23 ms·

GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

373 points by striking 11y ago

markbao 11y ago
Neat product but the "familiar user interface" for a Quitter is literally a copy of Twitter. That's not a good look.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  It implements the 2010 version of twitter, for once being outdated isn't much a regression.
  - mxuribe 11y ago
    If you run/host your own network/instance - which is actually encouraged - you can design it pretty much however you wish.
DasIch 11y ago
Copying the design of Twitter and Facebook. What a great way to make a good first impression and to respect the copyright the GNU project cares so much about. I can't imagine a better way to show everyone just how amazing you are. The free software community must be truly happy to have such amazing supporters on their side.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  Do you understand that GNU got started by copying Unix? You can copy a product without violating copyright, although there have been several court cases on this topic.
  - DasIch 11y ago
    Of course you can copy the product as such, that's fine by me and I think even necessary. They've gone far beyond that here though, copying not just the product but significant parts of the design. The Quitter thing looks almost exactly like Twitter. If they'd copied the website of a bank like this, it would be considered phishing. This is well beyond copying an idea or a few design concepts.
    - calgoo 11y ago
      I thought they where just using bootstrap which was created by twitter. I'd say 50% of the web looks like twitter today... EDIT: OK, I take that back... After looking at some of these sites, some have really copied the design waaaay to much.
- zanny 11y ago
  You can implement ostatus however you like. It just so happens the most popular implementations are just clones of the Facebook / Twitter looks because they are familiar. There are more servers than just these, and most of them have unique UIs.
- mxuribe 11y ago
  Gnu social is an open platform, so as others have stated you can host your own. And, it allows you to customize the look and feel pretty much without limit; however you wish it to look. I can't explain exactly why the quitter network or the default Gnu social network look the way they do...but my guess would be for new user comfort; sort of to provide a familiar environment. But again, at the end of the day, because gnu social is open source, you can tweak your network to suit your needs.
Grishnakh 11y ago
Stuff like this is never going to work, because it suffers from the chicken-and-egg problem. Everyone (who cares about Twitter or something like it) uses Twitter because everyone else uses Twitter. You can make an account on Quitter or Diaspora or any other decentralized FLOSS network, but it'll be useless because all your non-nerd friends (and most of your nerd friends too) won't have accounts there, and will continue to use Twitter and Facebook because that's where all their contacts are. There's not really any way around this. The only thing that can happen is that something will somehow become so popular that everyone will just abandon the current service. This is what happened with MySpace: for whatever reasons, everyone moved over to Facebook, and abandoned MySpace, and now it's a dessicated husk that seems to become a place for bands to advertise and that's about it. This could potentially happen with either Facebook or Twitter, but I'm not holding my breath; the masses have shown over and over now that they're happy to chain themselves to highly centralized, proprietary products and services: FB, Twitter, the "app stores", not to mention all the proprietary software out there that intentionally and obviously uses nasty lock-in tactics.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  I would have felt the same way about MySpace. The reality is, alternatives can arise. Facebook won't last forever, and Twitter even less so (although one of my favorite attempted "Myspace killers" was a social network for karaoke singers)
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    Right, but look at history: MySpace died out (mostly), and was replaced, but by what? Facebook, another centralized, proprietary service. And then came Twitter, which was yet another centralized, proprietary service. When has an open, decentralized product or service ever supplanted a centralized, closed, proprietary one? Never, that I can think of. Linux never replaced Windows, not for the vast majority of users. It did become very popular for servers, but really it took over from proprietary UNIX there, and really created its own market because back in the early 90s there was no such thing as a webserver; the whole use-case is different with Linux on servers. So UNIX was never really entrenched in exactly the things that Linux servers are used for now. Then there's smartphones and embedded devices like that, but there again Linux really created its own market; before Linux, small devices generally didn't have enough power to run a heavyweight OS like Linux. Android (semi-open, uses Linux) came about pretty much simultaneously with the iPhone. So here again, there wasn't some single proprietary thing that was dominant and entrenched in a mature market. There's the Apache webserver, but here again, there was no big dominant proprietary player. LibreOffice hasn't had much success in supplanting MS Office. MySQL is very popular, but here again there was no dominant proprietary web database; MySQL created that market (though PostgreSQL has become a serious competitor to it, but it's also open). So in summary, the only time I've seen open, non-proprietary solutions win out is when the environment changed, frequently because of their presence and availability, making them the natural pick. I've never seen them beat out an entrenched dominant player in a mature market. So I definitely don't expect to see it happen with Facebook. What I could see happening is something coming up which uses a non-proprietary or decentralized system which creates a whole new market, rendering one of those things obsolete. I have no idea what that could be though, but then again 20 years ago I wouldn't have imagined that people would want to spend massive amounts of time on a "social network" sharing inane pictures and videos and making idiotic comments to each other about them.
rocky1138 11y ago
The https://quitter.se https://quitter.se anti-capitalist message didn't resonate with me, so I joined the https://gnusocial.no https://gnusocial.no federation. Much friendlier :)
- js8 11y ago
  I am not familiar with either, but I am curious why does "anti-capitalist message" matter so much? I thought the purpose is to build a messaging network that everybody can use. And even GNU founder can be considered anti-capitalist. I am asking because to me, to decide to join some (not political) community based on your own political opinion, is a good way to live in your own bubble. The real strength of the Internet is that we are exposed to contrarian positions, even at the expense of our comfort.
  - pekk 11y ago
    It is a federated messaging network. I don't see that it is any more subject to filter bubbles than Twitter is. Everyone chooses who they follow anyway. If you want to subscribe to feeds from people with politics opposite yours, you can do that.
    - js8 11y ago
      That was my point. The intro site may have "anti-capitalist" in it, but at the end of the day, it's up to users what they do with that network.
  - mikekchar 11y ago
    Before the horde descends, I thought I might respond to the suggestion that RMS is anti-capitalist. This comes up frequently and is a bit of a red herring. I won't try to speak for him (he can obviously do that well enough himself), however I think it is worth considering the free software movement in today's reality. Back when they only thing that described free software was the GNU manifesto, we still had the idea that writing software that enabled businesses was a good idea. It may be a consequence of free software that it will become difficult to charge money directly for software (as a product), but that shouldn't stop companies from making money. Especially now when we see how open source software is almost taken for granted, we can see that companies flourish, not die. It is true that you practically can not charge money for a compiler any more, but are we worse off? No. We have different and arguably better business models for that kind of software -- and we haven't given up capitalism at all. My tools are dramatically better than they were 30 years ago (when I first started in this business). The cost has also dropped to nearly zero. We have become efficient. It is true that the FSF considers software freedom a moral imperative. While it may be true that some kinds of software will be difficult to produce in this manner, we can see that there are several very large companies that thrive producing virtually every kind of software. Personally, I don't think there are many businesses that will be better off with our old software-as-a-product business models -- games being a probable exception. What we have now is better, more efficient, enabling for the general population -- and much better for businesses. I have a hard time seeing it from an "anti-capitalist" position. And, just from my personal perspective, I don't think RMS ever did either.
Gracana 11y ago
Is there a good way to publish to this at the same time as twitter, so I'm already established and can drop twitter when it dies?
- fcmeneg 11y ago
  Yes. In settings you can connect to your twitter account.
  - Gracana 11y ago
    Really! I will check it out and see how that works.
- reidrac 11y ago
  In my humble opinion, that's what ruined indenti.ca back in the day. If you're mirroring Twitter and losing the interactions you have in GNU Social, your account is just a bot and you're not really using the social network.
  - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    Which account is the bot?
  - st3v3r 11y ago
