

Tent.is alpha - Titanous
https://tent.is

======
emillon
> Tent.is will become a showcase for what is possible with Tent.

And 10 other sentences telling me that tent.is is for tent users and I still
don't know what tent is. The information I'm looking for is under the fold and
seems to be on :

<https://tent.io/>

Otherwise it looks quite interesting, thanks ! (statusnet but for facebook-
type content)

~~~
ukd1
"Tent is a protocol for open, decentralized social networking. Tent users
share content with apps and each other. Anyone can run a Tent server, or write
an app or alternative server implementation that uses the Tent protocol. Users
can take their content and relationships with them when they change or move
servers. Tent supports extensible data types so developers can create new
kinds of interaction.

Tent is for sharing with others and seeing what others have shared with you.
You can ask to follow other users and other users can follow you. Because you
control your own Tent server, it is also a good place to store things you do
not want to share with others, a sort of personal data vault. It can also be
used as a secure site login replacement so you don't need passwords when
accessing other sites on the web."

(apparently)

~~~
spindritf
> Users can take their content and relationships with them when they change or
> move servers.

How does it work when users seem to be identified by the url (which, at least
now, is in the provider's domain)?

~~~
Titanous
There are two important pieces to your Tent identity.

1: Your Entity (this is the url you're referring to. I could be
<https://jonathan.tent.is> and then change to <https://titanous.com>). Think
of entities like a name. You can change it but you really want to think
carefully first. Other Tent servers know you by your entity. If all you told
someone was your entity (<https://spindritf.net>) their Tent server would
contact the URL where you have saved information about your Tent server. It's
all you need to find out someone's Tent information or start following them,
like a username. When you change your entity, your server sends out a post to
all your followers and lets them know about a profile update with a new entity
URL so they can update their records.

2: Your "canonical tent URLs" (the addresses of the servers where you can be
reached). These are literally like your address. You can have multiple
addresses and move any time you want. Again, your server will simply send a
post to your friends letting them know you're moving and where to reach you.
In both of these cases you probably want to give other servers some time to
update their records before moving just in case.

There are a few edge cases worth mentioning. This system does not _actually_
depend on DNS, but most users will. For example, instead of
<https://titanous.com> I could theoretically list an IP address instead or a
tor hidden service.

~~~
leejoramo
So if I wanted to just my own domain, and not leejoramo.tent.is what do I do?
I am assuming that it would be something like this:

<link href="<https://leejoramo.tent.is> rel="????" />

and how to I configure things on the tent.is account?

------
jyap
For a count of number of users, check out the following count for:
<https://tent.tent.is/>

Currently at 429 and growing quickly. That account auto-follows new users.

That's also a good way (for now) to explore the other accounts
(<https://tent.tent.is/followings>).

The interesting thing is that Tent.is has a freemium business model compared
to App.net which has no free tier. I expect Tent.is to surpass the number of
users of App.net pretty quickly.

Follow me here: <https://jyap.tent.is/>

~~~
axx
Thanks! The "followings" list was a good start to find a few people. Over time
Tent needs a "discovery" function i guess.

The ^<http://domain.tld> thing is a bit annoying, though i know the reason. It
should be easy to have a domain/name converter, no?

I'm also on Tent.is: <https://aleks.tent.is/>

~~~
vacipr
A discovery option would be great,or some sort of user tags. Someone should
make a list of hacker news users on tent.is. Here's mine.
<https://vacipr.tent.is/>

------
beatpanda
What does HN think about using this protocol to build a distributed publishing
system? Like I'vegot this software that facilitates publishing a certain kind
of post type, and each node of the software can subscribe to any number of
other nodes. The problem is that each _node_ will represent a tent server, not
every person publishing on said node. I'm not sure if this woud be a misuse of
this protocol, but its features are really well-suited to what I want to do.

------
luke_s
The tent.io protocol looks very interesting. Architecturally the way e-mail
works, mixed with the functionality of social networks all done over
JSON/REST.

I wonder if it would be possible to implement a tent.io -> facebook/G+/Twitter
bridge? A tent.io server, which instead of being backed by some sort of
database, would instead read and write to somebodies existing social network
profiles?

~~~
zoul
Some kind of proxy that would join Tent with other social networks would IMHO
do wonders for the adoption rate. But at the same time it’s not what the
existing social networks want, which is why it probably wouldn’t work. Google+
doesn’t have a write API at all and see what Twitter is doing with their API.
See also my thoughts on Tent, <http://goo.gl/lGnfm>.

------
followben
I'm surprised by some of the negativity here - it's a pretty neat service for
an alpha. Sure there's kinks/ shortcomings, but it's very early days. They
even seem to be ironing things out even as we speak (switched from 140 to 256
char status updates in front of my eyes).

