Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web

Re:Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web by pwf on Wednesday August 22, 2012 @03:37PM (#4419158)

What arguments do you have against a 'pull' style for notifications? Something like a GET to /latest that passes in the last time the client checked for updates and only gets back the URI of the last 10 or so posts since then. An HD video post could contain simply a URI that points to the video, so the video isn't even downloaded until the 'app' within tent asks for it.

This way you could have a path with all the videos on it that you could proxy off to a server with more bandwidth. It would get the user a lot more control over how their content is accessed.

Edit: And what if my server is down when one of my friends makes a post? Will I never see it?

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Re:Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web by Titanous on Wednesday August 22, 2012 @03:41PM (#4419171)

Pull-style requests actually use up quite a bit more bandwidth than push notifications, because every client and server has to query every few seconds instead of just getting notified when there is a new post.

Posts have 'views', so a video or photo post would be pushed out with the 'meta' view which would include a URL to the content instead of the content inline.

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Re:Introducing Tent - the decentralized social web by pwf on Wednesday August 22, 2012 @03:57PM (#4419244)

I don't think so, considering that not all of my followers are going to be using the service all of the time. If the server just blindly downloaded everything always, then yes, it would be more bandwidth. But with proper caching strategies and servers only requesting new posts when clients are active, I think you could save a lot of bandwidth by not pushing everything.

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