    Does someone have a client that can work with both? Because, lets face it, Twitter is the 800 lb gorilla in the room. Most people, if they want to try this out, would also like to maintain their activity on Twitter. Hopefully there would be some way that you can do both, and be alerted to messages and replies on both, and even have a unified timeline in one app. (And if you're not interested in maintaining presence on Twitter as well, that's great, I'm happy for you, but please don't reply just to say that. It's not interesting or contributing to the discussion in the least).
    - reidrac 11y ago
      My point was that mirroring Twitter on identi.ca made identi.ca worse. Lots of people were automatically posting their Twitter updates on identi.ca, but never replying or caring about the interactions they had there. Same with blogs RSS feeds being fed to identi.ca. I don't know where we are with multi-protocol clients. Back then I was using https://launchpad.net/gwibber https://launchpad.net/gwibber (before it was rewritten to use CouchDB and stopped working for me, I don't know what is its current status). I didn't post like that, I had two accounts and used both; until I got bored of bots on identi.ca and, in practice, I was only using Twitter. EDIT: changed Gwibber link to launchpad as the .com doesn't seem to be maintained.
dcw303 11y ago
I don't get it. I went to gnusocial.no to join, and there's no link to sign up. I eventually found a register link off the help page (not visible on mobile for some reason), and I just get a messsage "Sorry, only invited people can register". Do they want people to join this or not?
- tagrun 11y ago
  You can't expect all GNU Social instances to be open for public registration, that's not what fedaration means. loadaverage.org seems to be open to everyone though. Also, do you have an OpenID?
  - zanny 11y ago
    I would be amazed if someone doesn't have an account with any of these websites: http://openid.net/get-an-openid/ http://openid.net/get-an-openid/ Though I do believe Google has gotten rid of their Openid implementation entirely in favor of Openid Connect.
    - dcw303 11y ago
      From that list, I only have a google account. I tried the link for the Profile URL, but it's sending a 404. Perhaps that's because they've gotten rid of their Openid implementation as you say. I'm sure there are ways around it. The point I was trying to make is that I thought that there would be more effort put into a frictionless signup. To be fair, I haven't checked out the other sites linked from the gnu page, so I don't know if they have a better experience.
  - st3v3r 11y ago
    Then why don't they just come out and say that? If they want people to use the service, they have to make it as friction free as possible. Otherwise people will give up.
CookieMon 11y ago
I'm going to need a bunch of "Share it on..." icons to annoyingly slap on all of my web pages :D
artlogic 11y ago
The more interesting thing to do (for this crowd, at least) would be to run your own instance: https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/blob/master/INSTALL https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/blob/master/INSTALL
jtreminio 11y ago
I was excited to learn that GNU Social is in PHP, but quickly turned off because of the quality of the PHP code.
- equalarrow 11y ago
  Heh, sorry, this made me chuckle. I'm sorry you're right, but ya know, it's a GNU project, so there's always room to contribute. :)
  - risk 11y ago
    found the canadian
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Instead of being written in Guile Scheme.
  - Johnny_Brahms 11y ago
    Now, you will find lots of people that claim scheme is the best programming language. I myself am torn between the caml family of languages and scheme. Most serious stuff I write in Scheme, and when I got parsack (parsec for Racket) I now no longer have any reason to leave.
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      I was reminded of a quote saying this kind of question (scheme or caml) is discussing brand of waters while lost in a desert dying of thirst. Although PHP post 5.5 matured enormously, I'm still rooting for a scheme.
      - Johnny_Brahms 11y ago
        Who isn't? :D I rewrote most of my old linux projects (for home use, most of them) in Scheme48 just because I like scsh so much.
leftdevel 11y ago
What's the value proposition over Twitter?
- pekk 11y ago
  What do you mean by "value proposition"? It is free software, not a business opportunity. Not everything is about selling and money. I read about the project just to answer your question, which you could have answered for yourself by reading. You can run your own instance. The source is open, which means it is publicly auditable, you can contribute to it, you can fork it. It is federated. There is not one single global point of failure, which has other implications regarding things like censorship. You are not beholden to a proprietary, profit-motivated service which can do whatever it wants with your data or with the service. It is an attempt to move away from walled gardens. If you distrust US-based services, you can use an instance which is based in Europe or wherever. If you don't get it, you don't get it.
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    Not all values are monetary.
  - DasIch 11y ago
    > There is not one single global point of failure, which has other implications regarding things like censorship. In other words it doesn't just ignore abuse and harrassment one of the biggest problems - maybe the biggest problem - twitter has a communications platform, it practically encourages it.
    - cazum 11y ago
      I haven't used gnusocial, but I'd imagine they have a ignore/block-user feature.
      - st3v3r 11y ago
        But as Twitter has shown us, that's pretty worthless, as the cost to creating a new account to get around it is pretty much zero.
equalarrow 11y ago
Wasn't this the initial goal of app.net? I know it's morphed somewhat now, but, if I remember correctly, it came about as a direct response to some Twitter developer in-niceness.
- adiabatty 11y ago
  Sort of. App.net's big experiment was "charge users money instead of monetizing their eyeballs". Twitter outages and developer alienation helped fuel its initial rise.
shmerl 11y ago
Diaspora* is also an interesting option. * https://diasporafoundation.org https://diasporafoundation.org * https://the-federation.info https://the-federation.info
- pekk 11y ago
  It would be nice if these would interoperate, so that it was not really an either/or choice. Don't they have essentially the same goals?
  - shmerl 11y ago
    There were some plans for that it seems: https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/issues/18 https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/issues/18 Diaspora is already interoperable with Red Matrix. For better interoperaibility they need to finalize the API. * https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Diaspora_API_proposal https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Diaspora_API_proposal * https://www.loomio.org/d/cedTCbsI/the-api-bounty-deliverables https://www.loomio.org/d/cedTCbsI/the-api-bounty-deliverable...
    - pekk 11y ago
      Thank you for this informative answer.
Jr77 11y ago
I'm beginning to think social media is toxic for society as a whole, do we even really want an source alternative to twitter, should twitter cease to exist?
- krapp 11y ago
  That's not really a decision we can make on behalf of the rest of society, is it?
jeena 11y ago
Reading the comments here it seems that people are missing the point by just joining one of those instances. It is not about just using some alternative to Twitter, the real advantage begins when you host it yourself so that you can own your own content and post whatever you want (not what some company wants you to) and (perhaps) syndicate to other services like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. I just gave a small talk about all this last week: https://jeena.net/media/2016/IndieWeb-Jeena.pdf https://jeena.net/media/2016/IndieWeb-Jeena.pdf
- girvo 11y ago
  GNU Social is similar in concept to the POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere) idea, isn't it?
  - jeena 11y ago
    As far as I can see GNU Social only POSSEs to Twitter, but that is a good start anyway.
  - mxuribe 11y ago
    POSSE is along the lines of a higher set of principles to aspire to: in essence where some system under your control is the first place that you publish your content (social posts. blog posts, photos, pretty much any of your content)...And then, your content gets sent out to other distribution points (e.g. facebook, twitter, etc.). It basically increases the value of your web presence to a system that you can control, instead of depending on an outside platform that may not have your interests as its primary goal. While GNU Social is one (out of many) types of tools/platforms that can implement/help achieve some of those POSSE principles. See also: http://indiewebcamp.com/principles http://indiewebcamp.com/principles
- _ak 11y ago
  I don't see hosting myself as an advantage. In the end, all you do all day is to maintain all the tools and apps that you host yourself.
  - 11y ago
teekert 11y ago
I used to be a big Indent.ca fan, it used to run on status.net foss. Apparently now it is pump.io, a foss micro-blogging service. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatusNet https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatusNet
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  There is also the whole tent protocol and camping.io thing. I stopped trying to follow years ago though.
m6w6 11y ago
List of servers: http://gstools.org/servers http://gstools.org/servers EDIT, another list: http://federation.skilledtests.com/select_your_server.html http://federation.skilledtests.com/select_your_server.html LAST EDIT, near complete list: http://www.skilledtests.com/wiki/List_of_Independent_Statusnet_Instances http://www.skilledtests.com/wiki/List_of_Independent_Statusn...
sspiff 11y ago
A bit odd to see them all labeled "runs out of Europe". I understand why they do this, but it's not like European hosting is a bullet proof solution for invasive snooping or data requisition.
- qznc 11y ago
  At least in Germany, we do not have secret courts and gag orders like in the USA.
  - mintplant 11y ago
    How do you know for sure? Honest question.
    - lmm 11y ago
