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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 Twitt

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.
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    That's getting close to a "no true Scottsman argument." You go through the list, find every successful open source project, and try to explain why it doesn't count. Some of your examples are flat out wrong: Oracle was the big dominant proprietary player when Yahoo decided to risk going with MySQL (which was great, and I can't wait for MySQL to get replaced by Postgres). Now think how many websites are running on WordPress. It pains me to say it (because the code quality is so bad), but that's an example of successful open source project. Git is up there too. Don't like Github? Switch to Sourceforge. Don't like Sourceforge? Run your own server. So if you define the category narrowly enough, anyone can say, "no open source project with these exact characteristics has ever had success," and be right. But because it's been limited so heavily, the example from the past will have no predictive power for the future. You need to find a different way of analyzing the problem.
    - Grishnakh 11y ago
      > You go through the list, find every successful open source project, and try to explain why it doesn't count. Wrong, I explain why in each case, they've completely changed the market, they didn't just come in and take over from a successful and dominant proprietary player. >Oracle was the big dominant proprietary player when Yahoo decided to risk going with MySQL No, they weren't. Oracle was never big in web databases. Ever heard of the LAMP stack? There was never a "LAOP" stack. Oracle was never used as part of a stack with Linux and Apache and Perl or PHP. Oracle was used in a bunch of big-iron systems back then (and still are), but they were never a serious player in small webservers. MySQL helped create that market. This is something like claiming that Harley-Davidson took over part of the market owned by the Ford Model T truck. >Now think how many websites are running on WordPress. It pains me to say it (because the code quality is so bad), but that's an example of successful open source project. Which proprietary product did it out-compete? That's right, none. WordPress created a whole new market. It's just like all my other successful FOSS examples. It never successfully out-competed a dominant proprietary product. >Git is up there too. git is probably about the only FOSS product, now that you mention it, that's made any real inroads against proprietary products, and even here, not that much. It's used all over the place for FOSS development of course, but there was never a dominant proprietary product used for source control for FOSS development. BitKeeper was the closest to it, and that was only used for a single project AFAIK (the kernel), and using a special gratis license. FOSS development has always been done with FOSS VCSes: CVS, SVN, Mercurial, etc. Now, git has made some inroads against ClearCase and Perforce in corporate software development (as have all the other ones: SVN, CVS, Hg, etc.), but usually only for new projects. ClearCase has been very hard to dislodge in the companies where it's been standardized on (even though it's an absolutely abysmal version-control system that only succeeds in hindering progress). >So if you define the category narrowly enough I've already stated my requirement. Show me a good example of a FOSS product completely taking over for a highly successful and dominant proprietary one, instead of just creating a new market or expanding the market (while not displacing the proprietary product at all). I don't think you'll be able to come up with a single one.
CookieMon 11y ago
> it'll be useless because all your non-nerd friends (and most of your nerd friends too) won't have accounts there Call it Eternal September, the unwashed masses, the quality of online communities dropping as they grow, call it whatever, I'm ready for a reboot, desperate even. You are probably right — there'll be a chicken and egg problem even with hardcore nerdy gnu fans, but if new networks are created that attract nerdy passionate people, they will already be an interesting place, and if they ever happen to go mainstream then we will have at least taken our online "town squares" and public spaces back from private ownership. An exciting new world where people aren't forced to use their real name (and prove it with government ID), where people can post their photos even if they contain nipples, where you might even have control over who can access your data. I'm ready to jump ship, just looking for the boat to jump to.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  If i want to get out of the way of the Eternal September, i just stick to IRC and domain-specific forums.
- mark_l_watson 11y ago
  I just got a GNU Social account last night. Things I like: you can tun your own server (no vendor going out of business problems); it is easy to remote follow people; I picked up some followers by asking people on Twitter/FB/G+ to also follow me on GNU Social. I plan on posting a lot to GNU Social and see what the experience is ike after a month or two.
striking 11y ago
I signed up and am having a great time. 3 people responded to my first message within a minute. Sure it doesn't replace existing communities or networks. But it's creating new ones right now. You just have to believe in it!
- zanny 11y ago
  This. Your family doesn't use HN or reddit, but you do. You can use GNU Social the same way, and maybe it will attract your family to it over time as well. (my mother has a reddit account, gods help me)
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    Apples and oranges. I use HN and Reddit because those have communities centered around certain interests (tech news here on HN for instance). So I come here to chat with people about tech topics. The design of the forum facilitates this, by people posting links to articles and then us discussing them. Places like Facebook are full of random people, generally who you know but for a brand-new social network would be just a bunch of unknown randoms. I'm sorry, I have no interest in trying to strike up a conversation with some random person who could be anywhere on the planet. There needs to be some kind of commonality, some reason to interact. On Reddit I can go to a subreddit centered on a certain esoteric topic and chat with people about that. On OKCupid I can try to chat up women who live near me and have interesting profiles and go out on dates with them. On GNU Social, what am I going to do there? I have no idea.
    - zanny 11y ago
      The nature of gnu social and ostatus is that the users of it, by the nature of it being niche, are technical. The major feed usually contains almost exclusively developers and FOSS activists talking about coding or software freedom. That is the commonality right now on ostatus, and new communities can join it any time and form new centers of commonality.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

