Idea of limited resource software
Big-net
There are two opposite ideas. One which is treated as obvious that today's hardware is so powerful, in comparison to computers several decades ago, and software seems to be infinite. Infinite in meaning of service size, number of users, data etc. Infinite in meaning of functionality - be like Facebook which try to build everything inside its world. Infinite in meaning of design - build with most complex backbone engines, for example first choice databases like PostgreSQL (because they are free) which are using in success in big commercial projects, or many layer of virtualisation in shape of big GAFA services with possibilities of scaling for million users. Having million user base seems to be the main object of most projects, as the initial assumption. This mean that the most of small projects are just oversized.
Small-net
The second one is about limiting resources. The most obvious direction is connected with popular Raspberry Pi or retro hardware movement. But it isn't the thing I'd like to write now.
As I've written [The Small-net is finite]. I've spotted the more and more projects which had set some limitations. There have some initial assumptions of the maximum shape of the project.
- For the first time about this I've read in [Official Circumlunar Space FAQ]. It's so natural for picked cosmic theme to organise their Pubnix into limited group of people. It's so unheard of services that are closing registering new users.
- Some time ago during my browsing for Gopher origins I've spotted some aggregators, which showing nothing now. There are no new items to aggregate. But the most uncommon thing is that aggregator doesn't provide historical content. In the Internet the most popular thing now is to gather all data, for some indefinite future reasons. I figured out later that Gemini Reddit-like [Geddit] has the same limitation.
- The most weird for the today user thing, I spotted yesterday, is [Sector Disk]. Social-media for 2880 users, which could request 512 bytes for their data. The essence of Small-net!
Infiniteness obscuring the field of vision
I hadn't understood the idea of Local Timeline in Mastodon. I understood this some time ago when I've discovered Pubnixes idea, which I mentioned above. It's showing that my habit of infinite services made me don't understand that idea before. I had been thinking that every instance of Mastodon want to have as many users as possible. So the Local Timeline in the long time period will be the same as Federated Timeline.
But as we can see above the main idea could be different. There could be some instance which is organised around some idea, and for which the Local Timeline is crucial. Instance which don't want to be separated, but don't use Federated Timeline as source of interactions.
[Official Circumlunar Space FAQ]
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szczezuja.space CC BY-SA
@ Sun 22 Aug 2021 10:38:49 AM CEST
tags: #smallnet, #software, #pubnix, #sectorDisk
/gemlog/