Errant thought - I kind of hope that the actual social network for developers of the not so distant future looks more like a bunch of us separately building bespoke applications to serve files to each other.
> Dave: "Bot, add a folder to my personal data store with the pictures I took this weekend and share it with everyone in my poker group"
> Sally: "I see that I've gotten an email from Dave with a magic link conveying access to something. Bot, use this link to negotiate a key exchange with whatever weird app Dave cobbled together (ask his bot if you need help) and then log into my VPS and add a tab to my personal webapp to display the content he has shared."
Think of it this way - why didn't we all just replace Facebook with "host files on our personal sites and give each other access to them" ten years ago? Because we'd have to store passwords, identify each other past spoofed emails, figure out when/how to trust friends of friends, etc. In practice that means everyone adopting the same protocol, which is a chicken-and-egg problem.
That hasn't changed, but what has changed is that reading docs and writing the glue code is effectively free. The main problem with something like Solid is, if it takes even an hour to figure out how to get it going, I am effectively assigning my friends an hour of homework to be able to network with me. That's no longer true. If you like the Fediverse and I like Solid and Dave uses Nostr and Sally is stuck with some proprietary thing that came with her NAS, we can all build a network without any of us switching to, or even learning much about, each other's platforms.
I thought this is why we established standards. I truly hope the LLM singularity brings further adherence to existing standards and doesn't lead to an explosion in protocols and formats. That sounds like a nightmare! :)
Maybe I'm blind, but what's the issue here? Users (that are GitHub usernames by the way) and commits (posts) are public. This is not a security concern whatsoever.
You’re not blind. I also only see public data here in the sitemap. From an seo perspective I don’t think this is necessary with a social network but I don’t see any issues of substance with it.
Mastodon is where I find the most (I hesitate to use this word) real nerds. The folks in it for the love of the game, not because it pays well or because they're chasing the latest trends. Nearly everyone I admire in tech is there, and very few of the people I think little of are.
My pleroma instance (alternative AP server) collapsed on itself, running out of storage mid upgrade, about two years ago. I didn't have the bandwidth to allocate to getting it back up and running, as I didn't have backups, and it wasn't an easy fix.Last weekend I pointed my (fully local!) agent at it, and it was able to get it back up and running.
Now that I have it up and running, my feed is entirely people just hating on LLMs. I have a hard time finding technical content that I enjoy on there these days.
That's true, and it is a rift in the fediverse...some very anti-LLM voices are quite loud there. But, there are people there with a nuanced view of them, as well.
And, I would rather talk to an AI Luddite that's extraordinarily technically competent without AI assistance than someone who vibe-coded a startup with no idea how it works, and the former is far more common on the fediverse than the latter. I think it's unfortunate there's such a strong emotional component to talking about LLMs, as it's the most interesting technical innovation since the internet, but I understand it and I'm sympathetic to it (the AI companies have done a good job giving people reasons to hate and/or fear them).
I found success in starting our from an LLM positive poster and fanning out from their follows and building a follower graph. From there I fetch a few hundred of their posts and used an LLM to classify the posts as negative, mixed, or positive. I used this to winnow a set of follows. For now I just poll and generate a timeline HTML. This has yielded decent results.
But the problem with all of these Twitter clones is the political schism of Musk's acquisition has largely polarized the offshoots. You aren't just on alt-Twitter, you're on a specific polarized chunk of it.
You have to purge old non-local content cached on your server or it just fills up your disk over time. You can do it directly in the SQL database or there's a maintenance script that does it.
I'm on mas.to, which is, I believe, the second largest after mastodon.social. I picked it because it's got the shortest URL, but it has been quietly reliable and up to date. Its moderation and defederation policies are stricter than some might like.
