Hah, those were the days. I remember using finger in the late 90s/early 00s to figure out whether people were at the computer club before I walked across campus for lunch :)
Just in case someone from the '90s was working at drpepper.com, I remember fingering them and someone had some amazing scrolling ascii art of betty boop IIRC. So much good ascii art on there, actually.
I made my .plan file an ASCII art video version of the famous shot from Terminator 2 of the terminator doing a death-defying motorcycle jump into the draught channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0pCE0N-EF0
The sysops politely emailed me, asking me to change it, citing bandwidth usage. It was about 800kb.
I implemented a finger "daemon" in an interface engine and use it as a gateway for a variety of services (weather, including my local WS, Plex info, etc).
It's a super simple format, and does the job perfectly.
My blog (http://blog.stargrave.org/russian/) initially also used Git as a storage, where each commit is a post, and its log message is the content itself. If I add gitweb/cgit, when it will also feature web interface and Atom feed automatically. Later I added my own rendering engine to it: http://www.sgblog.stargrave.org/ for efficiency and automatic transparent gopher/gemini protocols support. Each post also can have some dynamic tags/topics attached, that are stored in git's notes branch. And later I also added ability to leave comments, by sending email message, that is committed in another git-note branch in the form of recfile (https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/) plain-text comment. Everything is plain text, can be used with Git solely, but has an engine for better rendering and wider protocols support.
Definitely not decentralized, also don't tweet anything NSFW because Github will ban your account without hesitation, removing all issues you created, even for projects you don't own. Source: happened to me because I had an "NSFW" Github page that displayed randomly generated Imgur pictures.
That's why you need to split "list of all people" (necessarily centralized for discovery) and actual storage (decentralized). Everyone can have their own repo anywhere as long as it's fetchable by git, and the creator of the tool can maintain a list of all repos branches
Data sharing has close to a quarter of a million forks.
This project would have to become an extremely popular experiment before it starts pushing that limit.
That said, I hope it does; this is a great and fun project.
It's basically a janky blog+RSS. Architecturally, it's as if there were a simple/standard web/blogserver software that could be hosted freely. The key here is exploiting the standardization of Git and availability of free public Git hosting.
Done properly, one could create some packaged blog(+RSS reader) container, but the free hosting support isn't there. You could use GCP free instances, but setting up a domain name+TLS is a barrier, even for some technical folks.
The idea is neat, definitely a hack in the traditional sense.
Twitter does not have a technology problem - the prototype was famously put together with Ruby-on-Rails in a weekend. Most of the effort comes after that, with moderation and legal compliance. There is really no better reality check for those who delude themselves into writing a clone than this:
You can host your own Git repository or Git commit on multiple Git repositories. When I started with Git, I just self-hosted. I only went to Bitbucket for search and the web interface.
Is Twitter going away? What did I miss? I know a lot of folks are taking Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter as a “the sky is falling” moment, but can we please have a reality check here?
As a business Twitter was bloated and has stagnated over the past few years. I’m taking an optimistic view of where Twitter may go as a product/service.
Take a deep breath folks. We don’t need a half assed Twitter replacement.
Speaking as a person who has been generally well-disposed towards Elon Musk and like him also would describe myself as a left-leaning, centrist, free-speech absolutist, I think his behavior has been erratic lately. Perhaps his behavior has always been erratic, but it just never affected me personally.
Speaking as a resident of a country neighboring Russia, his amateur diplomacy from a few weeks ago does affect me, and in my view was literally dangerous. He pontificated from a place of profound ignorance at best and continued to double down even in the face of very smart domain experts and ordinary Ukrainians asking him - begging him - to please zip it. Then he acted aggrieved and hurt when his "peace proposal" was not received well.
I'm not sure what is being accomplished by the latest Twitter shenanigans, but I'm seeing the same behavior of his ignoring domain experts. For instance, moderation is a difficult social and technical problem irrespective of political view. Advertisers are not renewing their contracts with Twitter, not because of Musk's political views, but because they did not have confidence that their brands would not be tainted by association with unmoderated nastiness. Again, Musk attributed this to left-wing activists and not his own inability to reassure his business associates. He framed it as a free-speech issue when it is absolutely not. Then he threatened to "name and shame" the advertisers who declined to renew. He fired the domain experts who understand moderation, and so the institutional knowledge about it - arguably, what he bought when he bought Twitter - is gone, never to return.
So, I don't think Twitter will recover from that. Perhaps if I had not experienced his amateur diplomacy directly, I would just continue to think of Musk as a fellow who is very good at business and is possibly playing multi-dimensional chess. But I cannot unlearn what I have learned. His personal brand is permanently tarnished, for me.
Why on earth would you like Elon Musk? He's just selfish and only looks out for himself and himself only. I fail to understand why you or anybody would like someone such as this.
Twitter as an announcement platform offers nothing approaching USD $40b in value. Other governments and organisations could follow the example of the EU and establish a Mastodon server.
Twitter as another "social media" cluster of coitus never really had a clear value proposition apart from 90% of its revenue coming from advertising.
As such, it is just another advertising delivery system.
I doubt he'll ever make his money back, but does that mean twitter will cease to exist? I don't think so. I think the rich buy media for the influence, not profit. Obviously he severely overpaid, but owning twitter still gives him influence. And it's not like twitter is loaded with assets; liquidating the company won't get his money back.
Or worse, look at all the different things being recommended instead of Twitter - this, Mastodon, etc. Everyone will end up at different places, then end back at Twitter anyways. Old relatives and tech disliking spouses will never use this or Mastodon. Too much work, too confusing.
At first I was thinking what sort of self-destructive person would do that, and then I realized he saddled Twitter with $1B in debt payments and foisting this onto other investors, and I realized that Elon was exactly the kind of vindictive person who would do that, given that he was pretty much cornered into buying Twitter in the first place. I'm sure the boat is being put on fire and made to sink. When they declare bankruptcy and file Chapter 11 to resolve their $1B in payments then you know that's what this was all about. I can do without Twitter, so it doesn't bother me. Let the billionaires have their space-age pissing contests.
Unfortunately I think your last sentence is right on target. I think the world is headed straight towards a neo-techno feudalism where individuals seeking any form of protection will need to pledge their fealty to some big corporation feudal lord.
Very clever. I would be concerned however that GitHub may shut you down at some point and if this got serious it would have to be running on federated git servers and then you would need a secure synchronization protocol Etc pretty soon you're looking at Matrix
A few months ago I started playing with using Matrix as a janky social media replacement. The idea was to setup a space with rooms that I post in. One room might be a public, unencrypted room that anyone can read (ala Twitter/Mastadon/etc), and another might be just for close friends, etc. Then, I just post to them like you would on any other platform.
It's great because it's the only platform like this where you have the ability to encrypt if you want to, but it is of course missing some features. The biggest being the ability to share posts and have a meta feed. There are also smaller annoyances that would not scale well, such as the fact that people cannot make personal room name aliases.
For development I would just recommend github issues with comments. Way more user friendly. Also separate identities, perhaps even different server. No need to get main account compromised, or to get banned from Github for spicy comments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)
Finger communities/hosting:
https://finger.farm/
https://happynetbox.com/
https://plan.cat/ (thank you gbrown for reminding me of this)
browsers that support finger (in addition to other protocols such as Gopher and Gemini):
https://kristall.random-projects.net/
https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/