      It's impossible to prove. I think the best you can do is a) no legal basis for that kind of thing, and even more importantly b) a citizenry that remembers totalitarianism and knows the importance of privacy rights.
- rmc 11y ago
  Europeans in Europe can take countries etc to their local courts, or to the European Court of Human Rights, or the Court of Justice of the European Union. Europeans are not able to take any court case against the US government in US courts.
- josteink 11y ago
  > A bit odd to see them all labeled "runs out of Europe". For people from a country which touts itself as "land of the free", this has to be a bit of a bitter bullet to bite ;)
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- mattl 11y ago
reidrac 11y ago
I used StatusNet when it was identi.ca for quite some time, specially because back then Twitter really allowed 3rd party clients and with multi-protocol clients was really easy to use both. When I was using identi.ca it was pretty much about Linux, Open Source, and basically that was it. I never got the same level of interaction I can enjoy in Twitter; but that's not a technical issue, is just that a social network needs people to interact and identi.ca back then (and I suspect GNU Social today) was not used enough to make it interesting for me. I tried, because you can argue that is silly to complain about not enough people using a social network if you don't start using it yourself; but at some point identi.ca got flooded with bots and people "abusing" the API instead of using the social network, and I gave up. I love twitter because I can meet people based on common interests (eg, 8-bit computers), and also broadcast about my current projects (not sure who finds that interesting though). To be honest, things should get really bad with Twitter for me to leave it, but then I don't think there will be a substitute (and if there's one, having my own infrastructure would be very low priority, in the same way I don't host my own XMPP server).
- Goladus 11y ago
  > I tried, because you can argue that is silly to complain about not enough people using a social network if you don't start using it yourself; No, not at all. That's the Network Effect [1] in a nutshell. Practically, what this means is that apart from possibly instagram, microblogging is twitter's market to lose. So long as twitter does not abuse the trust users have placed in them to manage the service, then upstart competitors (whether centralized or decentralized) will find it difficult to overcome the network advantage. However, if twitter does not honor the informal contract and decides to abuse their power for political or social ends, they will be devaluing their product for a large segment of users. Those betrayed users are more likely to decide en masse to join a network not subject to a centralized autocratic authority. This accusation was in fact recently leveled against them [2], so you may see growing support for politically neutral alternatives. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect [2] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/02/16/exclusive-twitter-shadowbanning-is-real-say-inside-sources/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/02/16/exclusive-twitter-s...
Lorin 11y ago
Whatever happened to finger?
- chriswarbo 11y ago
  It inspired https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebFinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebFinger which is apparently being used by GNU Social.
fatline 11y ago
what leaves me skeptic about these kind of alternative services like GNUSocial and Diaspora is not much when, if ever, or how they will be able to attract the necessary critical mass of users that makes them relevant. Instead, it what would happen after that. The main two questions I would be interested in would be: (1) do they scale to the size of, say, Twitter (~400M Daily Active Users, Facebook ~1B DAU)? (2) what would be their business model? The thing is.. hypothetically GNUSocial is very nice. It's free software, it's an open protocol, you are supposedly in perfect control of your personal data. In theory, there's no reason not to prefer it to the current state of things (if only you could make it appealing to your grandma or 14 years-old cousin). However, when, for instance, the Justin Biebers, the Lady Gagas, the Obamas join it together with their hundreds of millions of followers, or simply when the tweets per minute reach hundreds of thousand or even millions, can the GNUSocial protocol ensure a reliable and responsive (~ real time) service? And if it does, what's the maintenance and hardware cost for the confederations? And how are they supposed to financially cover for it? Sure, there are services based on open protocols that have been extremely successful at scaling (e.g., email, or bittorrent), still, they have different requirements than a social network. Can we make an open social network of independent confederations scale? Probably yes, but whether GNUSocial is ready for it or not is an open question (as far as I know..). In any case, take the example of the email. The protocol is open, there's a "confederation" of independent providers taking part to it. It handles a massive amount of data every day. You don't even have necessarily to store your data on a cloud server. That's great. Still, at the end of the day everyone uses free mail services (GMail, Yahoo, you name it), heavily maintained by hundreds/thousands of dedicated (and skilled, and expensive) engineers, storing gigabytes of your data (backed up and redundantly replicated over different geographical areas), and financing themselves using targeted advertising. Sure, you can pay your own, trusted, mail provider an annual fee and have (apparently?) complete control over your data. But how many people actually use these services outside of the work environment (where your employer actually covers the cost)? And I'm not talking about the community of hackernews readers. I'm talking about your non-techy friends, your relatives, the random guy/gal you meet at the pub, that is, the people that ultimately are necessary for your service to reach a critical mass.
- VLM 11y ago
  "together with their hundreds of millions of followers" For no particular reason I can determine, we've temporarily merged the cultural / social automation technology for personal friendships with fanboy relationships with social status signalling. Future systems are unlikely to be identical clones of past systems. This seems usable for personal relationships. Quite possibly automation for fanboy relationships might be a totally different service and technology. Maybe in the future people won't do geolocated at all. Or maybe status signalling will go out of style in the larger culture. Sometimes coincidences don't matter. The rest of your argument is the eternal wheel of IT which never stops rotating between centralization and distribution. Much as we had mainframes in the past and have centralized social media today, the wheel will rotate thru yet another decentralized phase soon enough. It never stops rolling.
rootlocus 11y ago
Chrome complains about https://micro.vinilox.eu https://micro.vinilox.eu "Attackers might be trying to steal your information from micro.vinilox.eu (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID"
- extropic-engine 11y ago
  Many GNU Social servers are hosted by individual users. In this case, it looks like the admin got a certificate from Let's Encrypt for "vinilox.eu", and then tried to use it on "micro.vinilox.eu". It doesn't necessarily mean that the site is not trustworthy.
alatkins 11y ago
Isn't this what the tent.io guys set out to do? Is that still an active project?
motters 11y ago
I've recently been making some debian packages for GNU Social, if anyone wants to try them out. https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial-debian https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial-debian https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial-qvitter-debian https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial-qvitter-debian In particular it's the qvitter plugin which makes this system really usable, both on desktop and mobile.
chriswarbo 11y ago
Like others, I used to use StatusNet back when it powered identi.ca, and abandoned it when they switched to pump.io and everything broke. I considered running my own StatusNet/GNUSocial/pump.io instance, or even writing an OStatus plugin for the CMS I used to run my site on, but have come to the realisation that such software isn't the right path for federation. If I were running a popular site with many users, e.g. a forum, then such features might be nice to add. But hosting my own multi-user, dynamic, OAuth-based Web app just for myself is crazy; especially when the only other thing my server hosts is a static HTML site (I had the same realisation that a multi-user, dynamic CMS Web app was also insecure overkill). In fact, I never used to use the identi.ca Web site anyway; I used the XMPP bot until it got turned off, then switched to RSS feeds and a custom posting command ( http://chriswarbo.net/git/warbo-utilities/branches/master/web/status http://chriswarbo.net/git/warbo-utilities/branches/master/we... ) Unfortunately I've not seen a simple, single-user, no-authentication-required, non-Web-app (preferably commandline) implementation of these protocols (OStatus, Salmon, webmention, etc.) which I could use alongside a standalone, untrusted API endpoint on my server. I spotted some IndieWeb links on HN a few weeks ago and some of what they say resonates with me, e.g. https://indiewebcamp.com/monoculture https://indiewebcamp.com/monoculture Unfortunately, some of their technology seems heavily focused on non-federated, non-FOSS walled gardens which I don't want to be part of (e.g. IndieAuth can use a Google account, a GitHub account, a Twitter account, etc. It claims to support email, but that seems to have died since Mozilla Persona shut down)
wslh 11y ago
This software and discussion miss the reason you can't descentralized a twitter clone: analytics. One of the advantages of centralized services is the capability to quickly analyze what's going on from the content of the messages but you can't do that with a descentralized service.
