7 ms·

GNU Social - diaspora already has a clone that's usable and free software

32 points by omouse 16y ago

kentnl 16y ago
I know its trolling to say "Eww, PHP", but every time these days I see yet another project that runs on it, a little part of me dies inside. :(
- martey 16y ago
  It wouldn't be trolling if you actually explained why you thought PHP was not appropriate for this project. The developers already covered the reasons why they are using it in the FAQ - http://www.gnu.org/software/social/faq.html http://www.gnu.org/software/social/faq.html : Why are you using PHP? Ruby/Python/Perl/A GUI in Visual Basic would be better! Better for who? Look at the success of phpBB and Wordpress -- PHP is pretty much everywhere, and while maybe your favourite language is more elegant, PHP is largely ubiquitous.
  - kentnl 16y ago
    Mostly negative personal experiences. But that aside, saying "its everywhere" is in my opinion the /poorest/ argument in favor of anything technical. MySQL has their slogan as being the "Most popular Open Source database", which, by comparison to PostgreSQL's slogan "The most advanced Open Source database", awful. If you're popular AND good, thats fine, but being popular alone is a poor metric.
    - ebiester 16y ago
      That depends. Are you running it on a shared host? PHP is one of the few you can guarantee to be there. That makes it cheap to run a small instance.
    - mattl 16y ago
      I'm not making the argument from a technical perspective, but from a cultural one. Culturally, this stuff works best if there are bazillions of instances out there, not thirty. PHP offers that, and I don't think I can name anything else that I can say that about.
      - Joeboy 16y ago
        IMO if this thing is worth anything the value is in the protocols, not the code. I hope you're envisaging other implementations. On vaguely which subject, is there some documentation of the protocols anywhere? I had a quick look on the site and couldn't see anything like that.
        mattl 16y ago
        http://ostatus.org/sites/default/files/ostatus-1.0-draft-1-specification.html http://ostatus.org/sites/default/files/ostatus-1.0-draft-1-s...
  - technomancy 16y ago
    > PHP is largely ubiquitous. Easy to deploy, but hard to find skilled hackers who will voluntarily work in it.
    - adharmad 16y ago
      What about facebook?
      - koenigdavidmj 16y ago
        They get props for compiling the bloody thing to C++.
      - there 16y ago
        it's probably going to be hard to get facebook developers to work on gnu social though :)
      - prodigal_erik 16y ago
        Facebook has too much legacy code to switch from PHP to anything sane, but I don't doubt many of them would like to. The Quora guys promptly adopted Python after leaving.
    - mattl 16y ago
      Maybe some people will stick their noses up at working on PHP. I'm not super excited by those people, and I think its a shame when talented developers get embittered into language wars, but I can certainly understand why they happen. I tell everyone working on GNU social that we're going it for the betterment of the world, not their own personal situation. That means running it everywhere.
  - randombit 16y ago
    _Look at the success of phpBB and Wordpress_ Look at the number of horrific security holes in phpBB and Wordpress. Every other release or so fixes some new flaw.
  - lallysingh 16y ago
    PHP doesn't do enough to encourage building maintainable software. The vast majority of code I've seen "in the wild" grows from a thin, simple layer of logic & SQL queries into an insatiable maintenance monster. Note: I'm holding back a lot of language nerd rage, so I'm keeping this post very short.
    - sanswork 16y ago
      PHP doesn't make it any more difficult to write maintainable software it just makes it easier to not write it.
    - mattl 16y ago
      Take a look at the code, it's well structured.
    - AlexMuir 16y ago
      So use a framework. Php's problem is that it doesn't come with an structure. The plus is that you can use any framework that works for you. I use http://www.yiiframework.com http://www.yiiframework.com and it has shaved 70% off my dev time.
- bonquesha99 16y ago
  I bet this project wont harm you inside: http://github.com/huberry/phuby http://github.com/huberry/phuby
- mattl 16y ago
  I was the main pusher for PHP in the early stages of GNU social development -- out of interest, what would you use instead, given our goal of having this installed on as many web servers as possible and as cheaply and easily as possible?
  - kentnl 16y ago
