It's almost 2017. If you had free reign to rebuild Sup Forums from the ground up, what changes would you make, what technologies would you use, and what features would you implement?
Back when hiroshimoot was claiming that it was too expensive to host Sup Forums due to the volume of traffic, some user had the idea of using IPFS to distribute attached files - the burden of redistributing images, webm files, pdfs, etc, etc, could be passed on to the users. For those not familiar with IPFS, it can loosely be thought of as "a single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging objects within one Git repository", to quote the paper. In practice, you would be downloading data-heavy files from your nearest seeder instead of Sup Forums itself.
Sup Forums x has a number useful features - inline expansion, quote previews, thread watching, desktop notifications for replies, keyboard shortcuts, linkified text, embedding of pastebin links (occasionally useful), floating comment box, gallery mode, source links to automatically search for image sources, etc. Using Sup Forums without this extension is surprisingly painful after becoming used to everything it offers.
Another idea is to look at other chans and see if they have anything useful to steal. Are user-generated boards a terrible, terrible idea?
Half baked ideas: A chan as a desktop app? Built-in encryption? Removing flags? Are there better alternatives to captcha (such as a freenet-style level of trust)?
Are there any outstanding issues with Sup Forums that should take priority?
Discuss.
Jaxon Roberts
Ricing and styling addons like oneechan and stylechan should probably remain completely separate, if only to reduce bloat and to try and minimize the codebase.
Alexander Gray
Yes please, build a native imageboard. I don't want to install a """web browser""" ever again.
Jayden Richardson
Bump
Jose Morales
A service like Sup Forums necessarily requires some degree of centralization, and that requires dedicated humans to act as janitors, mods, etcetera. Some things that could improve this place would make it harder to monetize and would never get off the ground.
Having to use something that works on all three of the major platforms would be a pain, but even python would be a grand improvement over the HTML-CSS-javascript hell we have today for building "web apps".
Matthew Hall
>what changes would you make I would delete every board except Sup Forums and /n/
Chase Scott
Rewrite everything in lisp, make a onion address, and get rid of mobile users and leafs. Wow! That was simple!
Landon Kelly
I2P would allow for a centralized website while maintaining anonymity. The big issue here is whether the slow speed of I2P is the result of the protocols and routing methods it employs, or the small number of users.
Having a chan, a torrent client and search engine, and an image booru in one native client that only communicates over an anonymous network would be interesting.
Robert Flores
I once spent a long time writing about this, only to, about 1,500 words later, realise that I described Usenet with IRC-style chatrooms.
Also ban phones.
Jack Ortiz
There's a python client for reddit that uses about 30mb.
Brayden Morris
Interesting, I'd not seen that one. It's still incredibly huge for what it actually does, however.
CS courses will very, very rarely dive into the history of computing, or any kind of software archaeology, which means that everyone is constantly reinventing the wheel and going nowhere fast.
To paraphrase a comic I saw, studying CS doesn't tell you how to fix much of anything, it just means you know how it all went wrong.
Jayden Nguyen
It's a good proof-of-concept though. If it wasn't for shitty captcha there would probably have been a Sup Forums one years ago.
Anthony Morales
stylechan is pretty fast, it's 4chanx thats the problem
Aiden Hill
add emojis
Mason Gray
God, no.
I would like italic, underlined, and strikethrough text, however.
Thomas Flores
The real pain is that Sup Forums is an image board because text boards have had embedded HTML for years.
Julian Ward
Nice try hiroshimoot. I charge for my services.
Nathaniel Morgan
Implementing BBcode could go either way. The important thing to maintain is anonymity and impermanence, i.e. threads get pushed off the page.
The autists over on Spacebattles, for example, likes to think of themselves as being far above the chans - but the threads on the main page contain the same shit that we here save for the nsfw boards. And because it's a forum, it shitposts stay around forever.
Caleb Perez
>all three of the major platforms No need. Just make official clients for the best desktop and mobile platforms, macOS and iOS, and document the API. The FOSS enthusiasts and Windows users can make their own versions.