- mxuribe 11y ago
  For an enterprise, yes, analytics would certainly be more important; because you'd want to measure success of whatever...but those are goals more for a company. If I only wish to share with, say, my family and a few important friends (without resorting to email blasts) the types of things folks normally share on a centralized social network, then analytics isn't important for me. I just basically need to host "the party" but don't care as much about measuring the success of "the party". My goals are not necessarily all the same as twitter/facebook, etc. ;-)
  - wslh 11y ago
    No, it is for something bigger than a company, it is for the world: if there is a earthquake or tsunami you want to receive the alert immediately. I am not pro Twitter, I am just saying that from the computer science point of view you can't find a distributed solution to one of the problems Twitter is trying to solve.
    - mxuribe 11y ago
      Ah, ok, sorry i think i misunderstood your note because i fixated too much on the term "analytics". For what i will call "broadcast" events - such as your very valid tsunami, earthquake examples - sure it would be essential for those alerts to get out...But whether you're using a centralized or a decentralized approach shouldn't matter - assuming of course that one of the nodes of the decentralized method gets the needed input about the alert - in order to pass it on to the other peers of the decent. network. Much like email and websites, and to some degree mobile phone carriers, having a decentralized network does not necessarily prevent fast distribution of important/up-to-the-minute/broadcast information such as alerts. In fact, one might argue that having a decentralized approach might help with overall resilience. That being said, as much as i am a proponent of decentralized (and open) social networks, they have many non-trivial obstacles to contend with...but i do hope for one day to not have to exclusively depend on closed and centralized platforms like twitter et al.
F30 11y ago
So, can anybody elaborate on the history of and relationship between StatusNet, identi.ca, GNU social and pump.io? It seems like this fragmentation is another obstacle for success, besides the obvious issue of gaining traction. And then there's tent.io, which appears to be completely unrelated but have similar goals. Is there anyone with insights on usage numbers, development activity etc. of the different projects? In other words: What's the best bet for federated, open source microblogging?
- phaer 11y ago
  GNU social is, as far as I understand it, just a rebranding of the old StatusNet project after it joined the GNU project. identi.ca had been the most post popular StatusNet instance until they switched to pump.io, a new project started by at least one of the StatusNet developers. tent.io is unrelated to the others as far as i know.
  - rpcutts 11y ago
    Correct on all counts. Identica was a StatusNet instance it is now a Pump instance. GNUSocial is a re-branding of StatusNet.
    - mattl 11y ago
      Not exactly. GNU social was its own project when StatusNet was still a thing. GNU social, StatusNet and "Free and Social" merged to become GNU social
tehmillhouse 11y ago
Before the site has given me any reason to join, it makes me choose between 7 virtually indistinguishable options of providers with subtle technical advantages and disadvantages. Ah, GNU projects. Never change.
- ywecur 11y ago
  It could be as easy as just recommending one at random every time you load the page. I don't understand why they don't implement this.
  - mattl 11y ago
    It's a static site, but also maintaining a huge list of servers, monitoring them, etc seems like a lot of work when the real goal should be "start your own server"
    - nickik 11y ago
      For most people "start your own server" is not the real goal. People who want to run their own will choice to do so and are able to look in the docs. People who just want twitter should just get that.
      - mattl 11y ago
        People who just want Twitter will find GNU social a very different experience immediately anyway, and I'd rather leave that offering to a particular server (such as Quitter) rather than the whole project.
- gosukiwi 11y ago
  Haha I don't even know which one to join. Feels like I'll make the wrong choice. GNU projects always remind me why programmers alone isn't enough, apps also need good design and UX.
  - progman 11y ago
akumpf 11y ago
How hard/easy is it to switch servers and retain @accountname references (i.e. your username)? When faced with a big list of servers to choose between, my hesitation is that I'll pick one now and realize later that another one is better. For example, I may someday want to host GNU social myself, but if I do so will I essentially be starting over (even if I can retain my data, will my connections still retain a relationship to the new server?). A nice little diagram and/or technical details page would be much appreciated :)
- yarrel 11y ago
  As with any other service it depends whether your username has already been taken or not.
  - akumpf 11y ago
    I ask because this is a major hurdle with the Diaspora* model, in my opinion. I just created two accounts with the same username on different servers to test, and the fact that I could do that bummed me out a bit... It's great that my data can be free, but if my account is tied to a specific host and I must make a separate, unique account with another host later then I'm still substantially locked in. Essentially, switching accounts likely means all my social connections will have out-of-date contact info, urls, etc. when I switch. If, however, my user ID is global across the distributed network and there is a way to gracefully transfer my account/data/info to another server seamlessly (without my social connections even knowing/caring about it) then I think distributed social networks like GNU Social could be a game changer.
    - ApplaudPumice 11y ago
      It's possible with hubzilla.io you can also have your account data on two different servers for redundancy.
sarciszewski 11y ago
A PHP project without a composer.json? Say it ain't so! https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/tree/master https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/tree/master
- yarrel 11y ago
  It's so. GNU social is designed to be easily hostable on cheap server slices where ssh-ing in and running composer may not be easy.
  - sarciszewski 11y ago
    Sure, but `composer update` is an easier way to pull in dependencies than manually untarring them.
JabavuAdams 11y ago
Ok, so I'm bad at landing pages, but ... I mean, really.
atmosx 11y ago
I just realized that decentralization is awesome for privacy and all, but for social networks sucks big time.
- mark_l_watson 11y ago
  I have only been using GNU Social for about 18 hours, but so far the decentralization does not seem to be a problem. When you have an account on one person's (or organization's) server, you can "remote follow" people elsewhere and that seems to work just fine.
  - st3v3r 11y ago
    How do they handle the issue of keeping usernames unique? If I were to sign up on one server with my handle, what's to stop someone from signing up on another server with that same handle to impersonate me?
    - mattl 11y ago
      What's to stop you from getting mattl@hotmail.com and pretending to be me in email? Same thing, really.
      - mark_l_watson 11y ago
        You get an email that you respond to to finish the registration process.
        mattl 11y ago
        No, I mean... what is the difference between a user called mattl being on two GNU social servers, and a user called mattl being on two common, gratis email servers? I could go and make a webmail account called mark_l_watson@whatever.com and people shouldn't assume it was you.
        11y ago
harijoe 11y ago
What an irony to use twitter bootstrap to make a FLOSS twitter :)
- sbarre 11y ago
  Bootstrap has not been a part of Twitter for quite some time now.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
After reading about GNU Social on HN last night I created an account on the first of the 6 provides, loadaverage.org I like the service and I am considering running my own server. My account is https://loadaverage.org/markwatson https://loadaverage.org/markwatson and I am going to start out by cross posting some of the things I post on Twitter and G+ and see where this goes. When I quit consulting at Google in 2013 the first thing I did when I got home was to write an article on how to use Twitter, G+, and Facebook while preserving some degree of privacy. If alternatives like GNU Social catch on (a big IF), that will be a good thing!
- queeerkopf 11y ago
  I guess the mentioned article is http://blog.markwatson.com/2014/07/practical-internet-privacy-and-security.html http://blog.markwatson.com/2014/07/practical-internet-privac... Have you modified your approach since then?
  - mark_l_watson 11y ago
    I follow about the same procedures now as I did in 2013. One difference: I now do online banking on my iPad. I don't install many apps on my iPad, and I think (hope!) it is a fairly secure device.
- st3v3r 11y ago
  Why did you decide on that server, out of all the others?
  - mark_l_watson 11y ago
    Pretty much a random decision.
erikb 11y ago
Is that a rebranding of diaspora?
sarciszewski 11y ago
https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/blob/master/lib/util.php#L248 https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/blob/master/lib/util.php#L... Oh boy, strcmp() for passwords. http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/11/its-all-about-time.html http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/11/its-all-about-time.html
rozzin 11y ago
I run a GNU social hub for granite-staters, in case anyone's interested...: https://nhcrossing.com/ https://nhcrossing.com/
JikkuJose 11y ago
Is GNU against good user experience design?
mohsinr 11y ago
I am excited about it. We can launch own instance for local community and it will be another good communication tool with full control to achieve the goal. It could be twitter for XYZ institute or university, or for a MMC internal network ? Or I am missing the point?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