    The "its easy to get it on a webhost" is one I'll give you, its not really even arguable. Sadly this is one of those annoying chicken-egg issues I try rally against. Lots of webhosts are really sub-par, and tend to rip off their clients, and much of these same webhosts refuse to give root access, which is a pre-requisite for most of the non-PHP languages. Sure, PHP will work on these platforms just fine, but as usual, the more people who produce PHP products, the more people out there who'll start dirty nasty webhosts trying to capitalize on that fact, perpetuating the bad hosting situation. As for personal preferences from a technical standpoint, I'd have hoped somebody like GNU would have had the intuition to develop something well developed like a long-lived FCGI servlet application, which seems to be easy to do in every language except PHP. PHP seems optimized for the developer use-case where "Something that runs perpetually and handles each request through the system chain" is "Too hard, and Too confusing", and instead they tailor to the 'Every request reloads everything from scratch' style of programming, which is in my personal opinion a design flaw. Context: I was a PHP programmer for a while. These days I tend to become progressively more and more ashamed of that fact ( except in the obvious case here where I use it to bash it =) ). As a result, I don't frankly care what you use, I like Perl myself these days, but go ahead, use Python or Ruby, both increasingly more common. Heck, use C++ or Java for all I care, there are many decent systems, libraries and web frameworks in those languages ( that is, compared to the pathetic PEAR/PECL + Several dozen frameworks which each and every one of reinvent every wheel twice ), just use one, as long as its NOT PHP.
    - mattl 16y ago
      This is why we'll be recommending a bunch of hosts who are good.
- growt 16y ago
  Yes it is trolling, so please stop it. If this thread gets started on each and every post that is somehow related to PHP it doesn't add to the discussion. Go write the same thing in Ruby or Erlang or whatever if you can't stand the idea of software being written in PHP, or shut up.
mortenjorck 16y ago
I'm sorry, but if Diaspora came out with something that looked like this, I'd lose any faith I had in their chance of success: http://www.gnu.org/software/social/design-mockups/gnusocial.html http://www.gnu.org/software/social/design-mockups/gnusocial.... There's no imagination here. It's just blindly following the leader, just like the legions of Linux desktops that have used a Win95 start menu for the past 15 years. I apologize if this comes across as unduly harsh, but it's mostly that I'm disappointed with the waste of talent. If the GNU Social team can build a working product, the people behind it are obviously capable of good things -- so why are they just making more of the same?
- samratjp 16y ago
  Don't lose faith - Diaspora looks pretty enough http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/07/01/one-month-in.html http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/07/01/one-month-in.html (As a side note, the GNU profile example using Sunny in Philadelphia crew is > funny than the Diaspora profile e.g. :)
  - angusgr 16y ago
    I don't think the criticism was for prettiness, but just for aping existing social network look, feel and functionality. Which the FAQ says up-front is one of their aims: By default, we think it'll ship with a plugin to offer functionality that looks like the current popular social network sites, but plugins for other free software applications are expected.[1] For my 2c, Diaspora looks even more like Facebook in most of the UI design details. I actually don't know if that's going to be an important factor in determining if either platform becomes popular, though. Creating a decentralised social networking service will be difficult. Doing it while also reinventing social networking's user experience is an order of magnitude more difficult, although if they succeed then that's a compelling reason for people to migrate. [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/social/faq.html http://www.gnu.org/software/social/faq.html
  - mattl 16y ago
    Glad you like the Sunny stuff. All the GNU social developers are huge Sunny fans.
stoney 16y ago
I don't think the average non-techie user is going to get very far past: You will need PHP5 (including the OpenID, gd and curl libraries) plus MySQL 5 or later. Apache 2 or later, or lighttpd are supported as web servers. I guess the project is still in the very early stages, so it's probably a bit unfair to criticise them for that at the moment. Hopefully someone (or many people) will offer hosted versions.
- angusgr 16y ago
  Hopefully someone (or many people) will offer hosted versions. I think this is the thing. I also like the idea of techy types (like us) being able to host our own servers for small groups of our less techy friends.
  - mattl 16y ago
    Exactly this.
- mattl 16y ago
  Totally. We're going to make this Wordpress-easy to install, but also have a vast array of reputable service providers offering both gratis and low-cost domain+social+identity packages.
  - stoney 16y ago
    Cool, I look forward to it! I guess the trick will be to get people to view their social network as more like email (decentralised, everyone has accounts with different providers, etc) and less like facebook/twitter/etc (centralised). At the moment people see the network and the host all mashed together as one thing (I go to facebook.com for facebook). Maybe there are some parallels here with the early days of AOL...
dhess 16y ago
It was announced a few months ago, but I only recently found out about Tonika (via wmf's blog): http://5ttt.org/ http://5ttt.org/ It's not directly comparable to Diaspora or GNU Social, but to me it's much more interesting than either: a distributed, secure framework for building an ecosystem of HTTP-based social networking services, rather than simply a free software "clone" of Facebook.