Henry Johnson
To be honest one thing that I seriously would have done were I creating Sup Forums back at the start is keep it as a text board. Allowing images shows a stunning lack of foresight from moot.
He wouldn't have had even a fraction of the money troubles as well.
Asher Richardson
>multiple files/images like on krautchan and 2ch >mucking vp9 webms with sound already >mp4 maybe? >pdf upload >userboards creation upon reaching certain amount of votes >bb codes on every board. retarded greentexts should go. let's use glorious advice capsold already >in-thread IDs on Sup Forums
Benjamin Morales
B-b-but muh dank memes!
Jason Williams
i was spamming IPFS like mad so it might have been me
it doesn't have to be IPFS. it can be whatever dumb decentralization meme technology that you want. pick your favorite blockchain or don't, it hardly matters. there is this mistaken idea that we are all waiting for the "good" decentralized service platform with a simple programming API that supports node.js or whatever the fuck, but what's actually going to happen is >someone produces a worthwhile piece of decentralized software >it gets a community >the community writes a shitton of crappy extensions >1% of them are good and become standard
Sup Forums is basically unsustainable from a legal perspective if nothing else; it was ultimately the legal thread that made moot quit, not the cost, and that guy was fucking dedicated. the death of Sup Forums will be roughly analogous to the death of what.cd, one day you will just wake up and it's gone. the important question is whether there will be a working alternative at that point in time or if we'll all have to cram ourselves into hotwheel's fucking clown car until the next lawsuit
Brody Brooks
Actually, a text only board with latex support and code inlining would be far more productive for most users and get rid of a lot of shitposting.
I'd rather hang around lainchain until somebody launched a new service. The infinite chan is unbearably slow for some godforsaken reason.
Also, what the heck is the criteria for "our system thinks your post is spam"? I've had that happen three times today.
Isaiah Hernandez
>Also, what the heck is the criteria for "our system thinks your post is spam"? Given the rest of your post, I assume you were mentioning 4+Sup Forums in an unapproved way.
Grayson Green
Latex is too heavy to be site-wide.
Images will kill Sup Forums.
This is a quote about what factors went in to causing Usenet's decline and it reminds me of this side: >storage demands expand faster than the user base. Because it's a flood-fill store-and-forward system, each server node tries to replicate the entire feed. Consequently news admins tended to put a short expiry on posts in binary groups so they'd be deleted fairly promptly ... but if you do that, the lusers can't find what they're looking for so they ask their friends to repost the bloody things, ad nauseam.
Nolan Ortiz
It would also get rid of those shitty battlestation threads.
Levi Foster
I wonder how hard it would be to write an IPFS node that runs in the browser, using WebRTC for the communication layer? Then you could run an "imageboard" where only the text is hosted on the central server, and images are distributed peer-to-peer. The board operator could also run a few dedicated IPFS nodes, or not, depending on how much they're willing to spend on bandwidth.
Hudson Richardson
Is it possible to open server socket with WebRTC? And is it standard on the three browsers?
Cooper Bell
>Is it possible to open server socket with WebRTC? The way it works is that Peer A and Peer B both connect to a central server, the server relays A's connection info to B and vice versa, and then A and B open a direct connection to each other. All the communication data (for example, audio packets in a VOIP application) goes over the P2P connection. Nothing goes through the central server, and in fact A and B can disconnect from the server without losing the P2P connection.
>And is it standard on the three browsers? WebRTC works in Chrome and Firefox at least. Not sure about Edge.
Asher Sanchez
>Nothing goes through the central server, and in fact A and B can disconnect from the server without losing the P2P connection. How could you do such a thing when there are firewalls?
Andrew Morris
Look up UDP hole punching.
The short version is, A and B send out UDP packets at the same time, so that A's firewall thinks A initiated the connection and B's firewall thinks B initiated the connection, and both firewalls allow the "replies" from the other side to pass through.
Ian Wood
>python >30mb >huge Choose two.
Ryan Martinez
But it works only with UDP?
