Federation and TiddlyServer

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Arlen Beiler

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Jun 29, 2017, 10:56:44 PM6/29/17
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I haven't done anything with Federation, but I am curious if there is anyway TiddlyServer can help with that or if it is entirely based on single file TiddlyWikis loaded in the browser (or the rendered "single file" TiddlyWiki served by the node server and TiddlyServer)?

Thanks,
-Arlen

Jed Carty

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Jun 30, 2017, 3:19:37 AM6/30/17
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What currently exists is almost entirely based on the single file version. Last year Jeremy made the start of what we would need to extend it to use the node version and I am working on some supporting things for my robot that will hopefully help with federation.

Jeremy Ruston

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Jun 30, 2017, 3:57:12 AM6/30/17
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Hi Arlen

The primitive operation underlying federation is the ability to pull in tiddlers from an external wiki, potentially with the ability to transform them as they are imported (eg, to add a title prefix or a tag).

Jed’s work supports standalone wikis to fetch content from other standalone wikis (with some restrictions on matching http vs. https). Rather than using a straightforward xmlhttprequest, it avoids CORS issues by using a mechanism first developed for the implementation of the plugin library: the remote wiki is loaded into an iframe and then window.postMessage() is used to request and extract tiddlers from it.

Earlier this year, I added the “fetch” command which allows Node.js wikis to fetch content from standalone wikis:


The piece that is still missing is support for Node.js wikis to fetch content from other Node.js wikis using the API rather than retrieving the entire html file. (Jed’s robot work might yield a useful start for this).

I’m also now interested in an implementation of federation based on the peer-to-peer Beaker Browser (https://beakerbrowser.com). It would allow us to build a community of intertwingled, sovereign wikis without any centralised hosting.

So, I think we already have sufficient primitives for experimentation with federation. The challenge has been figuring out a compelling use case and then building a usable user interface on top of it. We started by exploring recreating a conventional threaded discussion forum. The logic was to try to prove that the federation model was sufficiently rich to subsume existing collaboration tools. In practice, common feedback was to be puzzled why we were excited about an inferior copy of something that already exists.

Best wishes

Jeremy

On 30 Jun 2017, at 08:19, Jed Carty <inmy...@gmail.com> wrote:

What currently exists is almost entirely based on the single file version. Last year Jeremy made the start of what we would need to extend it to use the node version and I am working on some supporting things for my robot that will hopefully help with federation.

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Danielo Rodríguez

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Jun 30, 2017, 5:47:35 AM6/30/17
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I really think that a mesh network is the best way to go. The beakerbrowser seems like a good thing for regular users that want to contribute. Something that will help a lot too will be to create a tiddlywiki distribution that can act as a node of such mesh on a headless server. This will allow lot of raspberrypi enthusiast to participate in such mesh. In my case, I have a couple of single board computers running, I would love to contribute spawning a daemon on any of them.

Regards 

Stephen Wilson

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Jun 30, 2017, 6:35:58 AM6/30/17
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'intertwingled'

Good word!

Lost Admin

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Jun 30, 2017, 9:04:26 AM6/30/17
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If I could find really cheap raspberrypi hosting I might be one of them. Although i may not count as a true "enthusiast". I only have 2.

Mat

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Jun 30, 2017, 9:34:37 AM6/30/17
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Jeremy Ruston wrote:
The piece that is still missing is support for Node.js wikis to fetch content from other Node.js wikis using the API rather than retrieving the entire html file. (Jed’s robot work might yield a useful start for this).


Isn't a missing - but implementable piece - also for single file TWs to be able to fetch individual .tid tiddlers from node.js wikis?

...or, are perhaps nodejs wikis really also one file at the stage when tiddlers are fetchable?

@Arlen, that might be something TiddlyServer could otherwise enable; i.e if single tiddlers are served then they should be fetchable, I think.

(...I also cannot let go of the thought that much more ought to be possible with iframes when we're in control of designing the server side and how it behaves. I want to be able to at least click on a tiddler link in a served tiddler and have it open that tiddler in my local TW...)

...

Further, Jeremy wrote:

So, I think we already have sufficient primitives for experimentation with federation. The challenge has been figuring out a compelling use case and then building a usable user interface on top of it. We started by exploring recreating a conventional threaded discussion forum. The logic was to try to prove that the federation model was sufficiently rich to subsume existing collaboration tools. In practice, common feedback was to be puzzled why we were excited about an inferior copy of something that already exists.

It was also not very 'touted'. Jed (and I) intentionally didn't want many participants because of its early dev stage and its obvious scalability problems.

However, IMO the perfect use case should be a community "plugin store".


<:-)

@TiddlyTweeter

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Jun 30, 2017, 2:17:28 PM6/30/17
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Ciao tutti


Mat wrote:
 IMO the perfect use case should be a community "plugin store".

I strongly agree. One of TW's great strength lays in customisation and anything that can deliver easily accessible aggregation to ease the process of customisation would be a major plus.

I also think there is a role for extending this process to include Curated Bundles (PMario still has The Bundler at early stages, but its more than suggestive already) which can effectively deliver an entire application setup.

Best wishes
Josiah
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