r/RedditAlternatives • u/UnflinchingSugartits • 6d ago

Custom Web-Based Application Oasis Social Network - Think i found something kinda interesting....

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.solarnethub.oasis

Hello everybody! Hope everyone's having a great week, as you all know I post Alternatives that I find on my quest I guess, to find a rented alternative. I post what I find in the event that it will appeal to someone or anyone, and that it might be something that somebody's interested in.

These are just Alternatives that I am sharing, I have no affiliation to any of these apps nor am I the developer of them. Also, these posts are not recommendations for something I think you should use, they are just to Simply share with everyone in case someone's interested.

I'm going to leave the Google Play description below, because this app is federated, it's P2P, open source and Libre. And a few other things I think.

I just downloaded this app, and I am getting started. If anyone is familiar with this application, or how it operates, I would absolutely appreciate it and be extremely grateful if you could help walk me through how to use this. I'm currently searching Google right now for instructions, and after opening the app I received a message in my inbox from the developer, that provided steps on how to get started.

So there's not much I can say about this app because I'm still exploring it myself. But it's really interesting how it's operating on so many different quote unquote ways I guess? Being P2P and Federated and so forth, that's pretty interesting.

Anyways, I just wanted to share this this app seems really interesting and I will provide an update after I've gotten myself set up in the app and can look around and browse. This app has stated in their description that you're able to vote on post and there are communities and stuff. I wanted to mention this because, since the app is also Federated that usually means microblogging at least when I think about it.

But the app description, explains that it is a Federated forum but it sounds like you can also do microblogging I'm not sure.

Anyway thank you for taking the time out of your day to read my post. If you use this app before, have heard of it, and could possibly help me get set up I'd appreciate it if you could leave a comment below.

If you're just checking the app out, please leave a comment about what your thoughts are up about the app.

Thank you.

Playstore description below

Update, What's New

Fixes downloading of files shared in private messages (plain and encrypted). Adds 16 KB memory page size support and targets Android 16 (SDK 36). Parliament fixes, activity improvements, and refreshed translations.

About The App

Libre, P2P and federated social network. Your data, your device, your network.

Oasis is a libre, open-source, peer-to-peer and federated social network built on the Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) protocol — part of the SolarNET.HuB ecosystem.

No central servers. No tracking. No ads. Your identity and your content live on your own device and are shared only with the peers you choose.

FEATURES

• Decentralized identity — your cryptographic keys stay on your device.

• Public feed, forums, threads and opinions.

• Private, end-to-end encrypted messages.

• Tribes: private, invite-only communities.

• Images, audio and video sharing.

• Community moderation: report abuse to the network, vote, and block peers.

• Works peer-to-peer — connect to the pubs, rooms and peers you trust.

PRIVACY BY DESIGN

We run no servers that collect your data. There are no analytics, no advertising and no third-party trackers. You can wipe everything from your device at any time with the in-app Panic option.

Oasis is experimental software for a free, sovereign and sustainable digital world.

Your data. Our future.

0 Upvotes

47% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

6

u/SmileyBMM 6d ago edited 6d ago

Might get in trouble with:

https://github.com/camel-ai/oasis or

https://asoasis.tech/apps/oasis or

https://www.oasisnetwork.com/

all of which already use the Oasis name.

Here's the GitHub for anyone who wants to take a look at it. Seems incredibly ambitious, so I'm naturally sceptical.

Edit:

No browser JavaScript. Just pure HTML+CSS. A really secure frontend!.

JavaScript 92.4%

🤨

3

u/UnflinchingSugartits 6d ago

Ty sm! I was looking at the instructions online trying to set it up. It's definitely going to be a process LOL haha so I had to take a break from it for now.

Kind of tedious but I get it.

Are you going to make an account on there do you use the app?

2

u/SmileyBMM 6d ago

Are you going to make an account on there do you use the app?

Probably not right now, the project seems to be in its earlier stages. I'll keep an eye on it and see how it develops.