~~~
h2s
Negativity appears to be the default response to bold new things on HN. Ironic
really, for a site run by an incubator for bold new things.

Personally I'm liking Tent a lot. It appears to be the exact social networking
application I've occasionally daydreamed about for the last few years, and I'm
sure I'm not alone in that. Hopefully that's a sign that this is an idea whose
time has come.

------
creat0
How do users behind NAT run their own tent servers? If they can manage to run
their own HTTPS servers from behind NAT, if they have those skills (not to
mention a reachable IP), then why do they need tent? Couldn't they just host
all their content on their own server? I can see tent as providing some sort
of coordination of user data hosted on different servers, but I'm not seeing
how tent enables users to host their own content and have full control over
it. Maybe that's not the goal?

Correct me if I'm wrong but what this tent idea seems to lead to is a
proliferation of tent service providers, not independent users running tent
servers behind consumer ISP accounts. If that's true, then how can we be sure
these service providers will not adopt the same sort of annoying monetization
strategies of providers like Facebook and Twitter?

By no means am I suggesting tent could not be useful. I just want some
clarification of what problem they are trying to solve. (There is no shortage
of problems to choose from. :)

~~~
wmf
Servers belong in the cloud, not at home. The cloud is available to consumers.

~~~
EvanAnderson
Servers belong on the Internet.

If users have an Internet connection at their home and are willing to accept
the potential reliability issues associated with hosting a server at home
then, by all means, host a server at home. UPnP NAT traversal is decently-
supported in many consumer-oriented routers, as is dynamic DNS.

I wish that the tech community hadn't lost sight of this and formed this
artificial distinction between the Internet and the "home Internet". We could
have been focusing efforts on making hosting services on servers in users'
homes easier, but the siren-song of offering hosted services to create
recurring revenue streams won out.

~~~
creat0
Do you think the possibility of "always on" computers at home (e.g., running
low power ARM CPU's) is a real one?

Would this change the way we think about "reliability"? (Of course the
canonical example of the need to be "always on" is email. We've come to expect
that the server handling our mail is always up.)

~~~
donkeylipstick
I have a Mac Mini on 24/7 that's a web/mail/file server. This is for my small
business, so there is activity but nothing heavy. Absolutely more than capable
of adding a dozen people for social networking.

This consumes 12W while idle, which is probably 99.9% of the day, these are
just background daemons carrying out requests all day for loading the website
and sending/receiving email.

It's cheaper than a hosting service and I have 100% physical control over my
server. If it goes down for a power outage or whatever, the same exact thing
happens on Linode every few months. Email will just start to backlog until
your server comes back online.

You are at the mercy of your ISP though, the biggest hurdle is port blocking
if they're bastards about it. Most of them are, but there are ways around it.

[http://images.apple.com/environment/reports/docs/macmini_per...](http://images.apple.com/environment/reports/docs/macmini_per_july2011.pdf)

~~~
creat0
This is the answer I was hoping for. I know of at least one solution for your
ISP concerns. I think it will work very nicely.

ISP's can obviously block anything they want to block. But with bigger
bandwidth and things like VOIP services on the rise I would think that means
letting some regular customer UDP traffic pass in/out. In your opinion, would
you think that most ISP's would not allow customers to keep some long-term UDP
"connections" open on any port? I have not had any trouble with this in the
places I've tried, but it's hard to know what most ISP's do. Honestly I just
can't see any reason they would block a low number of low traffic UDP peer-to-
peer connections per customer (the customer's social network), when you
consider they are allowing things like Bittorrent which are huge network hogs
by comparison and are being blatently used for the sole purpose of downloading
bootlegged entertainment media from random strangers.

The interesting thing is that if we can achieve this sort of peer-to-peer
social networking, concerns about email servers being online, at least with
respect to mail that you send to people on your social network, may turn out
to be less of an issue. Why do I say this? Because the reason you want your
email servers to always be up is so you can receive mail as timely as
possible. Ideally you would like to have near "real-time" mail. Otherwise, if
time is not an issue, then storing messages for pickup later on, e.g. in the
cloud, should be fine. But if you and I are both on a private peer-to-peer
social network, all that's required to send "real-time" email (or whatever
format of bits you choose) is that we are both logged in. We might leave low
power machines on in order to stay logged in over long periods. I would guess
this might be a much more popular form of "email" between friends and family.1
Remember the UNIX programs talk and finger?

1\. Obviously there is no spam. The only people who can send and recieve mail
to members of the peer-to-peer private social network are those who are logged
in. Spammers can't log in. Nor can they be bothered to try to crack their way
into myriad disparate small p2p social networks.

------
whalesalad
This is sort of a non sequitur, but the bootstrap UI makes this feel oddly
like app.net.