373 points by striking 11y ago

markbao 11y ago

Neat product but the "familiar user interface" for a Quitter is literally a copy of Twitter. That's not a good look.

agumonkey 11y ago
It implements the 2010 version of twitter, for once being outdated isn't much a regression.
- mxuribe 11y ago
  If you run/host your own network/instance - which is actually encouraged - you can design it pretty much however you wish.

DasIch 11y ago

Copying the design of Twitter and Facebook. What a great way to make a good first impression and to respect the copyright the GNU project cares so much about. I can't imagine a better way to show everyone just how amazing you are. The free software community must be truly happy to have such amazing supporters on their side.

ktRolster 11y ago
Do you understand that GNU got started by copying Unix? You can copy a product without violating copyright, although there have been several court cases on this topic.
- DasIch 11y ago
  Of course you can copy the product as such, that's fine by me and I think even necessary. They've gone far beyond that here though, copying not just the product but significant parts of the design. The Quitter thing looks almost exactly like Twitter. If they'd copied the website of a bank like this, it would be considered phishing. This is well beyond copying an idea or a few design concepts.
  - calgoo 11y ago
    I thought they where just using bootstrap which was created by twitter. I'd say 50% of the web looks like twitter today... EDIT: OK, I take that back... After looking at some of these sites, some have really copied the design waaaay to much.
zanny 11y ago
You can implement ostatus however you like. It just so happens the most popular implementations are just clones of the Facebook / Twitter looks because they are familiar. There are more servers than just these, and most of them have unique UIs.
mxuribe 11y ago
Gnu social is an open platform, so as others have stated you can host your own. And, it allows you to customize the look and feel pretty much without limit; however you wish it to look. I can't explain exactly why the quitter network or the default Gnu social network look the way they do...but my guess would be for new user comfort; sort of to provide a familiar environment. But again, at the end of the day, because gnu social is open source, you can tweak your network to suit your needs.

Grishnakh 11y ago

Stuff like this is never going to work, because it suffers from the chicken-and-egg problem. Everyone (who cares about Twitter or something like it) uses Twitter because everyone else uses Twitter. You can make an account on Quitter or Diaspora or any other decentralized FLOSS network, but it'll be useless because all your non-nerd friends (and most of your nerd friends too) won't have accounts there, and will continue to use Twitter and Facebook because that's where all their contacts are. There's not really any way around this. The only thing that can happen is that something will somehow become so popular that everyone will just abandon the current service. This is what happened with MySpace: for whatever reasons, everyone moved over to Facebook, and abandoned MySpace, and now it's a dessicated husk that seems to become a place for bands to advertise and that's about it. This could potentially happen with either Facebook or Twitter, but I'm not holding my breath; the masses have shown over and over now that they're happy to chain themselves to highly centralized, proprietary products and services: FB, Twitter, the "app stores", not to mention all the proprietary software out there that intentionally and obviously uses nasty lock-in tactics.

ktRolster 11y ago
I would have felt the same way about MySpace. The reality is, alternatives can arise. Facebook won't last forever, and Twitter even less so (although one of my favorite attempted "Myspace killers" was a social network for karaoke singers)
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  Right, but look at history: MySpace died out (mostly), and was replaced, but by what? Facebook, another centralized, proprietary service. And then came Twitter, which was yet another centralized, proprietary service. When has an open, decentralized product or service ever supplanted a centralized, closed, proprietary one? Never, that I can think of. Linux never replaced Windows, not for the vast majority of users. It did become very popular for servers, but really it took over from proprietary UNIX there, and really created its own market because back in the early 90s there was no such thing as a webserver; the whole use-case is different with Linux on servers. So UNIX was never really entrenched in exactly the things that Linux servers are used for now. Then there's smartphones and embedded devices like that, but there again Linux really created its own market; before Linux, small devices generally didn't have enough power to run a heavyweight OS like Linux. Android (semi-open, uses Linux) came about pretty much simultaneously with the iPhone. So here again, there wasn't some single proprietary thing that was dominant and entrenched in a mature market. There's the Apache webserver, but here again, there was no big dominant proprietary player. LibreOffice hasn't had much success in supplanting MS Office. MySQL is very popular, but here again there was no dominant proprietary web database; MySQL created that market (though PostgreSQL has become a serious competitor to it, but it's also open). So in summary, the only time I've seen open, non-proprietary solutions win out is when the environment changed, frequently because of their presence and availability, making them the natural pick. I've never seen them beat out an entrenched dominant player in a mature market. So I definitely don't expect to see it happen with Facebook. What I could see happening is something coming up which uses a non-proprietary or decentralized system which creates a whole new market, rendering one of those things obsolete. I have no idea what that could be though, but then again 20 years ago I wouldn't have imagined that people would want to spend massive amounts of time on a "social network" sharing inane pictures and videos and making idiotic comments to each other about them.

rocky1138 11y ago

The https://quitter.se https://quitter.se anti-capitalist message didn't resonate with me, so I joined the https://gnusocial.no https://gnusocial.no federation. Much friendlier :)

js8 11y ago
I am not familiar with either, but I am curious why does "anti-capitalist message" matter so much? I thought the purpose is to build a messaging network that everybody can use. And even GNU founder can be considered anti-capitalist. I am asking because to me, to decide to join some (not political) community based on your own political opinion, is a good way to live in your own bubble. The real strength of the Internet is that we are exposed to contrarian positions, even at the expense of our comfort.
- pekk 11y ago
  It is a federated messaging network. I don't see that it is any more subject to filter bubbles than Twitter is. Everyone chooses who they follow anyway. If you want to subscribe to feeds from people with politics opposite yours, you can do that.
  - js8 11y ago
    That was my point. The intro site may have "anti-capitalist" in it, but at the end of the day, it's up to users what they do with that network.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  Before the horde descends, I thought I might respond to the suggestion that RMS is anti-capitalist. This comes up frequently and is a bit of a red herring. I won't try to speak for him (he can obviously do that well enough himself), however I think it is worth considering the free software movement in today's reality. Back when they only thing that described free software was the GNU manifesto, we still had the idea that writing software that enabled businesses was a good idea. It may be a consequence of free software that it will become difficult to charge money directly for software (as a product), but that shouldn't stop companies from making money. Especially now when we see how open source software is almost taken for granted, we can see that companies flourish, not die. It is true that you practically can not charge money for a compiler any more, but are we worse off? No. We have different and arguably better business models for that kind of software -- and we haven't given up capitalism at all. My tools are dramatically better than they were 30 years ago (when I first started in this business). The cost has also dropped to nearly zero. We have become efficient. It is true that the FSF considers software freedom a moral imperative. While it may be true that some kinds of software will be difficult to produce in this manner, we can see that there are several very large companies that thrive producing virtually every kind of software. Personally, I don't think there are many businesses that will be better off with our old software-as-a-product business models -- games being a probable exception. What we have now is better, more efficient, enabling for the general population -- and much better for businesses. I have a hard time seeing it from an "anti-capitalist" position. And, just from my personal perspective, I don't think RMS ever did either.

