18 ms·

Fediverse – Federated social networks running on free open software

259 points by jaywink 9y ago

ohtwenty 9y ago
Neat to see it all together! I'd heard of most of these projects, but there's some I hadn't heard about so I'll be sure to check them out. One issue I've got is that there's no real rhyme or reason to the layout, or why they're put where they are.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
egypturnash 9y ago
This doesn’t really tell me anything about each network. There’s just a paragraph of free association about them as a physical place, usually with a bunch of misspellings. Presumably you’ve read through the info of each network; synopsize them and tell us what existing corporate site each one is most trying to work like? All the clever positioning breaks down on the iPad mini I’m sitting in bed reading this on. I just get two columns of circular images, with captions nearer to the next image than the one they’re supposed to be for. It seems to work properly if I turn to landscape but... You’re missing Secure Scuttlebutt. And the decentralized video sharing network whose name I can’t remember.
- programmarchy 9y ago
  BitChute? Uses a BitTorrent browser client.
- gnodar 9y ago
  > And the decentralized video sharing network whose name I can’t remember. Most decentralized video sharing services I've seen are built on blockchain which this site explicitly denounces in regards to social media. The only federated video sharing alternative I'm aware of is PeerTube: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
  - egypturnash 9y ago
    Yeah, I think that's it.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 9y ago
    This is splendid. Here's a list of instances that you can try: https://instances.peertu.be/instances https://instances.peertu.be/instances I wonder if - two peers who streams in different resolution (say 360 and 1080p) can share data through P2P to lighten the load for the main instance. - if it will be possible to associate a magnet link (for instance, taken from TPB) with a hosted video to allow for peers to leech from the network.
- f2n 9y ago
  >And the decentralized video sharing network whose name I can’t remember. perhaps https://d.tube https://d.tube ? it was on HN somewhat recently
  - confounded 9y ago
    Media Goblin? https://mediagoblin.org/ https://mediagoblin.org/
  - Vosporos 9y ago
    https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube ? :)
- captchasarehard 9y ago
  Misspellings, yep. Corrected a couple. Stating "what existing corporate site each one is most trying to work like" is not what most developers of those networks would appreciate. It's usually new users, journalists who compare federated networks to corporate ones. Easy to grasp for non-tech users. The experience will always be different. Good idea to name strong points each federated network has compared to other federated neighbours though. Adding PeerTube is on the list. There's a chance it'll work better on iPad mini next time ( but I can't promise).
CharlesW 9y ago
I don't understand what this site does. It appears to be a list of federated social networks (if a very "heavy" and overdone one, but cool), but on the "Fediverse" page (which I guess is the "About" page?) there's a buried and unlinked "Join Fediverse!" call to action with no details about what that might mean. Can anyone provide insight about who this is for and what problem(s) it's supposed to solve?
- captchasarehard 9y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. There are links now. The main goal was to have one place where you could find relevant up-to-date links related to current federated social networks. It does need more thinking on how to make it a more useful place for people completely new to the concept.
bringtheaction 9y ago
Only one of them MIT licensed. All of the others GPL or AGPL. Need more MIT licensed alternatives. Preferably written in Python ^^
- egypturnash 9y ago
  Welcome to your new side project.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  It's good that developers are starting to think seriously about who they want their work to benefit.
  - amelius 9y ago
    We need a license that excludes use by user data harvesting companies, such as Google and Facebook. Even if not legally enforceable, it could make a difference, by clearly dividing between good and bad.
    - ReverseCold 9y ago
      That would make it a nonfree license, but I would use an MIT like license that does this for some projects.
    - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
      Many of those companies, including Google, allow GPL and LGPL and absolutely avoid AGPL because it applies to network services. Now you know.
- gregknicholson 9y ago
  If you're running an instance on your own server and not distributing binaries, you can treat the GPL like the MIT licence. The GPL's copyleft terms only kick in when you redistribute the software. Allowing other people to run the software remotely doesn't count. (This is my understanding; do check for yourself.)
bovermyer 9y ago
I like this. It's non-obvious what it is at first, but it invites you to click on things and explore.
yborg 9y ago
The main determinant of the stickiness of a social network is the network size, and having to click each icon to find this out is stupid when there are oceans of space that could present this information on the main page. That said, this is a sad commentary on open source social networks. The largest would appear to be Mastodon at ~1M 'accounts'. Facebook is what, ~2 billion active? if you want to believe their numbers.
- giancarlostoro 9y ago
  Facebook has a decade on these projects as well though. Also larger financial backing. These projects protocol (forget which ones) are based on an official w3c spec as well. So unlike Facebook these types of networks will be an official part of the web. Facebook can disappear one day but these sites will not go anywhere.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- swerveonem 9y ago
  Let's not forget about diaspora.
- aquova 9y ago
  I expect Mastodon's numbers to sharply increase over the next few months, and I wouldn't be surprised if this month was by far their sharpest increase in users. The 'big' social medias have had over a decade head start, and by being centralized are more user-friendly. I've known about Mastodon for a while, but always wrote it off as "that weird Twitter clone". I've recently decided to try it again and turned my opinion around about it.
- captchasarehard 9y ago
  If you're curious about these networks, it might help to keep an eye on the-federation.info project. That one was made to present numbers. Currently not all networks included, but they're working on it.
zrb05293 9y ago
They forgot about micro.blog
swiley 9y ago
Mastodon is pretty underrated, I tried it a couple years ago and was unimpressed. I just tried it again today after all of the news about facebook and feel very differently. Now they have a nice web UI (nicer than most IMO, which I didn't think they'd be able to pull off with it being federated) and some really nice desktop clients (I really like madonctl with ansi colors enabled, I just added it to my .fvwmrc.)
- fastball 9y ago
  I like Mastodon as well but I really wish it was more than just twitteresque content. I want to be able to have photo albums and such on there as well.
  - webmaven 9y ago
    For that, check out MediaGoblin (also implementing ActivityPub for interoperability): https://mediagoblin.org/ https://mediagoblin.org/
    - crowbahr 9y ago
      Now where is the reddit alternative?
      - sdrothrock 9y ago
        It was open-sourced, so reddit's alternative would be reddit... IIRC, the main competitor (voat) is based off of that source.
        crowbahr 9y ago