~~~
pax
What, both Twitter killers are using Twitter bootstrap? :))

~~~
Robin_Message
It's part of their secret plan to sue competitors for patent infringement in
the future ;)

------
driverdan
The site is completely broken if you block 3rd party tracking scripts
(Mixpanel). The registration form does nothing when I try to submit it.

$12 a month is way, way too much. Someone could host it themselves on a cheap
VPS for <$10 a month and not worry about 3rd parties tracking their activity.

~~~
johnpmayer
I think the extra $2 accounts for the laziness factor. By all means run your
own - that's probably better for the overall ecosystem.

~~~
zoowar
OK, where's the source?

~~~
18pfsmt
It is here: <https://github.com/tent/tent.io>

~~~
chunkbot
See also: <http://tent.io>

------
spindritf
How do you discover new content and find people to follow?

EDIT: OK, then <https://spindritf.tent.is/>

EDIT2: Tent is available over ipv6, great to see.

~~~
ceejayoz
Right now, the same way you found people on early Twitter - the global feed
and "hey, mine is username.tent.is".

------
coverband
While SaaS pricing is an ongoing discussion in other HN threads, this site is
a good example of a terrible pricing strategy (IMHO). Their freemium model is
useless for discovering what the service is capable of, since it only allows
for a status post. The premium service is ridiculously over-priced as well --
if the "open sourced FB" model somehow becomes a viable product with a market,
I'd expect GoDaddy and others to start offering it for $1-2/month or even less
if paid annually.

~~~
seagreen
I doubt they'd have a problem with GoDaddy coming along and offering it
cheaper. The whole point is to get more people involved, and it's actually
pretty smart of them to go ahead and anchor the price fairly high. There are
probably about a million patio11 quotes that would be relevant here.

------
bpatrianakos
I am so glad someone built out a Tent.io service so fast! This is exactly what
I imagined it'd be like. People would host their own and people like this
would host one for those who don't want to or don't know how to host their
own. I see this and laugh whenever I hear a doubter say Tent will fail because
"no one will run their own server". That's beside the point and Tent.is is the
counterargument.

~~~
johnpmayer
"The architects of Tent built Tent.is"

~~~
bpatrianakos
Haha I'm an idiot (but I still got up votes somehow).

------
robodale
Ok, I took the bait and signed up. I went to the home page, and was presented
with a spartan and VERY pretentious pricing/signup/(ad copy? description of
the service?) layout.

After trying to figure out what a Tent is (still had no idea after reading), I
signed up with blind faith that the Tent will tell me what to do next.

The next page was where I was expected to make a status update. Ok, so I enter
some gibberish. Click the post button.

Yay, I made a post.

Have you ever showed up way to early to a sporting event or large classroom,
and there is nobody there. I mean nobody. No sound, just you. You look around
and think "am I supposed to be here?". "Is it Saturday?".

Looking at the post I made made me feel like that. Now that I wasted 10
minutes of my life on this, good luck with pitching your Tent.

------
ceejayoz
I picked up support.tent.is. Probably should block that.

~~~
danielsiders
Thanks, I thought we caught all the really scary ones in our blocklist. You'll
be blocked in a few minutes-- thanks again

~~~
ceejayoz
NP. I'll see if I can come up with any others.

------
oellegaard
Too bad the docs are rather hard to understand :( I wish someone made some
python source code or improved the docs. It seems the "server protocol" is
basically just some sort of schema of JSON to be send over HTTP(s), but at the
moment it seems rather unstructured.

~~~
sauerbraten
The json schemas seemed pretty structured, but the docs in general really are
missing a table of contents and basic explanations of API commands and design
decisions.

------
gambler
For me the registration/login are broken even when I unblock mixpanel. Might
be because I block third party cookies, or it's just allergic to NoScript or
RequestPolicy, even if I unblock everything on their registration/login
screens. I just get blank pages.

------
conradev
From <http://tent.io>

> 4\. Alice's server sends the status to two friends (Bob's and Carol's)
> servers.

What happens when you have, say, a million friends, and want to post a status?
Your server (or army of them) has to send one million API calls to one million
servers. For every post.

What happens if you share a photo on your tent server, and your one million
friends want to view it? That's a lot of bandwidth, and bandwidth isn't free.

It's a cool idea, but I just can't see it being efficient (especially in terms
of cost) down the road.

~~~
spindritf
> What happens when you have, say, a million friends, and want to post a
> status?

There won't be a million servers, most people will cluster around the few most
popular providers.

