Git as a janky Twitter replacement

by est • 4 years ago

318 65 4 years ago

danbmil99• 4 years ago

Very clever. I would be concerned however that GitHub may shut you down at some point and if this got serious it would have to be running on federated git servers and then you would need a secure synchronization protocol Etc pretty soon you're looking at Matrix

yellowapple3• 4 years ago

and then you would need a secure synchronization protocol

Would you? Seems straightforward to point to multiple pushRemotes and federate that way, much like what's possible for any other sort of Git repo.

sitta• 4 years ago

A few months ago I started playing with using Matrix as a janky social media replacement. The idea was to setup a space with rooms that I post in. One room might be a public, unencrypted room that anyone can read (ala Twitter/Mastadon/etc), and another might be just for close friends, etc. Then, I just post to them like you would on any other platform.

It's great because it's the only platform like this where you have the ability to encrypt if you want to, but it is of course missing some features. The biggest being the ability to share posts and have a meta feed. There are also smaller annoyances that would not scale well, such as the fact that people cannot make personal room name aliases.

I still totally recommend it.

stolenmerch• 4 years ago

I've been doing this for the past couple of weeks after reading this tweet: https://twitter.com/obryant666/status/1395816947913138178

It's oddly fulfilling.

mastazi4• 4 years ago

If we're going minimal, then why not Finger as a Twitter replacement?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)

Finger communities/hosting:

https://finger.farm/

https://happynetbox.com/

https://plan.cat/ (thank you gbrown for reminding me of this)

browsers that support finger (in addition to other protocols such as Gopher and Gemini):

https://kristall.random-projects.net/

https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/

angrygoat• 4 years ago

Hah, those were the days. I remember using finger in the late 90s/early 00s to figure out whether people were at the computer club before I walked across campus for lunch :)

layer8• 4 years ago

You mean “to finger out”. ;)

prox• 4 years ago

Is there an aggregator for fingers? So it becomes more RSS or like twitter in format?

mastazi4• 4 years ago

the home pages of happynetbox.com and plan.cat have a list of recent updates. It's worth saving them as bookmarks on your Finger client.

finger://@happynetbox.com

finger://@plan.cat

Unfortunately finger.farm only has that feature available on its web mirror, but not on its native finger-protocol home page.

In addition to those, over time I have also bookmarked some individual profiles, like this one which is one of my favourites

finger://blast-rules@happynetbox.com

Oh and also, in case you want to check the weather around the world:

finger://@graph.no (web version: https://graph.no/ )

gojomo• 4 years ago

There's a protocol called 'WebFinger':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebFinger

gbrown_• 4 years ago

To add to the list Joshua Stein has made https://plan.cat who's atheistic I'm rather fond of.

mastazi4• 4 years ago

Thank you! I visited plan.cat before, but forgot to bookmark it. Added to my comment above.

xwowsersx3• 4 years ago

I assume you meant aesthetic?

endorphine• 4 years ago

Any resources for (ideally interactive) introduction to Finger? Apart from the wikipedia page.

mastazi4• 4 years ago

I wish there was more info about Finger on the web.

You can learn more about the protocol by reading RFC 1288, obviously that's not interactive at all though.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1288

cbanek• 4 years ago

Just in case someone from the '90s was working at drpepper.com, I remember fingering them and someone had some amazing scrolling ascii art of betty boop IIRC. So much good ascii art on there, actually.

I 'member.

bravura• 4 years ago

At university we used finger.

I made my .plan file an ASCII art video version of the famous shot from Terminator 2 of the terminator doing a death-defying motorcycle jump into the draught channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0pCE0N-EF0

The sysops politely emailed me, asking me to change it, citing bandwidth usage. It was about 800kb.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS• 4 years ago

I implemented a finger "daemon" in an interface engine and use it as a gateway for a variety of services (weather, including my local WS, Plex info, etc).

It's a super simple format, and does the job perfectly.