I follow many people who use infosec.exchange and hachyderm.io and they seem to be nerd-oriented instances. But it doesn't matter all that much, since you can follow and interact across the whole federation. I'd say just pick one that's reasonably large and old enough to have proven it is run by people who know how to run a reliable service and are in it for the long haul. It's possible to move to a new instance with only a little inconvenience, so don't agonize too much over it.
you’re correct. unfortunately the type of people on hacker news these days are more interested in feeling self righteous than actually being correct. i think when Twitter was taken over it really shook a lot of them, so they seek refuge anywhere they can. open debate is what they fear the most, so the best route for them to avoid any risk of severe cognitive dissonance is to close off discussion and make “i’m correct and you’re wrong” the starting point. and yes to be specific i’m mostly talking about leftists
I would describe the website as “twitter for developers and uses your GitHub account for auth”. It’s a simple concept, but I think using your GitHub account to sign in is a great idea and a meaningful differentiator. Good luck!
So not at all ready to be seen? Maybe we should all flag this so it can re-appear once someone spent at least a bit of time on making it proper and ready for public consumption?
I have a petty complaint: if you name your social network after a core Unix concept, then why make your users login exclusively through a Microsoft subsidiary?
GitHub is a social network already. You’re logging into one social network with another social network. And I’m complaining about that fact on a different social network. What has the world come to?
This is interesting: a. Developers on average are probably low on E trait in the Big Five b. Most users in the online developer communities (at least the ones who will be doing the "social" part, per the standard 1% rule of social platforms) loathe LinkedIn-style stuff, being asked to log in or provide PII. c. Most "social" services devs regularly use are for technical/utility stuff (GH, SO, subreddits) more than the social aspect.
If a, b and c are true, then this site is reinventing HN/proggit with forced GitHub login on top. NGMI.
It’s a good idea but twitter is the worst possible implementation of social media. You don’t get any sort of discussion, it’s just people slopping into the feed.
Y.a.t.c (yet another twitter clone). Except for theming it brings nothing new to the social media space.
I also dont think sending my tweets to a null device will do much for development.
Ill put my bets on Bsky or Mastodon here.
I signed up for TextLog a few weeks ago. I love the text-only social network, but their European infra meant too much latency for my US-based browsing. Maybe this will scratch that itch!
> Computah... build me a social network in PHP. Import the user's profile from GitHub, they shouldn't have to fill anything in. No likes, reposts or algorithms. Add a catchy slogan at the home page. Make no mistakes!
As HN has gotten bigger its pulled in other communities and now its not very developer/hacker oriented anymore. Lobsters was the first push to have the deep software talk back and there will be more as HN caters to a different crowd nowadays.
yep im confused, i see a handful of words that signals almost nothing other than there is potentially something behind the login gate. then an 8 hour video... im not just gonna jump into some random 8 hour video without any context, just as im not about to signup for something with no context for what it really is.
I'm thinking of it a different way. In order to join a social media network these days, I need to have some assurance that it's going to be worth my time. They didn't provide any, so screw 'em.
Errant thought - I kind of hope that the actual social network for developers of the not so distant future looks more like a bunch of us separately building bespoke applications to serve files to each other.
> Dave: "Bot, add a folder to my personal data store with the pictures I took this weekend and share it with everyone in my poker group"
> Sally: "I see that I've gotten an email from Dave with a magic link conveying access to something. Bot, use this link to negotiate a key exchange with whatever weird app Dave cobbled together (ask his bot if you need help) and then log into my VPS and add a tab to my personal webapp to display the content he has shared."
That might be overly optimistic, but it doesn't feel that far off. It's kind of what Tim Berners-Lee build https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_project for right?
Isn't that just called hosting a website?.. You can just give an agent access to your server and let them do all that, no?
There are also places like https://tilde.town/ if you want something more social media–esque
Think of it this way - why didn't we all just replace Facebook with "host files on our personal sites and give each other access to them" ten years ago? Because we'd have to store passwords, identify each other past spoofed emails, figure out when/how to trust friends of friends, etc. In practice that means everyone adopting the same protocol, which is a chicken-and-egg problem.
That hasn't changed, but what has changed is that reading docs and writing the glue code is effectively free. The main problem with something like Solid is, if it takes even an hour to figure out how to get it going, I am effectively assigning my friends an hour of homework to be able to network with me. That's no longer true. If you like the Fediverse and I like Solid and Dave uses Nostr and Sally is stuck with some proprietary thing that came with her NAS, we can all build a network without any of us switching to, or even learning much about, each other's platforms.
