React on Rails HN RSC Demo

ineptech 4d ago

Errant thought - I kind of hope that the actual social network for developers of the not so distant future looks more like a bunch of us separately building bespoke applications to serve files to each other.

> Dave: "Bot, add a folder to my personal data store with the pictures I took this weekend and share it with everyone in my poker group"

> Sally: "I see that I've gotten an email from Dave with a magic link conveying access to something. Bot, use this link to negotiate a key exchange with whatever weird app Dave cobbled together (ask his bot if you need help) and then log into my VPS and add a tab to my personal webapp to display the content he has shared."

That might be overly optimistic, but it doesn't feel that far off. It's kind of what Tim Berners-Lee build https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_project for right?

flexagoon 4d ago

Isn't that just called hosting a website?.. You can just give an agent access to your server and let them do all that, no?

There are also places like https://tilde.town/ if you want something more social media–esque

ineptech 4d ago

Think of it this way - why didn't we all just replace Facebook with "host files on our personal sites and give each other access to them" ten years ago? Because we'd have to store passwords, identify each other past spoofed emails, figure out when/how to trust friends of friends, etc. In practice that means everyone adopting the same protocol, which is a chicken-and-egg problem.

That hasn't changed, but what has changed is that reading docs and writing the glue code is effectively free. The main problem with something like Solid is, if it takes even an hour to figure out how to get it going, I am effectively assigning my friends an hour of homework to be able to network with me. That's no longer true. If you like the Fediverse and I like Solid and Dave uses Nostr and Sally is stuck with some proprietary thing that came with her NAS, we can all build a network without any of us switching to, or even learning much about, each other's platforms.

raggi 4d ago

It’s actually changed for the worse. Now everyone wants their slop to be the winning protocol, so the competing standards problem has become far broader

ineptech 3d ago

I think that a million people asking Claude to build something is going to tend to converge on one protocol, not diverge. But the point is, I don't think it matters that much if they diverge. The whole idea of a standardization is predicated on the assumption that bespoke software is expensive, and that is now not always true.

joshspankit 2d ago

I wouldn’t have agreed before I learned software more deeply, now I especially agree in the age of better and better AI.

Put simply there are solutions that are elegant and irreducibly correct. I think we got away from this because software expertise got so fragmented by frameworks and packages but AI can cut through all of that.

rustyhancock 4d ago

I applied for a tilde account some years ago and never even heard back from the vetting process.

I suppose I can't say I don't want to be part of it without sounding like sour grapes.

But if you don't like me you can join them and benefit from them keeping riff-raff like me out!

voidfunc 4d ago

Just need to dust off the finger protocol.

mgdm 3d ago

About that: https://dotplan.space/about

whalabi 4d ago

I have plans to make something that is eerily similar to what you described at the start.

One other aspect I was thinking of was limiting sharing to friends of friends only so it's more a community than a toxic clusterf

soulofmischief 4d ago

I thought this is why we established standards. I truly hope the LLM singularity brings further adherence to existing standards and doesn't lead to an explosion in protocols and formats. That sounds like a nightmare! :)

layer8 4d ago

I like that it’s email-based.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4d ago

https://dev-null.sh/sitemaps/users-1.xml

https://dev-null.sh/sitemaps/commits-1.xml

notpsychopath 4d ago

Maybe I'm blind, but what's the issue here? Users (that are GitHub usernames by the way) and commits (posts) are public. This is not a security concern whatsoever.

willio58 4d ago

You’re not blind. I also only see public data here in the sitemap. From an seo perspective I don’t think this is necessary with a social network but I don’t see any issues of substance with it.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4d ago

https://x.com/sitemap.xml (listed in robots.txt but doesn't work for me)

https://www.facebook.com/robots.txt (186 sitemap files listed, none are accessible to me)

Perhaps these require an "acceptable browser" and/or an account

Why sitemap URLs. Because I'm a sitemaps user; I use sitemap files every day

The /dev/null ones seem to be easily accessible. Unlike some other "social networks"

anavid7 4d ago

wow, very secure..

talon8635 4d ago

lol, outstanding

SwellJoe 4d ago

Mastodon is where I find the most (I hesitate to use this word) real nerds. The folks in it for the love of the game, not because it pays well or because they're chasing the latest trends. Nearly everyone I admire in tech is there, and very few of the people I think little of are.

Zambyte 4d ago

My pleroma instance (alternative AP server) collapsed on itself, running out of storage mid upgrade, about two years ago. I didn't have the bandwidth to allocate to getting it back up and running, as I didn't have backups, and it wasn't an easy fix.Last weekend I pointed my (fully local!) agent at it, and it was able to get it back up and running.