Gracana 11y ago

Is there a good way to publish to this at the same time as twitter, so I'm already established and can drop twitter when it dies?

fcmeneg 11y ago
Yes. In settings you can connect to your twitter account.
- Gracana 11y ago
  Really! I will check it out and see how that works.
reidrac 11y ago
In my humble opinion, that's what ruined indenti.ca back in the day. If you're mirroring Twitter and losing the interactions you have in GNU Social, your account is just a bot and you're not really using the social network.
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  Which account is the bot?
- st3v3r 11y ago
  Does someone have a client that can work with both? Because, lets face it, Twitter is the 800 lb gorilla in the room. Most people, if they want to try this out, would also like to maintain their activity on Twitter. Hopefully there would be some way that you can do both, and be alerted to messages and replies on both, and even have a unified timeline in one app. (And if you're not interested in maintaining presence on Twitter as well, that's great, I'm happy for you, but please don't reply just to say that. It's not interesting or contributing to the discussion in the least).
  - reidrac 11y ago
    My point was that mirroring Twitter on identi.ca made identi.ca worse. Lots of people were automatically posting their Twitter updates on identi.ca, but never replying or caring about the interactions they had there. Same with blogs RSS feeds being fed to identi.ca. I don't know where we are with multi-protocol clients. Back then I was using https://launchpad.net/gwibber https://launchpad.net/gwibber (before it was rewritten to use CouchDB and stopped working for me, I don't know what is its current status). I didn't post like that, I had two accounts and used both; until I got bored of bots on identi.ca and, in practice, I was only using Twitter. EDIT: changed Gwibber link to launchpad as the .com doesn't seem to be maintained.

dcw303 11y ago

I don't get it. I went to gnusocial.no to join, and there's no link to sign up. I eventually found a register link off the help page (not visible on mobile for some reason), and I just get a messsage "Sorry, only invited people can register". Do they want people to join this or not?

tagrun 11y ago
You can't expect all GNU Social instances to be open for public registration, that's not what fedaration means. loadaverage.org seems to be open to everyone though. Also, do you have an OpenID?
- zanny 11y ago
  I would be amazed if someone doesn't have an account with any of these websites: http://openid.net/get-an-openid/ http://openid.net/get-an-openid/ Though I do believe Google has gotten rid of their Openid implementation entirely in favor of Openid Connect.
  - dcw303 11y ago
    From that list, I only have a google account. I tried the link for the Profile URL, but it's sending a 404. Perhaps that's because they've gotten rid of their Openid implementation as you say. I'm sure there are ways around it. The point I was trying to make is that I thought that there would be more effort put into a frictionless signup. To be fair, I haven't checked out the other sites linked from the gnu page, so I don't know if they have a better experience.
- st3v3r 11y ago
  Then why don't they just come out and say that? If they want people to use the service, they have to make it as friction free as possible. Otherwise people will give up.

CookieMon 11y ago

I'm going to need a bunch of "Share it on..." icons to annoyingly slap on all of my web pages :D

artlogic 11y ago

The more interesting thing to do (for this crowd, at least) would be to run your own instance: https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/blob/master/INSTALL https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/blob/master/INSTALL

jtreminio 11y ago

I was excited to learn that GNU Social is in PHP, but quickly turned off because of the quality of the PHP code.

equalarrow 11y ago
Heh, sorry, this made me chuckle. I'm sorry you're right, but ya know, it's a GNU project, so there's always room to contribute. :)
- risk 11y ago
  found the canadian
agumonkey 11y ago
Instead of being written in Guile Scheme.
- Johnny_Brahms 11y ago
  Now, you will find lots of people that claim scheme is the best programming language. I myself am torn between the caml family of languages and scheme. Most serious stuff I write in Scheme, and when I got parsack (parsec for Racket) I now no longer have any reason to leave.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    I was reminded of a quote saying this kind of question (scheme or caml) is discussing brand of waters while lost in a desert dying of thirst. Although PHP post 5.5 matured enormously, I'm still rooting for a scheme.
    - Johnny_Brahms 11y ago
      Who isn't? :D I rewrote most of my old linux projects (for home use, most of them) in Scheme48 just because I like scsh so much.

leftdevel 11y ago

What's the value proposition over Twitter?

pekk 11y ago
What do you mean by "value proposition"? It is free software, not a business opportunity. Not everything is about selling and money. I read about the project just to answer your question, which you could have answered for yourself by reading. You can run your own instance. The source is open, which means it is publicly auditable, you can contribute to it, you can fork it. It is federated. There is not one single global point of failure, which has other implications regarding things like censorship. You are not beholden to a proprietary, profit-motivated service which can do whatever it wants with your data or with the service. It is an attempt to move away from walled gardens. If you distrust US-based services, you can use an instance which is based in Europe or wherever. If you don't get it, you don't get it.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  Not all values are monetary.
- DasIch 11y ago
  > There is not one single global point of failure, which has other implications regarding things like censorship. In other words it doesn't just ignore abuse and harrassment one of the biggest problems - maybe the biggest problem - twitter has a communications platform, it practically encourages it.
  - cazum 11y ago
    I haven't used gnusocial, but I'd imagine they have a ignore/block-user feature.
    - st3v3r 11y ago
      But as Twitter has shown us, that's pretty worthless, as the cost to creating a new account to get around it is pretty much zero.

equalarrow 11y ago

Wasn't this the initial goal of app.net? I know it's morphed somewhat now, but, if I remember correctly, it came about as a direct response to some Twitter developer in-niceness.

adiabatty 11y ago
Sort of. App.net's big experiment was "charge users money instead of monetizing their eyeballs". Twitter outages and developer alienation helped fuel its initial rise.

shmerl 11y ago

Diaspora* is also an interesting option. * https://diasporafoundation.org https://diasporafoundation.org * https://the-federation.info https://the-federation.info

pekk 11y ago
It would be nice if these would interoperate, so that it was not really an either/or choice. Don't they have essentially the same goals?
- shmerl 11y ago
  There were some plans for that it seems: https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/issues/18 https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/issues/18 Diaspora is already interoperable with Red Matrix. For better interoperaibility they need to finalize the API. * https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Diaspora_API_proposal https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Diaspora_API_proposal * https://www.loomio.org/d/cedTCbsI/the-api-bounty-deliverables https://www.loomio.org/d/cedTCbsI/the-api-bounty-deliverable...
  - pekk 11y ago
    Thank you for this informative answer.

Jr77 11y ago

I'm beginning to think social media is toxic for society as a whole, do we even really want an source alternative to twitter, should twitter cease to exist?

krapp 11y ago
That's not really a decision we can make on behalf of the rest of society, is it?

jeena 11y ago

Reading the comments here it seems that people are missing the point by just joining one of those instances. It is not about just using some alternative to Twitter, the real advantage begins when you host it yourself so that you can own your own content and post whatever you want (not what some company wants you to) and (perhaps) syndicate to other services like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. I just gave a small talk about all this last week: https://jeena.net/media/2016/IndieWeb-Jeena.pdf https://jeena.net/media/2016/IndieWeb-Jeena.pdf

girvo 11y ago
GNU Social is similar in concept to the POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere) idea, isn't it?
- jeena 11y ago
  As far as I can see GNU Social only POSSEs to Twitter, but that is a good start anyway.
- mxuribe 11y ago
  POSSE is along the lines of a higher set of principles to aspire to: in essence where some system under your control is the first place that you publish your content (social posts. blog posts, photos, pretty much any of your content)...And then, your content gets sent out to other distribution points (e.g. facebook, twitter, etc.). It basically increases the value of your web presence to a system that you can control, instead of depending on an outside platform that may not have your interests as its primary goal. While GNU Social is one (out of many) types of tools/platforms that can implement/help achieve some of those POSSE principles. See also: http://indiewebcamp.com/principles http://indiewebcamp.com/principles
_ak 11y ago
I don't see hosting myself as an advantage. In the end, all you do all day is to maintain all the tools and apps that you host yourself.
- 11y ago

teekert 11y ago

I used to be a big Indent.ca fan, it used to run on status.net foss. Apparently now it is pump.io, a foss micro-blogging service. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatusNet https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatusNet

johnchristopher 11y ago
There is also the whole tent protocol and camping.io thing. I stopped trying to follow years ago though.

m6w6 11y ago

List of servers: http://gstools.org/servers http://gstools.org/servers EDIT, another list: http://federation.skilledtests.com/select_your_server.html http://federation.skilledtests.com/select_your_server.html LAST EDIT, near complete list: http://www.skilledtests.com/wiki/List_of_Independent_Statusnet_Instances http://www.skilledtests.com/wiki/List_of_Independent_Statusn...

sspiff 11y ago

A bit odd to see them all labeled "runs out of Europe". I understand why they do this, but it's not like European hosting is a bullet proof solution for invasive snooping or data requisition.