        Sure while "Voat" is an alternative they're both centralized. I'm meaning decentralized reddit. Servers as subreddits, federated multi-reddits, only registered server accounts can vote on certain pieces, server by server moderation etc.
kovek 9y ago
Some people are confused about what this is. On this page you see examples of websites you can host yourself. I'll use Mastodon as an example since I've used it. I know about hubzilla slightly but have not used it. Mastodon is a platform you can run on your own server. That server you're running is called an instance. You can also register on an instance someone else is running. Think of a single Mastodon instance as a clone of Twitter. One nice thing is: Your server, your rules. Then, you can also allow your Mastodon instance and its users and their posts to be discoverable by other instances. I think it's said to be federated because no one entity controls the content that is being shared. the information is passed around from instance to instance by rules that are defined on a per-instance basis.
- amelius 9y ago
  Can I assume that these services (e.g. Mastodon and hubzilla) can talk to each other?
  - giancarlostoro 9y ago
    Yes there isnwork by w3c to spec out this protocol. I'm not sure if its under draft or already an official spec though.
    - synchronise 9y ago
      It's called ActivityPub and it's been made an official w3c protocol recently.
      - evolve2k 9y ago
        Announcement Jan 2018: https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6785 https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6785 W3C Recommendation: https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/ https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/
  - avhon1 9y ago
    That's the "federated" part of the article's name.
confounded 9y ago
It’s a HN meme, but please don’t mess with scrolling! Even with JS off it still seems to happen. Regardless, I enjoyed the summaries. One suggestion would be screenshots.
evv 9y ago
Seems to be missing SSB/Patchwork. Technically it is not federated because you can use it without servers at all, but I think the most practical case is to use "pub" servers, which act as federated hubs.
amelius 9y ago
How much safer is my data on these networks compared to Facebook? E.g. is my friends list safe from people outside my network? And also from people running federated servers?
- vermilingua 9y ago
  So long as you trust your server’s admin, your data should be safe from them and non-federated servers. However once your server is linked to another, the whole map of connected servers can see your outward-facing info. If you are DMing users outside your network, you can also consider those messages non-private, as your server, the destination server, and possibly intermediatry servers will have seen it. Services like this would do well to integrate the Signal protocol, although I don’t know how well it scales with federated servers, I can’t recall any actual tests of that functionality yet.
  - robotmay 9y ago
    Ah interesting coincidence; I've just started experimenting with building a social network using the Signal protocol. Not made much progress so far, but I think it's a sensible avenue to explore.
bhhaskin 9y ago
Nice! I just started hosting a GNU social instance for myself. Like it so far.
srikz 9y ago
Sandstorm[1] has not been in news lately ever since they decided to stop their for-profit offerings. But it seems like a good base layer for people to host these apps. [1]: https://www.sandstorm.io https://www.sandstorm.io
Shoothe 9y ago
Movim [0] is also a federated social service. [0]: https://movim.eu/ https://movim.eu/
agentultra 9y ago
I'm curious what the differentiation is between some of these projects. "Written in Rust" or "Written in Go" don't really tell me anything as a user. This is a really cool idea. I never really understood what "the social web" was really about in the mid-aughts. The Internet was always a social tool before Facebook and Flickr and all that happened. It's nice to see it come back around to being distributed again. I hope protocols take over again.
- captchasarehard 9y ago
  That's a challenge. Some networks (exactly the ones you mentioned) are in alpha or pre-aplha stage. It's more of the potential than the real thing we're talking about. Still good to list them all, in case passing by hackers get interested and join the development teams. But it's a good idea to enumerate some unique features where possible, yes. Added to todos.
qwerty456127 9y ago
Aren't all of these a way too complex? All I want of a "social network" is to create a page to express my personality efficiently (by presenting whoever interested some pictures, music and quotes I like, publishing some thoughts of mine perhaps) and let them leave me a message (not to talk, just to leave a message, I will contact them by the contacts they may provide (e.g. WhatsApp/Telegram/email) if and when I want). Nothing else. The page is to be easy to find for everybody and free for me to have (requiring no maintenance nor a hosting subscription). What options match this the best? There are Reddit and HN for crowd discussions, there are WhatsApp and Telegram to chat with friends, there is Twitter (with relaxed message length limit, finally!) to post your updates if you want and to contact people publicly. All we actually need "a facebook" for is to present ourselves.
- EGreg 9y ago
  About.me. Wordpress. The World Wide Web. However, if you want something that actually promotes social, it is NOT posting stuff about what happened in the past. What you read, saw, some news article about what happened. And then enlessly waste time contributing comments about it. No, it's this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
johnchristopher 9y ago
Every time I see a Facebook, privacy or a social network topic on HN and then read about alternatives such as tent.io, mastodon and others I ask myself why the open source world is so bent on reproducing it. Half of those topics dwell on privacy issues (might be fixable), half deals with the effects on the mind and on society. That won't be solved by the open-source software stack.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  Well, people clearly like this kind of social network thing. It makes sense that the open source community would try to replicate the experience without the tracking.
- captchasarehard 9y ago
  You would be even right if you go as far as saying these alternatives do not provide privacy, quite often. It's still all in "the cloud". Yet there's one thing. The content. You'll never get that kind of content in mainstream networks (or maybe you will, some foss groups?) but not in such concentration. Once you become a regular user of "alternatives" there's no turning back (I hope it doesn't sound trite). So the effect on the mind and on society is the answer to your question, imho.
jonathankoren 9y ago
Off topic complaining about the website: What’s up with scrolling on that site? I’m on iOS safari, and when I click through to one of the pages (say Mastsdon) and do a quick “throw scroll” (you know, when you move your thumb quickly across the page and lift up and the page keeps scrolling by inertia), the page stops immediately after my thumb leaves. (See any HN page for a working counter example.) Why does this happen? Why is someone overriding scroll events? Why not just leave stuff alone and allow a consistent experience? Why? Why? Why?
DpdC 9y ago
Vague information. too complicated for the average facebook user. this is positive zero. The average Facebook user needs a visible face to trust. Here there is nothing like it. Tell Elon Musk. That would be a blow. If you really want to win at Facebook, you need to play. with your owns weapons: advertising and people.

