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Unfortunately the AGPL licensing basically guarantees no other social network will be able to integrate with this one using the stock libraries. Which is a sham
by striking 11y ago
Unfortunately the AGPL licensing basically guarantees no other social network will be able to integrate with this one using the stock libraries. Which is a shame.
It seems like a cool idea for a project, certainly, but it's more of a tech demo than a social network because it doesn't have users yet.
I am trying it now, though. And I'll edit this post (or reply to it) with my findings.
EDIT 1: Requires a password instead of public key auth. Will someone get it right, ever?
EDIT 2: And as quickly as it began, it ends. There's no one for me to talk to, really. There are some post lists (the Comics community is actually the biggest, to which pr0n is second) and those are somewhat interesting (except for the fact that all the comics are in French except for CommitStrip, which is ordinarily in French but has an English translation).
The News tab is filled with Buzzfeed-esque articles, rather than being prepopulated with something sensible like Slashdot or HN or Science News (know your audience!).
Looking at most of the public profiles, if they've posted anything to their feeds, it'll be something like "test" and it'll have been posted in April of this year (so it's not worth sending them a contact request in all likelihood).
EDIT 3: I made first contact with a user named "Jake", in a mailing thread. And I got one message back from him. And that seems to be the end of that.
And the end of this.
I hope that a reader could see that I really, really tried to make it work, short of inviting my friends to use it (we already have communication platforms, I'm definitely not going to be able to convince them :)
Too bad.
EDIT 4: Jake and I are having a conversation in chat, actually. We can agree that the design work is impeccable, and that a lot of the details behind the network are charming. He notes, however, that these new platforms "don't put enough effort into community engagement".
EDIT 5 (last): I had a genuinely human experience on a "distributed social network". It's possible if you try hard enough, you just have to power through all of the hurdles. With some algorithmic optimization I'm sure this project could live to see mainstream use. If anyone else is up for a conversation about this, I'm striking@movim.eu.
- davexunit 11y agoThe AGPL is a feature, not a bug.
- striking 11y agoI did not call it a bug, and I'm not disagreeing with its use. I made an observation about it. Why do you believe this, though? Would a BSD/MIT/X11 (even LGPL) license not be more appropriate?
- davexunit 11y agoLax licenses, and even the regular GPL, do not legally entitle users of a web application to the corresponding source code. The AGPL does with its copyleft-over-network "Affero" clause. If you don't think copyleft is important, or think that it's OK to permit proprietary derivative works, then the AGPL will seem like a poor license choice. I am extremely pro-copyleft, especially for applications (vs. libraries), and think the AGPL is great and fits a very important legal use-case.
- striking 11y agoWhat if the license were just an entitlement to your personal data? That you could take it back and share it only according to your terms rather than those of the server operators? I think the AGPL works very well for applications that employ it. I simply think that perhaps this one shouldn't. Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions, it should just work better or have more value than a non-free version.
- simoncion 11y agoNot infrequently, one's data is less than useful without the software that manipulates it.
- davexunit 11y ago>Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions That's a real sneaky way to describe copyright infringement.
- JesperRavn 11y ago
- tacone 11y agoThe AGPL choice puts them in the very same field of play of the (now dead?) status.net/identi.ca. Was it a good choice? I'd say not.
- MadcapJake 11y agoHey! I'm 'Jake'! Not sure why it won't use the nickname field I entered. I'm MadcapJake@lightwitch.org (they need to add this to the profile or config or something, I had to go back to check my email to remember where I signed up)