Just so you know ... that would exclude me. That's OK, of course, a more niche audience can lead to better and richer conversations, and there will always be people on the fringes.
Maybe you want a Mastodon instance that specialises in your sort of thing, and allow federation to catch the people who have interesting things to say, but are on a different instance.
It would certainly exclude people initially but there are self-hosting "operating systems" emerging that enable users running a raspi to download and run pre-configured Docker containers as easily as an App Store app (e.g. https://getumbrel.com).
A federated Mastodon-like instance might be the move, but I have a way of providing Sybil resistance so could probably have an open p2p relay network. This is why I was asking for reading. I want to make sure I understand all the options.
For more context, I want to decentralize https://stacker.news which is basically an HN clone with Sybil resistance (costs bitcoin to post/broadcast) and karma is withdraw-able as bitcoin. The community is very fond of decentralization for obvious reasons plus I think it'd be a fun challenge.
Hey, I'm the founder on SN. Thanks for the mention! You generated some extra traffic today.
There actually isn't a cost to using Lightning Login (lnurl-auth). It operates without really touching the Lightning Network, i.e. a channel. It just uses your Lightning wallet's key pair to authenticate you.
More on login: through the QR code (or lnurl string), I effectively send your wallet a randomly generated string, a challenge, it signs it using a deterministically derived key pair using my domain and your wallet key pair, then hits an endpoint on my server with the signature which authenticates you.
The site however does use the Lightning Network to provide Sybil resistance. Upvotes/posts/comments cost 1 sat, ~1/2000 of a dollar. This helps gate the site allowing mostly Bitcoiners in and imports an incentive structure - those more like in person social interactions.
Rather than staking your reputation, you're staking Bitcoin. Rather than earning just reputation, you're earning Bitcoin (your earned karma/upvotes is Bitcoin you can withdrawal from SN at anytime).
Things precede shelter in the hierarchy of needs yet shelter is still valuable. Also there are shades of shelter. Most people might not want to live in the trailer park of money.
The likelihood depends somewhat on whether they are in or out of a network that can provide the quality and quantity of capital, advice, and process that YC provides. If you're out of network, YC is (I think) a no brainer. Even people "in the network," like Justin Kan and Suhail, repeat YC so there are likely also non-fungibles that YC provides.
The real beauty is in how few operators you need to achieve maximal expressiveness in a programming language. It makes other programming languages seem extra. Highly recommend the SICP lectures https://youtu.be/-J_xL4IGhJA
git-remote-gitern is a git remote helper that end to end encrypts git repos without a custom remote receiver and without additional user key management (other than SSH keys). For demonstration, git-remote-gitern's repo has been encrypted using itself: https://github.com/huumn/git-remote-gitern-encrypted. It's built for use with https://gitern.com.
I know some hackers self-host git for security reasons so I was curious how tractable e2ee without a custom backend might be. I had also been curious about git internals given my plans with gitern so I made this as a bit of a forcing function to learn git and encryption and nodejs better.
A little snippet about how it works from the README for those that don't like to click off
> git-remote-gitern creates an encrypted object graph that has mostly identical structure to your git repo's unencrypted object graph. This encrypted object graph behaves like any other git repo but all of its objects are encrypted. It keeps track of the mapping between unencrypted and encrypted objects using a flat file stored in the encrypted repo. This mapping allows git-remote-gitern to determine the revision of an unencrypted repo relative to an encrypted one.
I go into more depth in the README.
And key management
> A symmetric key is generated for each repo and is used to encrypt the repo. For each ssh public key on the gitern account, the symmetric key is encrypted with this ssh public key and stored in the encrypted repo. Thus any computer with an ssh private key corresponding to an ssh public key used to encrypt the symmetric key can decrypt a git-remote-gitern repo.
That makes sense. I haven't done really any pitching (other than the idea to friends) because I've been presuming I need a network. Are you saying I should pitch to the people that I do know to and the quality of this pitch will determine my eventual success regardless of who they are or if they access to capital? I can see this being true.
Audience: a Docker audience suffices.