qznc 11y ago
At least in Germany, we do not have secret courts and gag orders like in the USA.
- mintplant 11y ago
  How do you know for sure? Honest question.
  - lmm 11y ago
    It's impossible to prove. I think the best you can do is a) no legal basis for that kind of thing, and even more importantly b) a citizenry that remembers totalitarianism and knows the importance of privacy rights.
rmc 11y ago
Europeans in Europe can take countries etc to their local courts, or to the European Court of Human Rights, or the Court of Justice of the European Union. Europeans are not able to take any court case against the US government in US courts.
josteink 11y ago
> A bit odd to see them all labeled "runs out of Europe". For people from a country which touts itself as "land of the free", this has to be a bit of a bitter bullet to bite ;)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
mattl 11y ago

reidrac 11y ago

I used StatusNet when it was identi.ca for quite some time, specially because back then Twitter really allowed 3rd party clients and with multi-protocol clients was really easy to use both. When I was using identi.ca it was pretty much about Linux, Open Source, and basically that was it. I never got the same level of interaction I can enjoy in Twitter; but that's not a technical issue, is just that a social network needs people to interact and identi.ca back then (and I suspect GNU Social today) was not used enough to make it interesting for me. I tried, because you can argue that is silly to complain about not enough people using a social network if you don't start using it yourself; but at some point identi.ca got flooded with bots and people "abusing" the API instead of using the social network, and I gave up. I love twitter because I can meet people based on common interests (eg, 8-bit computers), and also broadcast about my current projects (not sure who finds that interesting though). To be honest, things should get really bad with Twitter for me to leave it, but then I don't think there will be a substitute (and if there's one, having my own infrastructure would be very low priority, in the same way I don't host my own XMPP server).

Goladus 11y ago
> I tried, because you can argue that is silly to complain about not enough people using a social network if you don't start using it yourself; No, not at all. That's the Network Effect [1] in a nutshell. Practically, what this means is that apart from possibly instagram, microblogging is twitter's market to lose. So long as twitter does not abuse the trust users have placed in them to manage the service, then upstart competitors (whether centralized or decentralized) will find it difficult to overcome the network advantage. However, if twitter does not honor the informal contract and decides to abuse their power for political or social ends, they will be devaluing their product for a large segment of users. Those betrayed users are more likely to decide en masse to join a network not subject to a centralized autocratic authority. This accusation was in fact recently leveled against them [2], so you may see growing support for politically neutral alternatives. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect [2] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/02/16/exclusive-twitter-shadowbanning-is-real-say-inside-sources/ http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/02/16/exclusive-twitter-s...

Lorin 11y ago

Whatever happened to finger?

chriswarbo 11y ago
It inspired https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebFinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebFinger which is apparently being used by GNU Social.

fatline 11y ago

what leaves me skeptic about these kind of alternative services like GNUSocial and Diaspora is not much when, if ever, or how they will be able to attract the necessary critical mass of users that makes them relevant. Instead, it what would happen after that. The main two questions I would be interested in would be: (1) do they scale to the size of, say, Twitter (~400M Daily Active Users, Facebook ~1B DAU)? (2) what would be their business model? The thing is.. hypothetically GNUSocial is very nice. It's free software, it's an open protocol, you are supposedly in perfect control of your personal data. In theory, there's no reason not to prefer it to the current state of things (if only you could make it appealing to your grandma or 14 years-old cousin). However, when, for instance, the Justin Biebers, the Lady Gagas, the Obamas join it together with their hundreds of millions of followers, or simply when the tweets per minute reach hundreds of thousand or even millions, can the GNUSocial protocol ensure a reliable and responsive (~ real time) service? And if it does, what's the maintenance and hardware cost for the confederations? And how are they supposed to financially cover for it? Sure, there are services based on open protocols that have been extremely successful at scaling (e.g., email, or bittorrent), still, they have different requirements than a social network. Can we make an open social network of independent confederations scale? Probably yes, but whether GNUSocial is ready for it or not is an open question (as far as I know..). In any case, take the example of the email. The protocol is open, there's a "confederation" of independent providers taking part to it. It handles a massive amount of data every day. You don't even have necessarily to store your data on a cloud server. That's great. Still, at the end of the day everyone uses free mail services (GMail, Yahoo, you name it), heavily maintained by hundreds/thousands of dedicated (and skilled, and expensive) engineers, storing gigabytes of your data (backed up and redundantly replicated over different geographical areas), and financing themselves using targeted advertising. Sure, you can pay your own, trusted, mail provider an annual fee and have (apparently?) complete control over your data. But how many people actually use these services outside of the work environment (where your employer actually covers the cost)? And I'm not talking about the community of hackernews readers. I'm talking about your non-techy friends, your relatives, the random guy/gal you meet at the pub, that is, the people that ultimately are necessary for your service to reach a critical mass.

VLM 11y ago
"together with their hundreds of millions of followers" For no particular reason I can determine, we've temporarily merged the cultural / social automation technology for personal friendships with fanboy relationships with social status signalling. Future systems are unlikely to be identical clones of past systems. This seems usable for personal relationships. Quite possibly automation for fanboy relationships might be a totally different service and technology. Maybe in the future people won't do geolocated at all. Or maybe status signalling will go out of style in the larger culture. Sometimes coincidences don't matter. The rest of your argument is the eternal wheel of IT which never stops rotating between centralization and distribution. Much as we had mainframes in the past and have centralized social media today, the wheel will rotate thru yet another decentralized phase soon enough. It never stops rolling.

rootlocus 11y ago

Chrome complains about https://micro.vinilox.eu https://micro.vinilox.eu "Attackers might be trying to steal your information from micro.vinilox.eu (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID"

extropic-engine 11y ago
Many GNU Social servers are hosted by individual users. In this case, it looks like the admin got a certificate from Let's Encrypt for "vinilox.eu", and then tried to use it on "micro.vinilox.eu". It doesn't necessarily mean that the site is not trustworthy.

alatkins 11y ago

Isn't this what the tent.io guys set out to do? Is that still an active project?

motters 11y ago

I've recently been making some debian packages for GNU Social, if anyone wants to try them out. https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial-debian https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial-debian https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial-qvitter-debian https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial-qvitter-debian In particular it's the qvitter plugin which makes this system really usable, both on desktop and mobile.

chriswarbo 11y ago

Like others, I used to use StatusNet back when it powered identi.ca, and abandoned it when they switched to pump.io and everything broke. I considered running my own StatusNet/GNUSocial/pump.io instance, or even writing an OStatus plugin for the CMS I used to run my site on, but have come to the realisation that such software isn't the right path for federation. If I were running a popular site with many users, e.g. a forum, then such features might be nice to add. But hosting my own multi-user, dynamic, OAuth-based Web app just for myself is crazy; especially when the only other thing my server hosts is a static HTML site (I had the same realisation that a multi-user, dynamic CMS Web app was also insecure overkill). In fact, I never used to use the identi.ca Web site anyway; I used the XMPP bot until it got turned off, then switched to RSS feeds and a custom posting command ( http://chriswarbo.net/git/warbo-utilities/branches/master/web/status http://chriswarbo.net/git/warbo-utilities/branches/master/we... ) Unfortunately I've not seen a simple, single-user, no-authentication-required, non-Web-app (preferably commandline) implementation of these protocols (OStatus, Salmon, webmention, etc.) which I could use alongside a standalone, untrusted API endpoint on my server. I spotted some IndieWeb links on HN a few weeks ago and some of what they say resonates with me, e.g. https://indiewebcamp.com/monoculture https://indiewebcamp.com/monoculture Unfortunately, some of their technology seems heavily focused on non-federated, non-FOSS walled gardens which I don't want to be part of (e.g. IndieAuth can use a Google account, a GitHub account, a Twitter account, etc. It claims to support email, but that seems to have died since Mozilla Persona shut down)

wslh 11y ago

This software and discussion miss the reason you can't descentralized a twitter clone: analytics. One of the advantages of centralized services is the capability to quickly analyze what's going on from the content of the messages but you can't do that with a descentralized service.