32 points by omouse 16y ago

I know its trolling to say "Eww, PHP", but every time these days I see yet another project that runs on it, a little part of me dies inside. :(

martey 16y ago
It wouldn't be trolling if you actually explained why you thought PHP was not appropriate for this project. The developers already covered the reasons why they are using it in the FAQ - http://www.gnu.org/software/social/faq.html http://www.gnu.org/software/social/faq.html : Why are you using PHP? Ruby/Python/Perl/A GUI in Visual Basic would be better! Better for who? Look at the success of phpBB and Wordpress -- PHP is pretty much everywhere, and while maybe your favourite language is more elegant, PHP is largely ubiquitous.
- kentnl 16y ago
  Mostly negative personal experiences. But that aside, saying "its everywhere" is in my opinion the /poorest/ argument in favor of anything technical. MySQL has their slogan as being the "Most popular Open Source database", which, by comparison to PostgreSQL's slogan "The most advanced Open Source database", awful. If you're popular AND good, thats fine, but being popular alone is a poor metric.
  - ebiester 16y ago
    That depends. Are you running it on a shared host? PHP is one of the few you can guarantee to be there. That makes it cheap to run a small instance.
  - mattl 16y ago
    I'm not making the argument from a technical perspective, but from a cultural one. Culturally, this stuff works best if there are bazillions of instances out there, not thirty. PHP offers that, and I don't think I can name anything else that I can say that about.
    - Joeboy 16y ago
      IMO if this thing is worth anything the value is in the protocols, not the code. I hope you're envisaging other implementations. On vaguely which subject, is there some documentation of the protocols anywhere? I had a quick look on the site and couldn't see anything like that.
      - mattl 16y ago
        http://ostatus.org/sites/default/files/ostatus-1.0-draft-1-specification.html http://ostatus.org/sites/default/files/ostatus-1.0-draft-1-s...
- technomancy 16y ago
  > PHP is largely ubiquitous. Easy to deploy, but hard to find skilled hackers who will voluntarily work in it.
  - adharmad 16y ago
    What about facebook?
    - koenigdavidmj 16y ago
      They get props for compiling the bloody thing to C++.
    - there 16y ago
      it's probably going to be hard to get facebook developers to work on gnu social though :)
    - prodigal_erik 16y ago
      Facebook has too much legacy code to switch from PHP to anything sane, but I don't doubt many of them would like to. The Quora guys promptly adopted Python after leaving.
  - mattl 16y ago
    Maybe some people will stick their noses up at working on PHP. I'm not super excited by those people, and I think its a shame when talented developers get embittered into language wars, but I can certainly understand why they happen. I tell everyone working on GNU social that we're going it for the betterment of the world, not their own personal situation. That means running it everywhere.
- randombit 16y ago
  _Look at the success of phpBB and Wordpress_ Look at the number of horrific security holes in phpBB and Wordpress. Every other release or so fixes some new flaw.
- lallysingh 16y ago
  PHP doesn't do enough to encourage building maintainable software. The vast majority of code I've seen "in the wild" grows from a thin, simple layer of logic & SQL queries into an insatiable maintenance monster. Note: I'm holding back a lot of language nerd rage, so I'm keeping this post very short.
  - sanswork 16y ago
    PHP doesn't make it any more difficult to write maintainable software it just makes it easier to not write it.
  - mattl 16y ago
    Take a look at the code, it's well structured.
  - AlexMuir 16y ago
    So use a framework. Php's problem is that it doesn't come with an structure. The plus is that you can use any framework that works for you. I use http://www.yiiframework.com http://www.yiiframework.com and it has shaved 70% off my dev time.
bonquesha99 16y ago
I bet this project wont harm you inside: http://github.com/huberry/phuby http://github.com/huberry/phuby
mattl 16y ago
I was the main pusher for PHP in the early stages of GNU social development -- out of interest, what would you use instead, given our goal of having this installed on as many web servers as possible and as cheaply and easily as possible?
- kentnl 16y ago
  The "its easy to get it on a webhost" is one I'll give you, its not really even arguable. Sadly this is one of those annoying chicken-egg issues I try rally against. Lots of webhosts are really sub-par, and tend to rip off their clients, and much of these same webhosts refuse to give root access, which is a pre-requisite for most of the non-PHP languages. Sure, PHP will work on these platforms just fine, but as usual, the more people who produce PHP products, the more people out there who'll start dirty nasty webhosts trying to capitalize on that fact, perpetuating the bad hosting situation. As for personal preferences from a technical standpoint, I'd have hoped somebody like GNU would have had the intuition to develop something well developed like a long-lived FCGI servlet application, which seems to be easy to do in every language except PHP. PHP seems optimized for the developer use-case where "Something that runs perpetually and handles each request through the system chain" is "Too hard, and Too confusing", and instead they tailor to the 'Every request reloads everything from scratch' style of programming, which is in my personal opinion a design flaw. Context: I was a PHP programmer for a while. These days I tend to become progressively more and more ashamed of that fact ( except in the obvious case here where I use it to bash it =) ). As a result, I don't frankly care what you use, I like Perl myself these days, but go ahead, use Python or Ruby, both increasingly more common. Heck, use C++ or Java for all I care, there are many decent systems, libraries and web frameworks in those languages ( that is, compared to the pathetic PEAR/PECL + Several dozen frameworks which each and every one of reinvent every wheel twice ), just use one, as long as its NOT PHP.
  - mattl 16y ago
    This is why we'll be recommending a bunch of hosts who are good.
growt 16y ago
Yes it is trolling, so please stop it. If this thread gets started on each and every post that is somehow related to PHP it doesn't add to the discussion. Go write the same thing in Ruby or Erlang or whatever if you can't stand the idea of software being written in PHP, or shut up.

