tenant server!

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danielsiders 4421 days ago
Absolutely correct. We'll also release a protocol validator for 0.4 prior to the server refactor to help other folks implementing other servers.
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danielsiders 4421 days ago
Hi, Steve. Most of the github issues you opened (in the week after Tent 0.1 was announced) weren't "problems" with the protocol, just differences of opinion with our architectural choices. For a variety of reasons that we discussed extensively we felt (and still feel) that hypermedia, microformats, and other preexisting attempts to solve "decentralized social" aren't good solutions to the problems we're trying to solve. A few of the other issues you raised were actual implementation errors (we shipped the initial proof of concept very quickly), and to my knowledge they've all been fixed.

In the first few days after we released the first Tent proof of concept we were swamped with user feedback and a variety of discussions. We addressed many architectural questions in detail from "why not use a custom binary protocol" to "consider using ostatus, microformats" and "Consider not making claims about REST". If you're still interested in any of these topics I'd be happy to explain in greater detail the reasons for our choices.

Tent has evolved a great deal since the initial release. We've discussed most of the reasons behind the choices we made in great detail on Tent, IRC, and during monthly office hours, recording of all are available online.

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steveklabnik 4421 days ago
> A few of the other issues you raised were actual implementation errors (we shipped the initial proof of concept very quickly), and to my knowledge they've all been fixed.

Awesome, great.

The biggest one, in my mind, is the 'one POST per follower per message' problem. The previous stance was, and I realize I'm being a little bit uncharitable with this characterization, "we want people who use the service a lot to have to pay, so we're keeping the protocol inefficient for this purpose." Is this still the way things work?

And yes, while a lot of them do come down to opinion, a service that re-invents the world in this space sends off really bad signals. It's just a different kind of lock-in. Same beef I had with App.net.

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Titanous 4421 days ago
> The biggest one, in my mind, is the 'one POST per follower per message' problem.

Yeah, all distributed systems must communicate with their peers. In the worst case this means sending a POST for each message to each subscriber since each subscriber is a different server. This can be optimized by pipelining messages that were sent within the same time window.

In the best case, which is probably the most common, multiple users will share the same host and the protocol can be aware of this and add an envelope that specifies all subscribers on the host with a single copy of the message sent to each host instead of each subscriber. We plan to add this optimization before Tent 1.0.

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steveklabnik 4421 days ago
Right. This is the kind of thing you'd basically get for free if you just used PuSH instead of reinventing the world.

Anyway, good luck. My efforts in this space have failed and you're still plugging away, so...

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danielsiders 4421 days ago
One of the Tent architects here.

We're actively working on 0.4. The big challenge right now is that a number of organizations are considering using Tent is very large scale deployments for sensitive data, so we're making the transition from move fast and break things to enterprise grade reliability.

This includes everything from a solid protocol validator (future versions of the protocol will have complete validation coverage before we release a reference implementation) and a highly scalable multi-tenant server that large service providers can easily deploy. We're refactoring the server we use for hosting Cupcake users and releasing it under a permissive license in the next few months to make that transition easier.

So it's an exciting time for the core team but there isn't a ton happening on the surface just yet.

Our goal has always been to get Tent to a solid 1.0 after which the APIs could remain unmodified for several years at least (similar to HTTP and SMTP). The tradeoff is that we then need the freedom to break things between versions of the pre-1.0 versions. It's frustrating for early app developers (one of the reasons we don't encourage adoption) but will pay off once we hit 1.0

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