Coffee Space

Background

Encase you’ve been living under a rock, the recent election shenanigans has brought around a series of crazy events. One of these is the fact that the current sitting President of the United States has been permanently banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Whether or not you agree with this action, Twitter has now banned a series of Conservatives too, including parody accounts of politicians.

This has lead to Google and Apple banning Parler, a “free-speech” platform for apparent lack of moderation. Parler is/was a popular location for banned Twitter users to migrate to. Now Amazon, their cloud server provider running AWS, are now refusing to provide them with a service. Now the Tor network is under pressure from what is suggested to be a DDoS attack.

This all comes after months of lockdowns, where content across various popular platforms has been censored if it mentions the election, COVID-19, protests/riots, etc. This may have been done in the name of the “greater good”, but this has meant that genuine voices raising legitimate opinions/advice/discussion on these subjects have been censored.

Right now seems to be a bad time for free speech.

There are a series of other platforms that plan to overcome this, such as Scuttlebutt, cabal and skynet - just a few examples on the HackerNews front page today. But these will all mostly fail to gain popularity for the same reason why indie platforms of their type have failed to gain popularity before them - they struggle to get content. What if there was a way to get initial content without having to get users to sign up?

Introduction (sort of)

I am slowly but surely building out something called ‘Dead Social’, a dead-simple social media network built on top of RSS feeds. The idea is that it will be one massive RSS feed aggregator, where users can subscribe to one another’s feeds, as well as external feeds.

RSS is distributed by nature (lots of independent servers) and almost every website out there already provide feeds for consumption. Most indie blogs out there already offer feeds, most news companies, even big tech companies like Youtube offer such features.

Current

The project is written in Java - because it’s a C-family language (which I like) with types and relatively good speed. On top of that it’s possible to make guarantees about the web server not crashing under any circumstance (due to pretty much “catch all” exception handling). On top of that, I can re-use code and ideas from other projects I’ve worked on.

The project is still in the early stages, but it currently supports:

• Registration – Users can register and are saved to disk. The accounts in theory are securely stored (although I need to read up on the latest best practices).
• Login – Users can then login with those accounts.
• Commenting – Users can then comment if logged in with those accounts.
• Viewing – Posts can then be viewed on the user’s page.

Future

So obviously this is just basic functionality for now, but in the near future I want to offer:

• Account following – Accounts should be able to follow other accounts.
• RSS feeds out – It should be possible to generate an RSS feed for any given account.
• RSS feeds in – I think these will be represented by “dumb accounts” of some kind, allowing one pull for the entire server rather than spamming the hell out of their servers.

Stay tuned for more!