Tent.is alpha

[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)

[danielsiders]

Tent.is is a Tent server. You can read about the Tent protocol here: http://tent.io.

You can connect any Tent app to Tent.is, and it also includes a basic status app (status posts are 140 characters or less) to get people started.

[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/

[davedx]

Followed you! And then a load of other people. I like it.

[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.

[graue]

Interestingly, rstat.us already does this one way. You can post a status update there and have it automatically crosspost that update to Twitter for you. I've switched to posting most of my text-only updates this way, so my rstat.us stream shows life even though all my followers are still on Twitter (for now).

[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.

[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? :))

[datapolitical]

Yea, this felt like the app.net model for social networking.

[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.

[fomojola]

I think the pricing is partly as a driver for folks to do just that: host it themselves and flesh out the ecosystem.

[tree_of_item]

<$10 a month + the dollar value of the expertise required to maintain the server per unit time.

[asymmetric]

Same here, sign up and consequent access to my subdomain is broken with NoScript.

[axx]

I see it more as a donation kind of pricing. :)

[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"

[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

[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.

[danielsiders]

Just as if you wanted to invite your one million friends to a party, you would need to pay for drinks, you might have to pay to send 1,000,000 a photo. You could either pay yourself, ask your friends to pay, or find an advertising sponsor. The same options exist online.

[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.

[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

[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.