I really like solutions in this space, and this is quite nice. Seeing people try create solutions like this really tickles my brain a lot. Even if I think more into it and conclude it has catastrophic issues, I still really get a weird kick learning about novel decentralised networks. I really can't explain it. Fancy combinations of encryption and decentralisation just really do it for me, to an abnormal and uncomfortable extent. Hopefully someone else relates to this.

Anyway, I really like this idea, it's cool. When I think about this one though, I feel there's too much friction in the follow/unfollow process. Having unfollowing requiring reenecrypting and rebuilding the entire website for everyone seems cumbersome. It's not a killer in itself, but combined with this:

> If the original post is inaccessible (e.g. the viewer doesn’t follow the author), the reply is hidden entirely. A user only sees replies from people they follow — this is the spam prevention mechanism.

I think this is going to prevent it from scaling in any desirable way. I know it's not intended to scale, and is targetted at smaller freinds networks, not influencers, but again, even small friendship networks grow complex, and I can see the experience on S@t turning into the worst parts of activitypub where you can only read half of the interesting replies because not being friends, and it being a pain to then become mutual friends.

But, I really, really do like that s@t feels like a combination of RSS, activity pub and static sites, having a browser heavy client is interesting to.

It does feel a bit like s@t wants stuff to be easily locked down between a dynamic list of friends though, and it feels a bit weird to have the foundational tech of such a protocol be static sites, which by definition make it hard to lock stuff down to a dynamic list of friends. Hmmmm, I really do love/hate static site architecture

This is nice though, thanks for sharing.

I built something similar to this. It's a SSG and CMS that runs in the browser and publishes the raw Markdown and JSON metadata alongside the rendered HTML. Unlike this it doesn't use encryption as it only publishes public data.

As the source is available, other clients can easily parse the data so that content can be made available beyond the browser, such as text-only clients, indexing and discovery networks and custom readers. I've built a prototype terminal client to test this out.

Now that the editor is working, my plans are to add public follow/block/like lists to sites to add a lightweight social layer and to build an open indexer framework for content discovery.

It's not trying to be another social network protocol. It's first and foremost a publishing platform, designed to be as easy to use as something like Medium while still being simple, open and portable.

I'd really appreciate any feedback: https://www.sparktype.org.

Funny to see people mention nostr

https://satellite.earth/ (Satellite nostr client)

https://nsite.run/ (literally static sites on nostr)

2 years ago I built something I called "social media for blogs" that had some similar ideas. Nothing around encryption though, all on public data.

I'd be keen to revisit those ideas and see if they can take shape in another form.

MIT licensed if anyone's interested: https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess

Nostr?!

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

The concept is good. It is in the right direction.

I think it needs to not have a dependence on github. This is a microsoft thing, and at best it means this will become another way for a corporation to make money from people.

Speaking of money, it needs to be paid for. (The github part is free from Microsloth and so is NOT free). So how do you pay for this? Micropayments.

So we need a system of micropayments. Then we need it to provide a way to help people economically. These are not barriers, because this is hacker news, instead this is an accurate understanding of more of the problem.

People keep talking about a collaborative internet without using the term. But to be clear we are talking about a fundamentally different kind of internet. That we can build.

This obviously needs some iteration on the protocol design as other commenters have mentioned, but I'd still be up for partnering up over here at https://anproto.com/

> A user’s identity is their domain name.

That's dead on arrival. The domain name system is one of the core reasons why everything has become so centralized in the first place. If one wants to fix anything wrong with the Internet, finding a better way to naming things should be the first step.

So, in essence this is very, very similar to TWTXT (https://github.com/buckket/twtxt).

I'd imagine that similarly to TWTXT, this suffers from the same accessibility and barrier of entry issues. It's one thing when all you have to do is type text in a textbox and click "Submit", but it's a whole thing entirely when you have to screw around with updating your website to do anything.