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Comment by complaintdept | Hacker News Reader

Install `finger` and you've practically got a social media platform.

.plan was the original status update.

Indeed, I wish there was something like it today with a modern design. Like a DHT with your public key fingerprint as a lookup. Anyone who 'follows' your .plan also hosts it as a torrent. You 'approve' followers by signing your .plan file with their pubkey, or for a fully public .plan, just sign with your private. Blah blah blah decentralized cypherpunk social media utopia.

That's basically what ssb or dat are

Thank you! I hadn't heard of either of these.

Oh man, I've been working on this stuff for years. End users just don't care. Devs just reinvent the wheel in dumbass languages. The tech for this stuff has existed for 15 years, there's nothing to invent. It's ready now.

https://github.com/anacrolix/btlink https://github.com/anacrolix/dht

Thanks, I'll check these out. I have some hope that something like this could take off because of the popularity of Mastodon. I think the problem is that there has to be a major impetus for lots of people to switch, and it has to be completely brain dead stupid simple to set up, and to have it work fairly transparently so they don't feel like they're doing something completely new and different. Unfortunately decentralized services tend to add overhead, and user's expectations have been primed with centralized tech. We might see people care about stuff like this if we get more online censorship with government taking a closer look at tech lately.

I’m trying to google finger and all I get is fingerprint software

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

An old, old Internet protocol that was used to get information on a user, and could be used by users to post updates from their .plan files. Essentially plaintext social media for people with Internet connections in the 80s and (early-ish) 90s.

I had that "oh crap, I'm old" moment when my initial reaction was "what? You've never heard of finger?!" and then I remembered I last used it in the late 90s.

I'm glad your reaction was to assist the young folks. :)

Famous for enabling one of the very early Internet Worms.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

Reimplementing it (well, the CLI program, `finger`) also happens to be the final exercise of Haskell Programming from First Principles, after 1200 pages of glorious buildup from the lambda calculus forward, in case that sells anyone on trying it ;)

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