Now that I have it up and running, my feed is entirely people just hating on LLMs. I have a hard time finding technical content that I enjoy on there these days.

SwellJoe 4d ago

That's true, and it is a rift in the fediverse...some very anti-LLM voices are quite loud there. But, there are people there with a nuanced view of them, as well.

And, I would rather talk to an AI Luddite that's extraordinarily technically competent without AI assistance than someone who vibe-coded a startup with no idea how it works, and the former is far more common on the fediverse than the latter. I think it's unfortunate there's such a strong emotional component to talking about LLMs, as it's the most interesting technical innovation since the internet, but I understand it and I'm sympathetic to it (the AI companies have done a good job giving people reasons to hate and/or fear them).

Zambyte 4d ago

Of course, I am happy to listen to people who feel strongly against AI as well, and being pro-AI is by no means a signal that someone will have anything interesting to say. My gripe with it is that AI hate seems to be a massive portion of what people (I see) talk about on there. I would love to see people talk about non- technical things, or technical things that don't involve AI, or things that do involve AI.

It's likely just my bubble on there, but man it's relentless. I don't want to just hear everything about what you hate. I want to hear what you love!

ambigious7777 4d ago

I think it might just be the space in general, I've found my feed to be very full of anti-AI content too despite not seeking it out.

Karrot_Kream 4d ago

I found success in starting our from an LLM positive poster and fanning out from their follows and building a follower graph. From there I fetch a few hundred of their posts and used an LLM to classify the posts as negative, mixed, or positive. I used this to winnow a set of follows. For now I just poll and generate a timeline HTML. This has yielded decent results.

But the problem with all of these Twitter clones is the political schism of Musk's acquisition has largely polarized the offshoots. You aren't just on alt-Twitter, you're on a specific polarized chunk of it.

Zambyte 4d ago

I spend a lot more time on ATproto than on ActivityPub these days, amd yeah I agree with that. I find I prefer ATproto for non-technical content, and just don't really use microblogging for technology content anymore.

cowlevel 4d ago

You have to purge old non-local content cached on your server or it just fills up your disk over time. You can do it directly in the SQL database or there's a maintenance script that does it.

Zambyte 3d ago

Thanks, I definitely need to set this up to run periodically :)

matheusmoreira 4d ago

Which mastodon instance would you recommend?

SwellJoe 4d ago

I'm on mas.to, which is, I believe, the second largest after mastodon.social. I picked it because it's got the shortest URL, but it has been quietly reliable and up to date. Its moderation and defederation policies are stricter than some might like.

I follow many people who use infosec.exchange and hachyderm.io and they seem to be nerd-oriented instances. But it doesn't matter all that much, since you can follow and interact across the whole federation. I'd say just pick one that's reasonably large and old enough to have proven it is run by people who know how to run a reliable service and are in it for the long haul. It's possible to move to a new instance with only a little inconvenience, so don't agonize too much over it.

krapp 4d ago

You can also get a personal hosted instance (I use masto.host) to serve as an identity instance pretty cheap, but you have to be careful about keeping track of media usage, avoid posting images and use relays sparingly.

Before that I just had an account on multiple (mostly gamedev) instances.

Mastodon has its issues but one benefit of decentralization is you don't really have to commit to anything.

cowlevel 4d ago

Good point. With the centralised internet maybe we've become too accustomed to having a single identity for everything. On the old internet you had a different, unconnected account on every forum, and we liked it that way.

krapp 4d ago

I don't think anyone liked that necessarily, not having to deal with multiple logins is one reason decentralized social media and social logins took off.

Having identities tied to a domain and an instance is one of the biggest flaws with the fediverse IMO.

I'd much prefer something like Solid or Nostr where your identity is owned by you and described by a single file. Maybe involving PGP keys or some kind of cryptographic hash, although that might be too much of a barrier to be viable. It's a hard problem and the way the fediverse handles it is awkward at best.

matheusmoreira 4d ago

> Its moderation and defederation policies are stricter than some might like.

That sucks. I'm not exactly looking forward to joining another community with "strict" moderation.

Every mastodon instance I look up seems to be like this... Guess I'm stuck on X.

SwellJoe 4d ago

Every instance has their own moderation and defederation policies.

And, you might like to look into what that actually means. In the case of mas.to, the controversial decisions include defederation of instances that have a history of bigotry, usually anti-trans bigotry (the kind of bigotry lots of mainstream social sites allow and even protect).