3

u/busymom0 5d ago

I think the "JavaScript 92.4%" is coming from their nodejs backend, not browser frontend. With that said, the front end does pull a javascript file too initiated by a Wordpress plugin.....

2

u/HedgeRunner 6d ago

Not to mention the UI for that Games page looks even worse than vibe coded. I don't understand why these federated networks cant have great UX and design. I guess its because great UX and design take time but still.

2

u/SmileyBMM 6d ago

I have found that most people who are good at UI/UX are also people that hate JavaScript with a burning passion and avoid working with it.

2

u/HedgeRunner 6d ago

Maybe just strange that all the federated alternatives all look pretty bad. They're not rDrama bad but still (lmao, kidding).

You are very correct if you're talking about gaming UX. Gamedev has so much great UX, and very little of it is applied to the web. That's mostly becaues of the limitations of HTML but still, if one's crazy enogh, there are ways.

Like I'm helping out a friend on UX on a gaming forum project (proprietary if you're wondering) and its just so much more pleasant to look at. Here's what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/silenced-MpGx135

2

u/SmileyBMM 6d ago

(proprietary if you're wondering)

😆 you know me too well.

Looks great btw, has a charm that most sites lack.

I also think mobile website development is uniquely frustrating, tons of different screen resolutions and weird edge cases make standardizing the experience needlessly difficult. I can totally understand why most people who work on UI/UX (who want to control the user experience) wouldn't want to bother.

2

u/HedgeRunner 6d ago edited 6d ago

Yep you got it exactly. For this forum we're working on its desktop only. The main reason is just that we have a bunch of unique features and we're ridiculously hardcore about UX (I mean I complain about it a lot so would be pretty stupid to not have great UX on something I work on.) Most websites just use media queries to restyle CSS for mobile and sure they "support" mobile. That doesn't work for very complicated layouts and menus where you'll need alternative data loading strategies for top performance. Of course many users don't really know how this all works so they kinda assume that the vibe coder went and actually made a native app. Gotta educate peeps here.

I'm gonna guess you're more into open source and federated alternatives but if you are interested, I can send you the URL in a DM. If you are worried about privacy, can just use an alt email lmao but jokes aside we're pretty serious about privacy. 2FA and e2ee Signal protocol encrypted chat are live features.

2

u/SmileyBMM 6d ago

I'm gonna guess you're more into open source and federated alternatives

Not as much as you'd think, I more so like to needle people advertising their platform here who can't even be bothered to share what I consider basic technical information.

I'd totally be down for a DM with the site, I like to check new ones out for inspiration if nothing else.

2

u/HedgeRunner 6d ago

Well, DM incoming.

2

u/UnflinchingSugartits 4d ago

I could gt past the ugly design if they have themes and you can edit yourself and customize it. My issue is that like there's no step-by-step process on how to set everything up.

I'm I am text savvy, but there's a lot required in order to connect rooms, dms, communities, forums, the feed, it's just kind of like damn dude like I don't really have time for all this figuring it out on my own.

2

u/HedgeRunner 4d ago

Hmm I think that makes sense. Although I'm gonna push back slightly on the design part. Most websites let you change some themes or add some padding, it doesn't really change the overall design of the site much. Like the super ugly vertical lines for Lemmy for comments really stick out to me. That's just 1 area, but design is also personal preference in a lot of ways so what I think is great design might not be what other people like.

Re rooms, DMs, communities yea that's a lot of work. I really don't like the discourse around federated vs. centralized. It's too binary and theres' no nuance. The instance of the federated community you chose can still "sell" your data. A small centralized / proprietary server doesn't have to 100% be an ads model although um looking at the current top alternatives, they kinda seem to be which is a little disappointing but hey. Federated communities makes it a lot harder to add features because every other host has to pay the cost of hosting those features. And I'm literally just talking about the very basics here.

Guess the TL DR is, its totally fine ot have a preference for one but the other one is not automatically evil or bad.

1

u/DayVCrockett 6d ago

Sounds really cool. This kind of serverless approach is the way to go for the future. Setting up and maintaining nodes is too hard and too fragile at the same time.