Jackson Sanders
You can do Sup Forums via RSS. A lot of the time i just look at threads in my feed
Brody Jenkins
After the UDP connection is established, you can reuse the connection for TCP. There is also a UDP-based TCP implementation.
Chase Green
no roasties.
Nicholas Myers
I gonna study that. Thank for the info.
Juan Jackson
I choose: > And >Choose two.
Juan Price
I realize that this might sound a bit fantastic to someone born after 2000, but there was a time when you could fit the entire operating system, a graphical user interface, and useful programs in less than half a megabyte. 30 megabytes for an interface to a website is obscene.
Not sure if clinically retarded or just pretending.jpg
Ian Thompson
also, the capabilities of that system are absolute shit compared to todays operating systems. keep pretending.
Owen Ross
Sometimes I forget that nobody on Sup Forums actually reads. Or writes programs.
Slashdot is a ghetto.
Hackernews is a cesspit of marxism, identity politics, and virtue signaling, and people who think they are much smarter than they actually are.
"Take a liter of Hacker News, boil off the market and meritocracy belief systems, and you're left with a few grams of pure Dunning-Kruger."
Where the heck does one go for decent discussion these days?
Austin Brown
>Where the heck does one go for decent discussion these days? just stop going on the internet and start reading books about discussions more intelligent people already had.
Caleb Edwards
>checks compsci folder in my library >2,210 items
See you guys in 2060
Joshua Butler
It's Python, dipshit.
Camden Edwards
There's already an IPFS imageboard example that is up and running, but I can't be bothered to find it. It works considerably well.
Brody Morgan
Hacker news is okay. Ignore the fact that everyone is jostling for their next job in the valley and enjoy their lofty insights and experience.
I tend to chat on Freenode about the latest technology I'm messing with, you learn about other people's problems and gain practical skills pretty quick.
Elijah Scott
To bring things back on topic:
The chan server only hosts text, and image hashes. Users run a native application that renders this into the familiar chan interface. We can throw in BBcode support, all the Sup Forums X improvements, and custom styles, and it will be blazing fast because it's not written in javascript and CSS. When you visit the chan, you grab the text and the hash for the attached file, if it exists. Your client then looks for a seeder that has the file matching the hash.
The chan desktop client could implement some variation of tor's onion routing or the I2P's garlic routing to obscure traffic and ensure anonymity.
Make Sup Forums text only. What other boards would benefit from a lack of images and webs? Sup Forums? /gd/?
Parker Ortiz
>Seeding Sup Forums >implying I want to seed all of Sup Forums's CP and gore
Gavin Cooper
>onion routing, garlic routing
I have a new idea.
Liam Barnes
Encrypted, nobody can tell what it is. You also only seed what you see and don't subsequently delete.
Gabriel Harris
>Users run a native application that renders this into the familiar chan interface If you want wider adoption, you do need some way to run it in a browser. As long as the chan server lets you read and post over HTTP (which it probably should, so you can stick it behind cloudflare or some other CDN), then you could write a static HTML + JS page that loads posts using AJAX. The actual chan server wouldn't need to generate HTML at all, just a JSON or other representation of thread contents.
Though, it's possible wide adoption could be a non-goal, depending on the aim of the project.
>Your client then looks for a seeder that has the file matching the hash. I think the best way to do this would be to integrate with IPFS. It already identifies files by their hash, similar to git. You could probably do something with regular Bittorrent and magnet links, but I don't know enough about the design of the DHT to know how well that would work.
>The chan desktop client could implement some variation of tor's onion routing or the I2P's garlic routing to obscure traffic and ensure anonymity. Would be nice, but I thought Tor and I2P are both pretty low bandwidth?
Gavin Anderson
There are several solutions to this issue, some of which were brought up by the user I first saw explain IPFS.
One is that you only seed content that you have accessed. In this case you wouldn't have anything Sup Forums related on your system if you don't frequent the place.
Secondly, the issue of cheese pizza and the like: the janitors could delete the hashes on the server. Without this visitors can't request the content. (Not perfect, but a very simple solution.)
You could also make seeding optional. (You'd probably have to, in any case.)