~~~
conradev
Which defeats the purpose of P2P, that is centralization..

~~~
graue
Completely false. Think of email. I've been told by people running large-ish,
open signup websites that Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail together account for
more than 70% of users. But, so what? Three choices is already better than
one, and then you have a long tail of a zillion other email providers making
up the last 30%, which you can use if you don't like those 3, and finally, if
there's _no_ third-party email service you want to use, you can run your own
server.

With Facebook and Twitter, you don't have that choice. If you want to connect
with friends on those services, there's only _one_ provider available, and
that's it. Tent will give you that choice back — even if, in practice, a few
large servers have the most market share.

------
ragmondo
Hey "be my friend" etc etc - <https://ragmondo.tent.is/> \- to see how well
this works..

------
seagreen
Do you have a date for when Tent will be released under an open license?

~~~
jblz
The MIT-licensed reference server is on github. Get to forkin'!

<https://github.com/tent/tentd>

~~~
seagreen
Sweet! If Tent folks are reading this you might want to update the last
sentence currently on tent.io, "Tent will be released under an open license in
the immediate future."

~~~
danielsiders
As mentioned, the software (tentd, admin, and status) are all MIT licensed and
on github, as will be any libraries we create.

That (confusing) sentence refers to the specification itself for which we
still need a permanent governance model and foundation to oversee its'
development.

Thanks for bringing it to our attention, we'll try to clarify the language
soon!

------
obilgic
In case you are wondering how many users they have:

<https://cat.tent.is/followings>

------
modarts
The UX for this is kind of terrible in its current iteration, and extremely
confusing as to where I am, or what's going on.

------
beberlei
Now all that i need is a proxy, that reliable allows me to use my own domain
as a tent server, proxying to tent.is. ;-)

------
drumdance
This makes @replies rather harder, doesn't it? You have to know both the
username and the domain

~~~
oellegaard
Just the domain - but its also too bad they chose "^" instead of "@" - why
change something everyone know how works?

~~~
sondh
This is the first thing I noticed too (thanks to the welcome post from
tent.tent.is) and this is the answer <https://tent.tent.is/posts/k0rxvn>

If Tent goes mainstream, we will get used to it. No big deal.

------
modarts
Follow me at <https://modarts.tent.is/> !

------
rainboiboi
They just changed from 140 characters limitation to 256 with a blink of an
eye!

------
pclark
What is the difference between a passphrase and a password? Good grief.

~~~
tree_of_item
<http://xkcd.com/936/> has a mildly amusing explanation.

~~~
pclark
I saw that tent used an xkcd comic to explain it, and was instantly reminded
that the audience of tent will never ever become anything close to mainstream

~~~
kennywinker
Haters gonna hate.

Thing is, what it is now is not necessarily what it _will_ be. Right now it's
for the nerds, no question. Twitter was the same thing when it started.

~~~
pclark
The killer thing about Twitter was that it was succinct public text messages.
It turns out that is actually kind of an awesome way to communicate in some
contexts.

The killer thing about tent is that it is an open, de-centralised social
network. It turns out that is actually kind of an awesome way to … ?

~~~
seagreen
I don't know about you, but social networks and email seem fairly similar in
that I don't want to be locked into the same website my friends are using. Can
you imagine how painful email would be if it had been controlled by one
company from the start? That's why people are excited about Tent.

------
mrchess
Tent.is is the most confusing domain name, ever. Hurts my brain when I read
anything. Feels like bad grammar.

"Tent.is is the easiest..."

Not to mention I have no idea what "Tent.is" actually IS after reading the
extremely confusing blurb.

~~~
foobert
its a social network, similar to twitter except not owned by anyone.

so your twitter handle is twitter.com/mrchess but if twitter was cool like
tent then you could CUSTOMIZE it to your own domain like mrchess.com/tom

Tent lets you do stuff like that because all they're doing is creating a solid
platform. They're creating the pieces that connect and communicate.

Don't want Ads on your social network? create your own tent server by
installing some software and follow people that you want to. their updates
will be sent to your tent if you follow them.

------
ricardobeat
$12/month is around the same ballpark as my water bill.

~~~
18pfsmt
About the same as mine as well. Although I don't personally utilize Facebook,
I believe this could take the place of it. My friends' use of Facebook makes
me feel uncomfortable, like I have to monitor them (they just don't have any
understanding of the implications).

------
the1
no unicode support

------
blues
Tent is probably like CIA?

------
ragmondo
can't reply to a reply :-(

------
bashzor
Limited in the free version? This isn't going to work in the battle against
Facebook... Yes, I realize it's too early to 'battle', but if it's starting
out like this already...

