search

fraction / oasis

Free, open-source, peer-to-peer social application that helps you follow friends and discover new ones on Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB).
http://oasis-demo.fraction.io
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
287 stars 42 forks source link

What is the intended use case of Oasis? #33

Closed trashhalo closed 4 years ago

trashhalo commented 4 years ago

The readme is alittle unclear on where Oasis fits into the ecosystem.

I think clarifying this would help contributors make more meaningful commits.

christianbundy commented 4 years ago

Thanks for pointing this out, I'll brain dump a bit and hopefully there will be some nuggets of usefulness.

The backstory is that I spent lots of time using and developing Patchwork and Patchbay, but found both difficult to improve and maintain. When Matt broke up with Patchwork I looked around and realized that there weren't any other apps that I'd recommend for most people, so I started taking the two-pronged approach of:

Is it meant to be run locally as an alternative to patchwork?

Yeah, my personal use-case is an alternative to Patchwork that can either attach to an existing SSB service or start its own, plus I use a branch that acts as a public SSB viewer.

Is it meant to be hosted and used by multiple users?

It could be hosted somewhere (and secured with at least a password and TLS) if you want to be able to post to the same feed from multiple devices, but this loses many of the benefits of SSB's offline-first design. I'm planning to add identity switching, so that you can choose which feed you're posting from, but I think I'd like to avoid Mastodon-style logins where you have to trust the server administrator not to use your private keys or read your encrypted messages.

I know that @arj03 is working on SSB-Browser, where the entire SSB node runs directly in your browser, which might cover the "I want to try SSB but I don't want to install anything" use-case, but I think it would be best to assume that anyone using Oasis can be trusted with all of the information that Oasis knows. The public viewer use-case is an exception to that, but that's not in master yet.

Once all of the basics are covered I'd really like to look into something like choo, which would allow Oasis to run on the server over HTTP or completely in the browser just like SSB-Browser does, but I'm trying not to get ahead of myself.

What do you think?

trashhalo commented 4 years ago

What I got from your comment merged with context from the README:

Friendly Scuttlebutt interface designed for simplicity and accessibility. This is an experimental client built with HTML, CSS, and Node.js without any front-end JavaScript. The goal is to build a maintainable foundation for the next generation of scuttlebutt clients.

christianbundy commented 4 years ago

cc: @jedahan / @georgeowell in case you haven't seen this

Would love to collab on improving the readme! I've started a few rewrite-readme branches aimed at improving this but haven't been able to formulate anything I'm happy with. Here's a take (I'm promising myself that I won't hit the backspace key):

Oasis is a friendly web interface for Secure Scuttlebutt. Its interface is meant to be accessible to most people and most web browsers, and its code is meant to be accessible to most people with a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Oasis should be fun to use and improve, but at the end of the day it's just a tool to help you connect more closely with the people around you.

cc: @cinnamon-bun, most of my vision for this project has been inspired by your work and it would be great to have your help carving out a vision of the future (or at least a better readme) if you have time/interest

georgeowell commented 4 years ago

From my own perspective there should be three main goals of this project:

User safety/moderation tools Onboarding UX Maintainability

I would like to work on the README and documentation a bit also but I don't have much spoons.

cinnamon-bun commented 4 years ago

General agreement here with @christianbundy and @georgeowell, plus also