Defederation is a large hammer, so some folks think mas.to is too strict. But, I personally prefer no slurs or child porn in my feed (adults posting nudes of themselves with a content warning is fine, both by my reckoning and the policy of mas.to), so I've never had reason to complain, nor have I ever had an interaction with moderators.

X is far more censorious than Mastodon of the kinds of free speech that are actually politically meaningful, so I'm surprised you call it out specifically as your free speech safe space. But, if you mean the same thing Musk means when you say "free speech", the right to punch down with impunity, perhaps X is the right place. Punching down is exactly the kind of thing that gets you banned on many Mastodon instances. It is a place that is by and large extremely intolerant of intolerance, but accepting of most everything else.

matheusmoreira 4d ago

Don't think I could punch down on anyone even if I wanted to. I just don't fit in with the "intolerant of intolerance" folks.

Haven't seen anyone get censored on X without a court order yet, but I haven't been there that long. Who knows.

cowlevel 4d ago

HN has strict moderation, so does email.

matheusmoreira 4d ago

I've been on HN for just over ten years now and have never been banned despite participating in all sorts of controversial discussions. HN is actually a pretty good free speech benchmark.

baron3dl 4d ago

the game.

ajjenkins 5d ago

It would be nice if the website had more information about the platform before you create an account.

mnapoli 5d ago

Fixed! Check out the website it shows content now, no landing page anymore

ajjenkins 4d ago

Much better now, thanks!

I would describe the website as “twitter for developers and uses your GitHub account for auth”. It’s a simple concept, but I think using your GitHub account to sign in is a great idea and a meaningful differentiator. Good luck!

herbst 4d ago

GitHub? You mean that complete, usually offliney, mess Microsoft dig a grave for? Not sure if that's a good idea in 2026

TZubiri 4d ago

"twitter for developers and uses your GitHub account for auth"

No good developer would introduce such a security risk for novelty.

ersind 5d ago

This was done only in two days, there are important pages missing.

embedding-shape 5d ago

> This was done only in two days

So not at all ready to be seen? Maybe we should all flag this so it can re-appear once someone spent at least a bit of time on making it proper and ready for public consumption?

mystifyingpoi 5d ago

Does this excuse the main page missing any information what this thing even is? Come on.

JdeBP 4d ago

Thank you, but no. I'll stick with /dev/tty0 . It's federated.

createful 4d ago

If it's called /dev/null... shouldn't all your responses be sent nowhere? Shouldn't it be a blank page? ;)

garciasn 4d ago

Based on what I read, it was effectively that; just like all social networks.

methodical 4d ago

Social media site for devs getting hug-of-death'd by HN... the irony!

RonanSoleste 4d ago

If only we had wel developed solutions for that ;)

Joel_Mckay 4d ago

There are, but most people don't understand channels or why the OTP is suited for this type of use-case. =3

https://www.phoenixframework.org/

https://phoenix.hexdocs.pm/channels.html

probably_wrong 5d ago

I have a petty complaint: if you name your social network after a core Unix concept, then why make your users login exclusively through a Microsoft subsidiary?

pitched 5d ago

GitHub is a social network already. You’re logging into one social network with another social network. And I’m complaining about that fact on a different social network. What has the world come to?

ASalazarMX 5d ago

DM me and subscribe if you want an explanation.

croes 4d ago

Why do want your access to one social network be dependent on your access ti another social network?

Didn’t enough account bans happen to see that’s a bad idea?

retromagik 5d ago

Based on the branding, I think their target demographic assumes the dev in /dev/null is short for "Developers"

ASalazarMX 5d ago

It's a cute name, but considering how combative developers can be about naming, I think it should have been more clever than cute.

If 'dev' is developer, 'null' makes me think it's for worthless developers, or for things that developers don't care about.

bee_rider 4d ago

Well it is a social media site, isn’t that where everybody puts the things they don’t care about?

joshuat 5d ago

dev = developer

bin = trash

cowlevel 4d ago

etc = etceteria, a small island kingdom in OSRS.

lib = dumb politics go here

var = typo of car, automobiles go here

smnplk 4d ago

Lmao

stephenlf 5d ago

Is this a real question? If so, here’s a real answer:

GitHub is the single most widely adopted, developer-specific OIDC identity provider.

If it’s facetious, then WSL BABYYYYYY

mystifyingpoi 5d ago

Why does this need OIDC at all? Basic email + password account is like 1-2 prompts away.

ASalazarMX 5d ago

I guess at some point developers will have to prove they're serious developers by exposing their GitHub profile.

Edit: it's part of your profile already, better vibe code some random ideas to farm some GitHub dev credibility.

ranger_danger 5d ago

I don't think a github profile (or any specific activity therein) should be a prerequisite for being considered a 'serious developer'.