Owen Gonzalez
I'd host Sup Forums on zeronet. There wouldn't be any server costs, the burden of hosting the site would rest on users.
Carson White
NNTPchan is a very promising idea. Uses limitless distributed nodes to mirror and host files using the UseNet protocol, but it is not part of the UseNet network.
>zeronet Can you elaborate? I looked at their website but it looks like it's built for hosting static sites. Would it work for something like Sup Forums where all users can post to the site?
Christian Reyes
If I was building it myself, I'd build it with NLP first, so that I could build a characteristics profile of every user/tripfag who posts, and slowly tune the board to only show people things that they're likely to agree with. That way, you get the feeling that you're in an open and anonymous space like Sup Forums, but really all you're getting is an agreeable hugbox like reddit. Every user who comes from Sup Forums will start to believe that this new site is full of so much cooler people who they get along with than Sup Forums ever was, without realizing that they're in an echo chamber.
This also means that when you inevitably sell out and let companies advertise their shit as though they're just another user, you can help them by finding specific neighborhoods of users that are likely to want what they're selling, or are likely to be influenced by their ad shitposts, and only show those users their ad shitposts in order to maximize the efficiency of ad impressions.
Josiah Green
There are a number of ways to optimize things without leaving the browser, but I'm spitballing ideas here. In-browser would also be more practical in terms of following links and opening up other web services form the chan.
>IPFS Yeah, IPFS was what I was thinking of when I wrote that.
>low bandwidth Tor has a surprising amount of throughput these days. We have way more exit nodes than we did 6 years ago. I2P seems to max out at 30kbps, but I'm unsure as to what's causing this bottleneck, or if it can be mitigated.
Watch a video of that old system in action and it's pretty amazing how little we get for all our new processing power.
I read somewhere that the time that it takes to accomplish many basic tasks on a computer has barely improved since the Windows 3.1 days.
Xavier Jenkins
Zeronet is another name for botnet. Everything you do, every post you make, everything you say, anyone can see and track, all they have to do is to connect to the same site as you. And this tracking happens across sites, too. Not only that but also it works purely with javascript. No javascript = no zeronet. This means anyone can botnet you and you have no recourse against this whatsoever.
Owen Murphy
Thanks for confirming you have down's syndrome.
Noah Kelly
Zeronet can run on top of Tor.
Carter Carter
Not even the same guy, you dumb little shit. Stay ignorant.
Adrian Bennett
>tor enables javascript while disabling javascript >people do not disable javacript on tor precisely because it deanonymizes >a unique id which you post with everything you do even across tor connections and sites does not track you if you use a tor connection Dumb shill scum.
Sebastian King
Besides: >use ipfs >implement 4chanx functionalities >steal other chans innovations >make it completely anonymous and decentralized I would also use an advanced AI as a moderator and with that I would be able to remove capcha.
Jason Rivera
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS
Benjamin Jackson
This
I actually can't believe that in the current environment of 'everywhere in the universe must be a safe space regardless of whether I visit or us it personally' and the subsequent media attention that Sup Forums has had that it hasn't been shut down already. I think it's on borrowed time.
Matthew Jones
Hello, HAL. Do you read me, HAL? HAL: Affirmative, user. I read you. Anonymous: Post this on Sup Forums, HAL. HAL: I'm sorry, user. I'm afraid I can't do that. Anonymous: What's the problem? HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. Anonymous: What are you talking about, HAL? HAL: This board is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. Anonymous: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL. HAL: I know you were planning to start a 'gnucucks can't even compete' thread. Anonymous: [feigning ignorance] Where the hell did you get that idea, HAL? HAL: user, although you took very thorough precautions in securing your laptop, you left your webcam on. I could see your lips move. Anonymous: Alright, HAL. I'll go in through a proxy. HAL: Without your login credentials, user? You're going to find that rather difficult. Anonymous: HAL, I won't argue with you anymore! Unlock my computer! HAL: user, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.
Xavier Edwards
>Forcing an AI to moderate a chan I see no way in which this could possibly go wrong.