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.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  That's getting close to a "no true Scottsman argument." You go through the list, find every successful open source project, and try to explain why it doesn't count. Some of your examples are flat out wrong: Oracle was the big dominant proprietary player when Yahoo decided to risk going with MySQL (which was great, and I can't wait for MySQL to get replaced by Postgres). Now think how many websites are running on WordPress. It pains me to say it (because the code quality is so bad), but that's an example of successful open source project. Git is up there too. Don't like Github? Switch to Sourceforge. Don't like Sourceforge? Run your own server. So if you define the category narrowly enough, anyone can say, "no open source project with these exact characteristics has ever had success," and be right. But because it's been limited so heavily, the example from the past will have no predictive power for the future. You need to find a different way of analyzing the problem.
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    > You go through the list, find every successful open source project, and try to explain why it doesn't count. Wrong, I explain why in each case, they've completely changed the market, they didn't just come in and take over from a successful and dominant proprietary player. >Oracle was the big dominant proprietary player when Yahoo decided to risk going with MySQL No, they weren't. Oracle was never big in web databases. Ever heard of the LAMP stack? There was never a "LAOP" stack. Oracle was never used as part of a stack with Linux and Apache and Perl or PHP. Oracle was used in a bunch of big-iron systems back then (and still are), but they were never a serious player in small webservers. MySQL helped create that market. This is something like claiming that Harley-Davidson took over part of the market owned by the Ford Model T truck. >Now think how many websites are running on WordPress. It pains me to say it (because the code quality is so bad), but that's an example of successful open source project. Which proprietary product did it out-compete? That's right, none. WordPress created a whole new market. It's just like all my other successful FOSS examples. It never successfully out-competed a dominant proprietary product. >Git is up there too. git is probably about the only FOSS product, now that you mention it, that's made any real inroads against proprietary products, and even here, not that much. It's used all over the place for FOSS development of course, but there was never a dominant proprietary product used for source control for FOSS development. BitKeeper was the closest to it, and that was only used for a single project AFAIK (the kernel), and using a special gratis license. FOSS development has always been done with FOSS VCSes: CVS, SVN, Mercurial, etc. Now, git has made some inroads against ClearCase and Perforce in corporate software development (as have all the other ones: SVN, CVS, Hg, etc.), but usually only for new projects. ClearCase has been very hard to dislodge in the companies where it's been standardized on (even though it's an absolutely abysmal version-control system that only succeeds in hindering progress). >So if you define the category narrowly enough I've already stated my requirement. Show me a good example of a FOSS product completely taking over for a highly successful and dominant proprietary one, instead of just creating a new market or expanding the market (while not displacing the proprietary product at all). I don't think you'll be able to come up with a single one.

CookieMon 11y ago

> it'll be useless because all your non-nerd friends (and most of your nerd friends too) won't have accounts there Call it Eternal September, the unwashed masses, the quality of online communities dropping as they grow, call it whatever, I'm ready for a reboot, desperate even. You are probably right — there'll be a chicken and egg problem even with hardcore nerdy gnu fans, but if new networks are created that attract nerdy passionate people, they will already be an interesting place, and if they ever happen to go mainstream then we will have at least taken our online "town squares" and public spaces back from private ownership. An exciting new world where people aren't forced to use their real name (and prove it with government ID), where people can post their photos even if they contain nipples, where you might even have control over who can access your data. I'm ready to jump ship, just looking for the boat to jump to.

Mithaldu 11y ago
If i want to get out of the way of the Eternal September, i just stick to IRC and domain-specific forums.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
I just got a GNU Social account last night. Things I like: you can tun your own server (no vendor going out of business problems); it is easy to remote follow people; I picked up some followers by asking people on Twitter/FB/G+ to also follow me on GNU Social. I plan on posting a lot to GNU Social and see what the experience is ike after a month or two.

striking 11y ago

I signed up and am having a great time. 3 people responded to my first message within a minute. Sure it doesn't replace existing communities or networks. But it's creating new ones right now. You just have to believe in it!

zanny 11y ago
This. Your family doesn't use HN or reddit, but you do. You can use GNU Social the same way, and maybe it will attract your family to it over time as well. (my mother has a reddit account, gods help me)
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  Apples and oranges. I use HN and Reddit because those have communities centered around certain interests (tech news here on HN for instance). So I come here to chat with people about tech topics. The design of the forum facilitates this, by people posting links to articles and then us discussing them. Places like Facebook are full of random people, generally who you know but for a brand-new social network would be just a bunch of unknown randoms. I'm sorry, I have no interest in trying to strike up a conversation with some random person who could be anywhere on the planet. There needs to be some kind of commonality, some reason to interact. On Reddit I can go to a subreddit centered on a certain esoteric topic and chat with people about that. On OKCupid I can try to chat up women who live near me and have interesting profiles and go out on dates with them. On GNU Social, what am I going to do there? I have no idea.
  - zanny 11y ago
    The nature of gnu social and ostatus is that the users of it, by the nature of it being niche, are technical. The major feed usually contains almost exclusively developers and FOSS activists talking about coding or software freedom. That is the commonality right now on ostatus, and new communities can join it any time and form new centers of commonality.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]