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I applied for a tilde account some years ago and never even heard back from the vetting process.
I suppose I can't say I don't want to be part of it without sounding like sour grapes.
But if you don't like me you can join them and benefit from them keeping riff-raff like me out!
Just need to dust off the finger protocol.
About that: https://dotplan.space/about
I have plans to make something that is eerily similar to what you described at the start.
One other aspect I was thinking of was limiting sharing to friends of friends only so it's more a community than a toxic clusterf
I thought this is why we established standards. I truly hope the LLM singularity brings further adherence to existing standards and doesn't lead to an explosion in protocols and formats. That sounds like a nightmare! :)
I like that it’s email-based.
https://dev-null.sh/sitemaps/users-1.xml
https://dev-null.sh/sitemaps/commits-1.xml
Maybe I'm blind, but what's the issue here? Users (that are GitHub usernames by the way) and commits (posts) are public. This is not a security concern whatsoever.
You’re not blind. I also only see public data here in the sitemap. From an seo perspective I don’t think this is necessary with a social network but I don’t see any issues of substance with it.
https://x.com/sitemap.xml (listed in robots.txt but doesn't work for me)
https://www.facebook.com/robots.txt (186 sitemap files listed, none are accessible to me)
Perhaps these require an "acceptable browser" and/or an account
Why sitemap URLs. Because I'm a sitemaps user; I use sitemap files every day
The /dev/null ones seem to be easily accessible. Unlike some other "social networks"
wow, very secure..
lol, outstanding
Mastodon is where I find the most (I hesitate to use this word) real nerds. The folks in it for the love of the game, not because it pays well or because they're chasing the latest trends. Nearly everyone I admire in tech is there, and very few of the people I think little of are.
My pleroma instance (alternative AP server) collapsed on itself, running out of storage mid upgrade, about two years ago. I didn't have the bandwidth to allocate to getting it back up and running, as I didn't have backups, and it wasn't an easy fix.Last weekend I pointed my (fully local!) agent at it, and it was able to get it back up and running.
Now that I have it up and running, my feed is entirely people just hating on LLMs. I have a hard time finding technical content that I enjoy on there these days.
That's true, and it is a rift in the fediverse...some very anti-LLM voices are quite loud there. But, there are people there with a nuanced view of them, as well.
And, I would rather talk to an AI Luddite that's extraordinarily technically competent without AI assistance than someone who vibe-coded a startup with no idea how it works, and the former is far more common on the fediverse than the latter. I think it's unfortunate there's such a strong emotional component to talking about LLMs, as it's the most interesting technical innovation since the internet, but I understand it and I'm sympathetic to it (the AI companies have done a good job giving people reasons to hate and/or fear them).
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I found success in starting our from an LLM positive poster and fanning out from their follows and building a follower graph. From there I fetch a few hundred of their posts and used an LLM to classify the posts as negative, mixed, or positive. I used this to winnow a set of follows. For now I just poll and generate a timeline HTML. This has yielded decent results.
But the problem with all of these Twitter clones is the political schism of Musk's acquisition has largely polarized the offshoots. You aren't just on alt-Twitter, you're on a specific polarized chunk of it.
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You have to purge old non-local content cached on your server or it just fills up your disk over time. You can do it directly in the SQL database or there's a maintenance script that does it.
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Which mastodon instance would you recommend?
I'm on mas.to, which is, I believe, the second largest after mastodon.social. I picked it because it's got the shortest URL, but it has been quietly reliable and up to date. Its moderation and defederation policies are stricter than some might like.
I follow many people who use infosec.exchange and hachyderm.io and they seem to be nerd-oriented instances. But it doesn't matter all that much, since you can follow and interact across the whole federation. I'd say just pick one that's reasonably large and old enough to have proven it is run by people who know how to run a reliable service and are in it for the long haul. It's possible to move to a new instance with only a little inconvenience, so don't agonize too much over it.
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the game.
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What motivates someone to make a new account just for this kind of mundane and inappropriately rude comment? Why should anyone answer you?