Terr_ 4d ago

Yeah, it strikes me as a very... Silicon-Valley-brained view of software development.

For example, I'm sure there's a scary-talented engineer working on fluid simulation algorithms for a major aerospace manufacturer, and they would be fired if their work-product ever left the corporate VPN. Meanwhile, their personal stuff is in a self-hosted solution.

ASalazarMX 5d ago

I am of the same idea. Requiring online, public repositories, specifically in GitHub, doesn't cover all developers. It covers many of them nowadays, so there's that.

funshed 4d ago

It's built on laravel, email/pass/2fa/forget is all built in. GitHub auth only was a choice.

hobofan 5d ago

Because effective anti-spam account measures are not 1-2 prompts away.

cowlevel 4d ago

What stops someone making GitHub spam accounts?

mahboi 4d ago

How about ssh public keys

funshed 4d ago

It uses your GitHub public keys to authenticate so you can post from the CLI.

bigwheels 5d ago

Maybe spam concerns, but your point remains valid.

saghm 5d ago

And having those passwords leaked is probably only another 1-2 prompts away

OtomotO 5d ago

Guess I am simply not invited to the party then.

Or I am not a developer after all.

Identity crisis intensifies

pitched 5d ago

The dev in /dev/null is device, not developer. So you’re not a device but you can still be a developer.

fatty_patty89 5d ago

>Is this a real question? If so, here’s a real answer:

>Let's all be willing docile salves

This is how you sound

pants2 5d ago

Nobody's forcing you to use that website

28304283409234 5d ago

And for developers. Only a tiny percentage of the devs I know actually know what /dev/null is.

iberator 4d ago

Good point.

What if Microsoft black listed me from GitHub forever? I'm also banned from Facebook for like decade

ranger_danger 5d ago

FWIW DOS and Windows both have a null concept too:

  C:\> TYPE file.txt >NUL
  C:\>

sandeepkd 5d ago

How does publicly published PGP based login sounds?

flanz_10 4d ago

> Everyone here signed in with GitHub.

ugh.

caaqil 5d ago

This is interesting: a. Developers on average are probably low on E trait in the Big Five b. Most users in the online developer communities (at least the ones who will be doing the "social" part, per the standard 1% rule of social platforms) loathe LinkedIn-style stuff, being asked to log in or provide PII. c. Most "social" services devs regularly use are for technical/utility stuff (GH, SO, subreddits) more than the social aspect.

If a, b and c are true, then this site is reinventing HN/proggit with forced GitHub login on top. NGMI.

deadbabe 5d ago

/tmp/social would have been better I think. dev = device, doesn’t make sense.

catoc 3d ago

Yeah, /dev is not ‘developer’. Next someone will come up with

/usr/social

assuming it’s ‘user’

hk1337 5d ago

I like it. I might steal that.

RonanSoleste 4d ago

Y.a.t.c (yet another twitter clone). Except for theming it brings nothing new to the social media space. I also dont think sending my tweets to a null device will do much for development. Ill put my bets on Bsky or Mastodon here.

MisterMunchkin 4d ago

It’s a good idea but twitter is the worst possible implementation of social media. You don’t get any sort of discussion, it’s just people slopping into the feed.

I want a better version of reddit.

netrem 4d ago

Reminds me of https://devrant.com/, which had a decent sized community cca 2018

++ was (is?) the icon to upvote

stephenlf 5d ago

I signed up for TextLog a few weeks ago. I love the text-only social network, but their European infra meant too much latency for my US-based browsing. Maybe this will scratch that itch!

sp4cec0wb0y 5d ago

Your posts have to be approved? Odd way to run a social network imo.

rafram 5d ago

Kind of makes sense for a small operation. Better that than miss something bad for eight hours because the admin (presumably singular) is sleeping.

funshed 4d ago

Uses AI, Jev or similar.

jrecyclebin 4d ago

Highly recommend going through the onboarding process and using it a bit. The git analogies and visual metaphors are a nice touch.

ktosobcy 4d ago

Seems to be down...

What does it use? masto or hand-crafted stuff?

measurablefunc 4d ago

I don't think you're getting the joke, the site is literally called /dev/null.

funshed 4d ago

Laravel Backend, TypeScript Frontend.

catoc 3d ago

/dev/null has the connotation that whatever you say will be completely ignored. If you need a pun, why not go for

/dev/mull, same wordplay, but now we get to mull over each other’s posts

hk1337 5d ago

> Failed to open page

I'm guessing that wasn't expected result.

davidcollantes 4d ago

Looks like every post is a commit that needs to be approved by someone (they show as “pending"). How can that scale?

notpsychopath 4d ago

Only the first post has to be approved by a moderator (for now), subsequent posts are automatically AI moderated and approved.

liminal-dev 4d ago

How is that financially sustainable?

rvz 5d ago

> No likes. No reposts. No algorithm. Everything else goes to /dev/null.

