20 Hours of Tent.is | Hacker News Reader

20 Hours of Tent.is

tent.is

54 pointssgwil45 comments

> Putting a @ before a URL tends to look like an email address, which could be very confusing, so we decided on ^

Well, ^https://tent.tent.is looks like an URL which is also confusing. What if I want to mention an URL to somebody?

I'm sorry, but this looks horrible. At least remove the https so it doesn't look like a URL: ^tent.tent.is

If [1]mentions can be in the metadata, I wonder if mentions within the status itself can look like a footnote reference? That way you don't have to display the full URL in the message.

[1] ^https://example.tent.is

Good idea. Meta-data in general might not play well with others.

But it is a url.

I agree that it doesn't look nice. As it is, we're pretty used to links with url metadata and different visible text. Occasionally I'll hover over a link to find out the domain. Why not, similar to what alphang suggests, just ^tent (which links to https://tent.tent.is)?

Can you reasonably expect http or https for all endpoints? Then truncate the protocol segment.

^tent is bad because whoops I copied this message to another tent server and now the identity doesn't make sense.

That happens if I copy text with a link in it, too: the destination gets lost. We're pretty used to that phenomenon here on the internet.

I'm just guessing here, but if mentions are in the metadata, then it would actually be incorrect to copy and paste the mention text (a representation of metadata) into the actual content of a new message anyways. I expect a mature tent microblogging app would have a mechanism for inserting mentions as well as transferring content in and out from other servers in a way that preserves metadata.

Metadata should be displayed in an easy to read format, but still be accessible in full.

If you're going to include a symbol in front of the identity like twitter does, IMO it makes it look like you can use that identity alone to refer to that person. If you can't, then maybe you shouldn't dress it up anymore than just having it be a link.

Copy/pasting is not the only issue. A screenshot of a message is also (nearly) useless for identifying anyone in it without absolute URLs. Whether or not a screenshot is "incorrect" behavior isn't really relevant if users are going to do it, which might mean your notions of correctness are leading to a bad design.

These aren't really insurmountable design issues. I'm only imagining truncated mentions in-network, so ^daniel.tent.is is ^daniel when you are on tent.is. So when I see a screenshot of a message which mentions ^daniel, and I see that the message is from tent.tent.is, I know daniel is on tent.is, too. If he weren't, you just wouldn't truncate.

I'm not going to be designing tent apps any time soon, but I'm finding this quite interesting!

Contextual unique identifiers seem like pretty bad UX to me, and now you also have the additional requirement that any reasonable screenshot would have the site URL contained in it.

Aren't all usernames are contextual? When I see a screenshot of a tweet, I assume the username and mentions are on twitter and may or may not carry over to other services. If I saw a screenshot of your message in here on hn, I would assume that wahnfrieden is your hn identifier. How is this any different?

Each app/server has the power to display the data however they want. We're talking specifically about how tent.is should displays microblogging messages. On tent.is the full user identifier (with the site URL) is visible above each post, so they could safely to truncate tent.is identifiers to make mentions more readable. A different server or app could find a different solution.

you can now mention users with ^tent.tent.is as you say. For users on tent.is, ^username (i.e. ^tent or ^daniel will also work soon)

I agree. ^username.com feels spiky.

There's a strong convention for using @ to refer to someone, not just in email addresses, so I think it will be quite intuitive, especially if the http(s) is removed: @daniel.tent.is works pretty well I think.

Exactly. If Tent is to grow beyond the tech crowd, it has to be friendly and easy to use. Using @daniel.tent.is is smart, because it doesn't look like a URL, even though it is. It hides the underlying complexity, which is the right thing to do.

Why use website URL's for people when there's already a massively popular convention for person URI's: someone@tent.is. I think a "RESTful" protocol should follow this convention.

I think that they could have a far higher conversion rate at a better price. I'd immediately switch to a paid plan if the service was $2 to $4 per month, even if it is beta and has a small number of users, just to try it out. $12 is far to high to 'impulse subscribe', and most paying users will probably not use a lot of disk space or bandwidth.

I'm looking forward to see what wins out in the social protocol space:

- Open and Decentralized (Tent)

- Open and Centralized (App.net)

- Closed and Centralized (Facebook)

OStatus is open and decentralized, and has a vibrant community.

I'm sure OStatus is a great suite, but my impression is that it's a lot more complicated to set up, and it depends on a slew of work-in-progress protocols. Tent on the other hand is one protocol. I think that makes a huge difference when it comes to adoption potential.

Tent is a work in progress.

I almost feel like for any of these to truly win (besides FB) they have to be somehow integrated into the browsers.

Seems like a great opportunity for Google or Microsoft.

It'd make even more sense for Mozilla, given they're a nonprofit with promoting openness and innovation on the internet as their official purpose.

But yeah, Google support, although it would compete with Google+, might not be as far-fetched as it seems. Google Talk and Facebook Chat both use the open, distributed XMPP protocol. In the same way, it would be great to see commercial services that get mass use built over Tent.

It would make sense for Google to cannibalize their social network, because G+ is more a defensive, strategic alternative to the existing social networks than anything else.

Google would love for the walled-garden social networks to give way to open social networks -- closed social networks are probably the number one threat to their position as the center of the web.

Browser extensions for Tent are coming soon

I was curious about OStatus too, and found this: https://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues/4

- Open and Decentralized (diaspora)

Immediately what I thought of when reading Tent's description of itself.

Did Diaspora go anywhere after the security flaws were pointed out?

> Did Diaspora go anywhere after the security flaws were pointed out?

I think Diaspora sort of fizzled out due to a plethora of issues--not the least of which was the suicide of one of its founders.[1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy

OStatus?

This is what google needs to adopt. Platform does not need to be closed to be successfull. See how gmail is doing on open platform 'email'

I was thinking the same thing when I logged into Google Plus earlier (for the first time in months). I could see it using Tent under the hood, and still be successful because of the added features.

- I'd provide a default avatar for new users. - Bookmarklet before the browser extension. - Ability to cross-post messages to Twitter but only on demand.

In any case, don't forget to remind me sooner rather than later that I signed up with you and I should come back.

Really glad they dropped the protocol from user IDs!

Looking forward to being ^alanhogan.com or ^ajh.us one day :)

Tent.is looks great! And really impressed with Tent protocol (Didnt know about it before)

I'm still having trouble signing up. I put in the information and click 'launch tent' and nothing happens. I assumed yesterday that the problem was overwhelming demand, but ~2500 users over 20 hr shouldn't overload the site.

Hi-- What browser and OS are you using? Autocomplete seems to be causing trouble for some people.

Setting noscript to allow all on page worked - sorry for the bother. Edit: it did work the very first time for some reason (I wanted to have a work and personal account).

Firefox 15.0, Fedora 17. I am using Lastpass for passwords so that may function similarly to autocomplete. I'll try typing in directly.

Do you use addons like noscript or refcontrol maybe?

That was it, I needed to allow more than just the top page.

let me know if turning lastpass off helps

I had the same problem yesterday on my WP7. If I clicked on login the tab would crash.

Do you have a password reset? I've forgot mine for richard.tent.is

Not yet, send an email to contact@tent.is, and we'll get you sorted out.

putting mentions in the metadata is brilliant.

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