mxuribe 11y ago
For an enterprise, yes, analytics would certainly be more important; because you'd want to measure success of whatever...but those are goals more for a company. If I only wish to share with, say, my family and a few important friends (without resorting to email blasts) the types of things folks normally share on a centralized social network, then analytics isn't important for me. I just basically need to host "the party" but don't care as much about measuring the success of "the party". My goals are not necessarily all the same as twitter/facebook, etc. ;-)
- wslh 11y ago
  No, it is for something bigger than a company, it is for the world: if there is a earthquake or tsunami you want to receive the alert immediately. I am not pro Twitter, I am just saying that from the computer science point of view you can't find a distributed solution to one of the problems Twitter is trying to solve.
  - mxuribe 11y ago
    Ah, ok, sorry i think i misunderstood your note because i fixated too much on the term "analytics". For what i will call "broadcast" events - such as your very valid tsunami, earthquake examples - sure it would be essential for those alerts to get out...But whether you're using a centralized or a decentralized approach shouldn't matter - assuming of course that one of the nodes of the decentralized method gets the needed input about the alert - in order to pass it on to the other peers of the decent. network. Much like email and websites, and to some degree mobile phone carriers, having a decentralized network does not necessarily prevent fast distribution of important/up-to-the-minute/broadcast information such as alerts. In fact, one might argue that having a decentralized approach might help with overall resilience. That being said, as much as i am a proponent of decentralized (and open) social networks, they have many non-trivial obstacles to contend with...but i do hope for one day to not have to exclusively depend on closed and centralized platforms like twitter et al.

F30 11y ago

So, can anybody elaborate on the history of and relationship between StatusNet, identi.ca, GNU social and pump.io? It seems like this fragmentation is another obstacle for success, besides the obvious issue of gaining traction. And then there's tent.io, which appears to be completely unrelated but have similar goals. Is there anyone with insights on usage numbers, development activity etc. of the different projects? In other words: What's the best bet for federated, open source microblogging?

phaer 11y ago
GNU social is, as far as I understand it, just a rebranding of the old StatusNet project after it joined the GNU project. identi.ca had been the most post popular StatusNet instance until they switched to pump.io, a new project started by at least one of the StatusNet developers. tent.io is unrelated to the others as far as i know.
- rpcutts 11y ago
  Correct on all counts. Identica was a StatusNet instance it is now a Pump instance. GNUSocial is a re-branding of StatusNet.
  - mattl 11y ago
    Not exactly. GNU social was its own project when StatusNet was still a thing. GNU social, StatusNet and "Free and Social" merged to become GNU social

tehmillhouse 11y ago

Before the site has given me any reason to join, it makes me choose between 7 virtually indistinguishable options of providers with subtle technical advantages and disadvantages. Ah, GNU projects. Never change.

ywecur 11y ago
It could be as easy as just recommending one at random every time you load the page. I don't understand why they don't implement this.
- mattl 11y ago
  It's a static site, but also maintaining a huge list of servers, monitoring them, etc seems like a lot of work when the real goal should be "start your own server"
  - nickik 11y ago
    For most people "start your own server" is not the real goal. People who want to run their own will choice to do so and are able to look in the docs. People who just want twitter should just get that.
    - mattl 11y ago
      People who just want Twitter will find GNU social a very different experience immediately anyway, and I'd rather leave that offering to a particular server (such as Quitter) rather than the whole project.
gosukiwi 11y ago
Haha I don't even know which one to join. Feels like I'll make the wrong choice. GNU projects always remind me why programmers alone isn't enough, apps also need good design and UX.
- progman 11y ago

akumpf 11y ago

How hard/easy is it to switch servers and retain @accountname references (i.e. your username)? When faced with a big list of servers to choose between, my hesitation is that I'll pick one now and realize later that another one is better. For example, I may someday want to host GNU social myself, but if I do so will I essentially be starting over (even if I can retain my data, will my connections still retain a relationship to the new server?). A nice little diagram and/or technical details page would be much appreciated :)

yarrel 11y ago
As with any other service it depends whether your username has already been taken or not.
- akumpf 11y ago
  I ask because this is a major hurdle with the Diaspora* model, in my opinion. I just created two accounts with the same username on different servers to test, and the fact that I could do that bummed me out a bit... It's great that my data can be free, but if my account is tied to a specific host and I must make a separate, unique account with another host later then I'm still substantially locked in. Essentially, switching accounts likely means all my social connections will have out-of-date contact info, urls, etc. when I switch. If, however, my user ID is global across the distributed network and there is a way to gracefully transfer my account/data/info to another server seamlessly (without my social connections even knowing/caring about it) then I think distributed social networks like GNU Social could be a game changer.
  - ApplaudPumice 11y ago
    It's possible with hubzilla.io you can also have your account data on two different servers for redundancy.

sarciszewski 11y ago

A PHP project without a composer.json? Say it ain't so! https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/tree/master https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/tree/master

yarrel 11y ago
It's so. GNU social is designed to be easily hostable on cheap server slices where ssh-ing in and running composer may not be easy.
- sarciszewski 11y ago
  Sure, but `composer update` is an easier way to pull in dependencies than manually untarring them.

JabavuAdams 11y ago

Ok, so I'm bad at landing pages, but ... I mean, really.

atmosx 11y ago

I just realized that decentralization is awesome for privacy and all, but for social networks sucks big time.

mark_l_watson 11y ago
I have only been using GNU Social for about 18 hours, but so far the decentralization does not seem to be a problem. When you have an account on one person's (or organization's) server, you can "remote follow" people elsewhere and that seems to work just fine.
- st3v3r 11y ago
  How do they handle the issue of keeping usernames unique? If I were to sign up on one server with my handle, what's to stop someone from signing up on another server with that same handle to impersonate me?
  - mattl 11y ago
    What's to stop you from getting mattl@hotmail.com and pretending to be me in email? Same thing, really.
    - mark_l_watson 11y ago
      You get an email that you respond to to finish the registration process.
      - mattl 11y ago
        No, I mean... what is the difference between a user called mattl being on two GNU social servers, and a user called mattl being on two common, gratis email servers? I could go and make a webmail account called mark_l_watson@whatever.com and people shouldn't assume it was you.
        11y ago

harijoe 11y ago

What an irony to use twitter bootstrap to make a FLOSS twitter :)

sbarre 11y ago
Bootstrap has not been a part of Twitter for quite some time now.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

After reading about GNU Social on HN last night I created an account on the first of the 6 provides, loadaverage.org I like the service and I am considering running my own server. My account is https://loadaverage.org/markwatson https://loadaverage.org/markwatson and I am going to start out by cross posting some of the things I post on Twitter and G+ and see where this goes. When I quit consulting at Google in 2013 the first thing I did when I got home was to write an article on how to use Twitter, G+, and Facebook while preserving some degree of privacy. If alternatives like GNU Social catch on (a big IF), that will be a good thing!

queeerkopf 11y ago
I guess the mentioned article is http://blog.markwatson.com/2014/07/practical-internet-privacy-and-security.html http://blog.markwatson.com/2014/07/practical-internet-privac... Have you modified your approach since then?
- mark_l_watson 11y ago
  I follow about the same procedures now as I did in 2013. One difference: I now do online banking on my iPad. I don't install many apps on my iPad, and I think (hope!) it is a fairly secure device.
st3v3r 11y ago
Why did you decide on that server, out of all the others?
- mark_l_watson 11y ago
  Pretty much a random decision.

erikb 11y ago

Is that a rebranding of diaspora?

sarciszewski 11y ago

https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/blob/master/lib/util.php#L248 https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/blob/master/lib/util.php#L... Oh boy, strcmp() for passwords. http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/11/its-all-about-time.html http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/11/its-all-about-time.html

rozzin 11y ago

I run a GNU social hub for granite-staters, in case anyone's interested...: https://nhcrossing.com/ https://nhcrossing.com/

JikkuJose 11y ago

Is GNU against good user experience design?

mohsinr 11y ago

I am excited about it. We can launch own instance for local community and it will be another good communication tool with full control to achieve the goal. It could be twitter for XYZ institute or university, or for a MMC internal network ? Or I am missing the point?

deleted 11y ago

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