*Closes tab

aftbit 5d ago

Just skip the whole thing and send your thoughts straight to /dev/null

stephenlf 5d ago

Weird, especially because it DOES have likes.

mnapoli 5d ago

Yep our bad, we fixed this, no landing page anymore

zahlman 4d ago

It's a really bad look not to at least review this sort of thing before going live.

cowlevel 4d ago

It's the new era, baby. Nobody's going to be reviewing things. You just say "make me a social site for developers" and you have a social site for developers in just minutes!

wccrawford 5d ago

No, it has stars. /s

sigh Yeah, that's really a bad look for them to claim no likes and then have something that is functionally identical.

cyanydeez 5d ago

conceptually, just sounds like a place you go when you don't want anyone to hear, see or think about you.

brabel 5d ago

A dream developer experience.

antiloper 5d ago

> Computah... build me a social network in PHP. Import the user's profile from GitHub, they shouldn't have to fill anything in. No likes, reposts or algorithms. Add a catchy slogan at the home page. Make no mistakes!

jchonphoenix 4d ago

Wasn't this originally HN?

PaulKeeble 4d ago

As HN has gotten bigger its pulled in other communities and now its not very developer/hacker oriented anymore. Lobsters was the first push to have the deep software talk back and there will be more as HN caters to a different crowd nowadays.

layer8 4d ago

Not quite: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

ersind 5d ago

Looks good!

JaceComix 5d ago

Which part looks good? The <50 words or the YouTube video?

I'm not saying this isn't a good idea or that people don't want something like this but... There's nothing here?

sidrag22 5d ago

yep im confused, i see a handful of words that signals almost nothing other than there is potentially something behind the login gate. then an 8 hour video... im not just gonna jump into some random 8 hour video without any context, just as im not about to signup for something with no context for what it really is.

t1234s 5d ago

Why do all these guys have "Soy Face" when you take their pictures?

ASalazarMX 5d ago

TIL soy face is the 'unmasculine' version of pog face.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soy_face

lenerdenator 5d ago

Devs need to be around actual humans in-person more, not less.

ASalazarMX 5d ago

I have the right amount of humans in my life, I don't want more. Online is great for me, for this use case.

xyst 4d ago

Using GH as the only way to associate identity is a bit evil

nailer 5d ago

I can't see any of the content unless I sign in.

I don't know if I want to sign in, because I can't see any of the content.

satiric 5d ago

I'm thinking of it a different way. In order to join a social media network these days, I need to have some assurance that it's going to be worth my time. They didn't provide any, so screw 'em.

simonhamp 5d ago

it was supposed to be public. maybe it got reverted. the team were moving super fast

mnapoli 5d ago

yeah that's fixed

mnapoli 5d ago

That's fixed

bcourageous 4d ago

My favorite social network

simonhamp 5d ago

it's fully open source (https://github.com/nunomaduro/dev-null.sh/pulls) and received over 200 PRs in less than 48 hours

esaym 5d ago

I am always so floored when I see a new thing written all in PHP. I always got crap for using Perl most of my life.

piro0919 4d ago

Honestly, I don't think about it much when I ship things, but at the very least the landing page should explain clearly what it is.

muslimpeacepriz 5d ago

Shouldn't that domain be dev-null.social instead of 'shell'? Dorks.

TrueRider 4d ago

Horror, another platform without freedom of speech. And why should you if you already have Mastodon where you are protected by your instance?

thisisauserid 4d ago

symlinked in.

TheChelsUK 5d ago

Very good idea

nailer 5d ago

> follow people who write code, and commit plain text to a shared log.

Isn't that Twitter?

verdverm 5d ago

Twitter is gone, isn't it? X under Elon is not a place I will ever hang out

Discord is where more dev communities are moving to

drnick1 4d ago

> Discord is where more dev communities are moving to

Discord now requires age verification, so it is user-hostile and nobody should use it.

verdverm 4d ago

I have not been asked for any age verification yet, US based

nailer 4d ago

No, everyone is still there talking about programming. Your choice, but you’re missing out.

verdverm 4d ago

that's the thing, I do not think I'm missing out, HN is more than enough

I think the people who remain (on any big social) are missing out on IRL alternatives, if you get into it, you will find it is a much more rewarding way to spend your time.

/dev/null: social network for developers (dev-null.sh)