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I wasn't talking to you, four minute old account.
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you’re correct. unfortunately the type of people on hacker news these days are more interested in feeling self righteous than actually being correct. i think when Twitter was taken over it really shook a lot of them, so they seek refuge anywhere they can. open debate is what they fear the most, so the best route for them to avoid any risk of severe cognitive dissonance is to close off discussion and make “i’m correct and you’re wrong” the starting point. and yes to be specific i’m mostly talking about leftists
It would be nice if the website had more information about the platform before you create an account.
Fixed! Check out the website it shows content now, no landing page anymore
Much better now, thanks!
I would describe the website as “twitter for developers and uses your GitHub account for auth”. It’s a simple concept, but I think using your GitHub account to sign in is a great idea and a meaningful differentiator. Good luck!
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This was done only in two days, there are important pages missing.
> This was done only in two days
So not at all ready to be seen? Maybe we should all flag this so it can re-appear once someone spent at least a bit of time on making it proper and ready for public consumption?
Does this excuse the main page missing any information what this thing even is? Come on.
Thank you, but no. I'll stick with /dev/tty0 . It's federated.
If it's called /dev/null... shouldn't all your responses be sent nowhere? Shouldn't it be a blank page? ;)
Based on what I read, it was effectively that; just like all social networks.
Social media site for devs getting hug-of-death'd by HN... the irony!
If only we had wel developed solutions for that ;)
There are, but most people don't understand channels or why the OTP is suited for this type of use-case. =3
https://www.phoenixframework.org/
https://phoenix.hexdocs.pm/channels.html
> Everyone here signed in with GitHub.
ugh.
I have a petty complaint: if you name your social network after a core Unix concept, then why make your users login exclusively through a Microsoft subsidiary?
GitHub is a social network already. You’re logging into one social network with another social network. And I’m complaining about that fact on a different social network. What has the world come to?
DM me and subscribe if you want an explanation.
Why do want your access to one social network be dependent on your access ti another social network?
Didn’t enough account bans happen to see that’s a bad idea?
Based on the branding, I think their target demographic assumes the dev in /dev/null is short for "Developers"
It's a cute name, but considering how combative developers can be about naming, I think it should have been more clever than cute.
If 'dev' is developer, 'null' makes me think it's for worthless developers, or for things that developers don't care about.
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dev = developer
bin = trash
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Is this a real question? If so, here’s a real answer:
GitHub is the single most widely adopted, developer-specific OIDC identity provider.
If it’s facetious, then WSL BABYYYYYY
Why does this need OIDC at all? Basic email + password account is like 1-2 prompts away.
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Guess I am simply not invited to the party then.
Or I am not a developer after all.
Identity crisis intensifies
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>Is this a real question? If so, here’s a real answer:
>Let's all be willing docile salves
This is how you sound
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Good point.
What if Microsoft black listed me from GitHub forever? I'm also banned from Facebook for like decade
And for developers. Only a tiny percentage of the devs I know actually know what /dev/null is.
FWIW DOS and Windows both have a null concept too:
How does publicly published PGP based login sounds?
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This is interesting: a. Developers on average are probably low on E trait in the Big Five b. Most users in the online developer communities (at least the ones who will be doing the "social" part, per the standard 1% rule of social platforms) loathe LinkedIn-style stuff, being asked to log in or provide PII. c. Most "social" services devs regularly use are for technical/utility stuff (GH, SO, subreddits) more than the social aspect.
If a, b and c are true, then this site is reinventing HN/proggit with forced GitHub login on top. NGMI.
/tmp/social would have been better I think. dev = device, doesn’t make sense.
Yeah, /dev is not ‘developer’. Next someone will come up with
/usr/social
assuming it’s ‘user’
I like it. I might steal that.
It’s a good idea but twitter is the worst possible implementation of social media. You don’t get any sort of discussion, it’s just people slopping into the feed.
I want a better version of reddit.
