Comment on Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities
dangling_cat@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
I absolutely love this idea. Does it support ActivityPub? And I would love to see users can set labels on themselves like what expertise they can offer etc.
carlnewton@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Now that’s an interesting idea!
This release is step one in the plan. Federation is step two! More information on this here: carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/
I love what activitypub has done for the internet, but I don’t think it will be right for this project, but yes to federation – if there are instances to federate with of course!
ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
It seems to me that activity pub could still be useful for a couple of reasons. If you live in the suburbs of a city, then bring able to also access an instance for your suburb and your city might be useful.
And if you live in multiple locales, or if want to stay connected to your old home town etc
carlnewton@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Please do have a read of this: …github.io/…/location-based-social-network/#conne…
I feel quite confident that a gossip protocol approach is the right way to go, but seamless connectivity to other instances is absolutely planned!
ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
That was my bad. I was espousing federation, not AP specifically, and I see that federation is built in to the idea
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Reading through your link, it seems like the main difference in your framework is that there’s auto-propogation of federation built in. Please correct me if I missed anything
Unrelated point: before you throw too much time and effort into building up federation, I want to bring something in the Matrix vs. XMPP debate: caching.
Apparently in Matrix, if a user on server A joins a chatroom on server B, then all of the content on the chatroom need to then be copied and synced to server A. There’s 2 primary problems with this: it’s a lot of duplication overhead that can limit scaling of the network and there’s legal consequences for server A caching potentially illegal content. There’s also a privacy concern as this means more parties that can see various interactions.
XMPP gets around these problems by having the user on server A just directly connect with server B, without server A caching anything.
I haven’t dug into too many of the differences myself, but wanted to bring it up in case it helped