Jamie9912• 4 years ago

Definitely not decentralized, also don't tweet anything NSFW because Github will ban your account without hesitation, removing all issues you created, even for projects you don't own. Source: happened to me because I had an "NSFW" Github page that displayed randomly generated Imgur pictures.

yellowapple3• 4 years ago

Just use a server other than GitHub. Boom, federated and NSFW-friendly.

xigoi• 4 years ago

Then the tool for subscribing to all people won't be able to discover you.

uri4• 4 years ago

For development I would just recommend github issues with comments. Way more user friendly. Also separate identities, perhaps even different server. No need to get main account compromised, or to get banned from Github for spicy comments.

beAbU• 4 years ago

You can call this a blockchain driven twitter and you would only be about half wrong.

rmnclmnt• 4 years ago

Can you here the VCs coming?

smallerfish• 4 years ago

I mean you joke, but look at slack. Make a reasonably nice web/phone frontend to it, and boom - you're on your way.

lionkor• 4 years ago

technically, its already on ycombinator now

habibur• 4 years ago

Very clever.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

Please don’t make a front end they say!

pfoof• 4 years ago

This has the potential to benchmark how many forks of a single project Github can handle, especially with `follow_everyone` script

isitmadeofglass• 4 years ago

Data sharing has close to a quarter of a million forks. This project would have to become an extremely popular experiment before it starts pushing that limit.

That said, I hope it does; this is a great and fun project.

Ferret7446• 4 years ago

It's basically a janky blog+RSS. Architecturally, it's as if there were a simple/standard web/blogserver software that could be hosted freely. The key here is exploiting the standardization of Git and availability of free public Git hosting.

Done properly, one could create some packaged blog(+RSS reader) container, but the free hosting support isn't there. You could use GCP free instances, but setting up a domain name+TLS is a barrier, even for some technical folks.

The idea is neat, definitely a hack in the traditional sense.

stevage• 4 years ago

Does someone think there's a technology problem here to solve?

cpach• 4 years ago

I think they’re just having fun (^_^)

est• 4 years ago

You can ask the same question to 2007 twitter.

amelius• 4 years ago

Nope. But if you're holding a hammer ...

stargrave• 4 years ago

My blog (http://blog.stargrave.org/russian/) initially also used Git as a storage, where each commit is a post, and its log message is the content itself. If I add gitweb/cgit, when it will also feature web interface and Atom feed automatically. Later I added my own rendering engine to it: http://www.sgblog.stargrave.org/ for efficiency and automatic transparent gopher/gemini protocols support. Each post also can have some dynamic tags/topics attached, that are stored in git's notes branch. And later I also added ability to leave comments, by sending email message, that is committed in another git-note branch in the form of recfile (https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/) plain-text comment. Everything is plain text, can be used with Git solely, but has an engine for better rendering and wider protocols support.

bdhcuidbebe• 4 years ago

and its log message is the content itself

That’s a curious design choice. Care to share more details, like why not commit the content?

How do you deal with fixing typos?

xwowsersx3• 4 years ago

git commit --amend

dlqx• 4 years ago

git rebase -i ...

GiorgioG• 4 years ago

Is Twitter going away? What did I miss? I know a lot of folks are taking Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter as a “the sky is falling” moment, but can we please have a reality check here?

As a business Twitter was bloated and has stagnated over the past few years. I’m taking an optimistic view of where Twitter may go as a product/service.

Take a deep breath folks. We don’t need a half assed Twitter replacement.

rendall2• 4 years ago

Is Twitter going away? What did I miss?

Speaking as a person who has been generally well-disposed towards Elon Musk and like him also would describe myself as a left-leaning, centrist, free-speech absolutist, I think his behavior has been erratic lately. Perhaps his behavior has always been erratic, but it just never affected me personally.

Speaking as a resident of a country neighboring Russia, his amateur diplomacy from a few weeks ago does affect me, and in my view was literally dangerous. He pontificated from a place of profound ignorance at best and continued to double down even in the face of very smart domain experts and ordinary Ukrainians asking him - begging him - to please zip it. Then he acted aggrieved and hurt when his "peace proposal" was not received well.