mortenjorck 16y ago

I'm sorry, but if Diaspora came out with something that looked like this, I'd lose any faith I had in their chance of success: http://www.gnu.org/software/social/design-mockups/gnusocial.html http://www.gnu.org/software/social/design-mockups/gnusocial.... There's no imagination here. It's just blindly following the leader, just like the legions of Linux desktops that have used a Win95 start menu for the past 15 years. I apologize if this comes across as unduly harsh, but it's mostly that I'm disappointed with the waste of talent. If the GNU Social team can build a working product, the people behind it are obviously capable of good things -- so why are they just making more of the same?

samratjp 16y ago
Don't lose faith - Diaspora looks pretty enough http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/07/01/one-month-in.html http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/07/01/one-month-in.html (As a side note, the GNU profile example using Sunny in Philadelphia crew is > funny than the Diaspora profile e.g. :)
- angusgr 16y ago
  I don't think the criticism was for prettiness, but just for aping existing social network look, feel and functionality. Which the FAQ says up-front is one of their aims: By default, we think it'll ship with a plugin to offer functionality that looks like the current popular social network sites, but plugins for other free software applications are expected.[1] For my 2c, Diaspora looks even more like Facebook in most of the UI design details. I actually don't know if that's going to be an important factor in determining if either platform becomes popular, though. Creating a decentralised social networking service will be difficult. Doing it while also reinventing social networking's user experience is an order of magnitude more difficult, although if they succeed then that's a compelling reason for people to migrate. [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/social/faq.html http://www.gnu.org/software/social/faq.html
- mattl 16y ago
  Glad you like the Sunny stuff. All the GNU social developers are huge Sunny fans.

stoney 16y ago

I don't think the average non-techie user is going to get very far past: You will need PHP5 (including the OpenID, gd and curl libraries) plus MySQL 5 or later. Apache 2 or later, or lighttpd are supported as web servers. I guess the project is still in the very early stages, so it's probably a bit unfair to criticise them for that at the moment. Hopefully someone (or many people) will offer hosted versions.

angusgr 16y ago
Hopefully someone (or many people) will offer hosted versions. I think this is the thing. I also like the idea of techy types (like us) being able to host our own servers for small groups of our less techy friends.
- mattl 16y ago
  Exactly this.
mattl 16y ago
Totally. We're going to make this Wordpress-easy to install, but also have a vast array of reputable service providers offering both gratis and low-cost domain+social+identity packages.
- stoney 16y ago
  Cool, I look forward to it! I guess the trick will be to get people to view their social network as more like email (decentralised, everyone has accounts with different providers, etc) and less like facebook/twitter/etc (centralised). At the moment people see the network and the host all mashed together as one thing (I go to facebook.com for facebook). Maybe there are some parallels here with the early days of AOL...

dhess 16y ago

It was announced a few months ago, but I only recently found out about Tonika (via wmf's blog): http://5ttt.org/ http://5ttt.org/ It's not directly comparable to Diaspora or GNU Social, but to me it's much more interesting than either: a distributed, secure framework for building an ecosystem of HTTP-based social networking services, rather than simply a free software "clone" of Facebook.