/dev/null has the connotation that whatever you say will be completely ignored. If you need a pun, why not go for
/dev/mull, same wordplay, but now we get to mull over each other’s posts
Y.a.t.c (yet another twitter clone). Except for theming it brings nothing new to the social media space. I also dont think sending my tweets to a null device will do much for development. Ill put my bets on Bsky or Mastodon here.
Reminds me of https://devrant.com/, which had a decent sized community cca 2018
++ was (is?) the icon to upvote
I signed up for TextLog a few weeks ago. I love the text-only social network, but their European infra meant too much latency for my US-based browsing. Maybe this will scratch that itch!
Your posts have to be approved? Odd way to run a social network imo.
Kind of makes sense for a small operation. Better that than miss something bad for eight hours because the admin (presumably singular) is sleeping.
Uses AI, Jev or similar.
Highly recommend going through the onboarding process and using it a bit. The git analogies and visual metaphors are a nice touch.
Seems to be down...
What does it use? masto or hand-crafted stuff?
I don't think you're getting the joke, the site is literally called /dev/null.
Laravel Backend, TypeScript Frontend.
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> Failed to open page
I'm guessing that wasn't expected result.
Looks like every post is a commit that needs to be approved by someone (they show as “pending"). How can that scale?
Only the first post has to be approved by a moderator (for now), subsequent posts are automatically AI moderated and approved.
How is that financially sustainable?
> No likes. No reposts. No algorithm. Everything else goes to /dev/null.
*Closes tab
Just skip the whole thing and send your thoughts straight to /dev/null
Weird, especially because it DOES have likes.
Yep our bad, we fixed this, no landing page anymore
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No, it has stars. /s
sigh Yeah, that's really a bad look for them to claim no likes and then have something that is functionally identical.
conceptually, just sounds like a place you go when you don't want anyone to hear, see or think about you.
A dream developer experience.
> Computah... build me a social network in PHP. Import the user's profile from GitHub, they shouldn't have to fill anything in. No likes, reposts or algorithms. Add a catchy slogan at the home page. Make no mistakes!
Wasn't this originally HN?
As HN has gotten bigger its pulled in other communities and now its not very developer/hacker oriented anymore. Lobsters was the first push to have the deep software talk back and there will be more as HN caters to a different crowd nowadays.
Not quite: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
Looks good!
Which part looks good? The <50 words or the YouTube video?
I'm not saying this isn't a good idea or that people don't want something like this but... There's nothing here?
yep im confused, i see a handful of words that signals almost nothing other than there is potentially something behind the login gate. then an 8 hour video... im not just gonna jump into some random 8 hour video without any context, just as im not about to signup for something with no context for what it really is.
Why do all these guys have "Soy Face" when you take their pictures?
TIL soy face is the 'unmasculine' version of pog face.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soy_face
Devs need to be around actual humans in-person more, not less.
I have the right amount of humans in my life, I don't want more. Online is great for me, for this use case.
Using GH as the only way to associate identity is a bit evil
Honestly, I don't think about it much when I ship things, but at the very least the landing page should explain clearly what it is.
I can't see any of the content unless I sign in.
I don't know if I want to sign in, because I can't see any of the content.
I'm thinking of it a different way. In order to join a social media network these days, I need to have some assurance that it's going to be worth my time. They didn't provide any, so screw 'em.
it was supposed to be public. maybe it got reverted. the team were moving super fast
yeah that's fixed
That's fixed
My favorite social network
it's fully open source (https://github.com/nunomaduro/dev-null.sh/pulls) and received over 200 PRs in less than 48 hours
I am always so floored when I see a new thing written all in PHP. I always got crap for using Perl most of my life.
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Shouldn't that domain be dev-null.social instead of 'shell'? Dorks.
Horror, another platform without freedom of speech. And why should you if you already have Mastodon where you are protected by your instance?
symlinked in.
Very good idea
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> follow people who write code, and commit plain text to a shared log.
Isn't that Twitter?
Twitter is gone, isn't it? X under Elon is not a place I will ever hang out
Discord is where more dev communities are moving to
> Discord is where more dev communities are moving to
Discord now requires age verification, so it is user-hostile and nobody should use it.
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No, everyone is still there talking about programming. Your choice, but you’re missing out.
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