I'm not sure what is being accomplished by the latest Twitter shenanigans, but I'm seeing the same behavior of his ignoring domain experts. For instance, moderation is a difficult social and technical problem irrespective of political view. Advertisers are not renewing their contracts with Twitter, not because of Musk's political views, but because they did not have confidence that their brands would not be tainted by association with unmoderated nastiness. Again, Musk attributed this to left-wing activists and not his own inability to reassure his business associates. He framed it as a free-speech issue when it is absolutely not. Then he threatened to "name and shame" the advertisers who declined to renew. He fired the domain experts who understand moderation, and so the institutional knowledge about it - arguably, what he bought when he bought Twitter - is gone, never to return.

So, I don't think Twitter will recover from that. Perhaps if I had not experienced his amateur diplomacy directly, I would just continue to think of Musk as a fellow who is very good at business and is possibly playing multi-dimensional chess. But I cannot unlearn what I have learned. His personal brand is permanently tarnished, for me.

rc_mob• 4 years ago

Why on earth would you like Elon Musk? He's just selfish and only looks out for himself and himself only. I fail to understand why you or anybody would like someone such as this.

eurasiantiger2• 4 years ago

It is fairly obvious Musk’s business decisions only make sense in the context of dismantling Twitter.

rexreed3• 4 years ago

At first I was thinking what sort of self-destructive person would do that, and then I realized he saddled Twitter with $1B in debt payments and foisting this onto other investors, and I realized that Elon was exactly the kind of vindictive person who would do that, given that he was pretty much cornered into buying Twitter in the first place. I'm sure the boat is being put on fire and made to sink. When they declare bankruptcy and file Chapter 11 to resolve their $1B in payments then you know that's what this was all about. I can do without Twitter, so it doesn't bother me. Let the billionaires have their space-age pissing contests.

heresie-dabord• 4 years ago

We don’t need a half assed Twitter replacement.

Twitter as an announcement platform offers nothing approaching USD $40b in value. Other governments and organisations could follow the example of the EU and establish a Mastodon server.

Twitter as another "social media" cluster of coitus never really had a clear value proposition apart from 90% of its revenue coming from advertising.

As such, it is just another advertising delivery system.

MichaelCollins• 4 years ago

I doubt he'll ever make his money back, but does that mean twitter will cease to exist? I don't think so. I think the rich buy media for the influence, not profit. Obviously he severely overpaid, but owning twitter still gives him influence. And it's not like twitter is loaded with assets; liquidating the company won't get his money back.

Vaslo• 4 years ago

Or worse, look at all the different things being recommended instead of Twitter - this, Mastodon, etc. Everyone will end up at different places, then end back at Twitter anyways. Old relatives and tech disliking spouses will never use this or Mastodon. Too much work, too confusing.

wildcow• 4 years ago

This is a simple distributed ledger. I knew blockchain would soon take over Twitter.

When is twatcoin going online? I need to make fast monies.

eurasiantiger2• 4 years ago

GitHub is going to hate everyone who uses this.

rexreed3• 4 years ago

You can host your own Git repository or Git commit on multiple Git repositories. When I started with Git, I just self-hosted. I only went to Bitbucket for search and the web interface.

AirStreamer27• 4 years ago

Yes this is a perfectly normal approach that I’m sure everybody popular will want to use

kyaghmour• 4 years ago

I proposed something like that a few years back: https://lwn.net/Articles/780365/

There is something to this idea ... using git as a distributed (micro-)blogging/publishing system.

voidz• 4 years ago

Alright, I'll be the one to ask the "what's next" question.

What's next? A revival of Gopher?

heminispathe• 4 years ago

I can't tell if you're being ironic. Look up the Gemini protocol

rhabarba• 4 years ago

This would be just another use case for SCCS, actually.

papito• 4 years ago

Twitter does not have a technology problem - the prototype was famously put together with Ruby-on-Rails in a weekend. Most of the effort comes after that, with moderation and legal compliance. There is really no better reality check for those who delude themselves into writing a clone than this:

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

gigatexal• 4 years ago

Janky!?! It’s awesome

m3kw9• 4 years ago

Nobody is gonna go to a replacement without most of the people switching.

Git as a janky Twitter replacement

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