259 points by jaywink 9y ago

Neat to see it all together! I'd heard of most of these projects, but there's some I hadn't heard about so I'll be sure to check them out. One issue I've got is that there's no real rhyme or reason to the layout, or why they're put where they are.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

egypturnash 9y ago

This doesn’t really tell me anything about each network. There’s just a paragraph of free association about them as a physical place, usually with a bunch of misspellings. Presumably you’ve read through the info of each network; synopsize them and tell us what existing corporate site each one is most trying to work like? All the clever positioning breaks down on the iPad mini I’m sitting in bed reading this on. I just get two columns of circular images, with captions nearer to the next image than the one they’re supposed to be for. It seems to work properly if I turn to landscape but... You’re missing Secure Scuttlebutt. And the decentralized video sharing network whose name I can’t remember.

programmarchy 9y ago
BitChute? Uses a BitTorrent browser client.
gnodar 9y ago
> And the decentralized video sharing network whose name I can’t remember. Most decentralized video sharing services I've seen are built on blockchain which this site explicitly denounces in regards to social media. The only federated video sharing alternative I'm aware of is PeerTube: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
- egypturnash 9y ago
  Yeah, I think that's it.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 9y ago
  This is splendid. Here's a list of instances that you can try: https://instances.peertu.be/instances https://instances.peertu.be/instances I wonder if - two peers who streams in different resolution (say 360 and 1080p) can share data through P2P to lighten the load for the main instance. - if it will be possible to associate a magnet link (for instance, taken from TPB) with a hosted video to allow for peers to leech from the network.
f2n 9y ago
>And the decentralized video sharing network whose name I can’t remember. perhaps https://d.tube https://d.tube ? it was on HN somewhat recently
- confounded 9y ago
  Media Goblin? https://mediagoblin.org/ https://mediagoblin.org/
- Vosporos 9y ago
  https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube ? :)
captchasarehard 9y ago
Misspellings, yep. Corrected a couple. Stating "what existing corporate site each one is most trying to work like" is not what most developers of those networks would appreciate. It's usually new users, journalists who compare federated networks to corporate ones. Easy to grasp for non-tech users. The experience will always be different. Good idea to name strong points each federated network has compared to other federated neighbours though. Adding PeerTube is on the list. There's a chance it'll work better on iPad mini next time ( but I can't promise).

CharlesW 9y ago

I don't understand what this site does. It appears to be a list of federated social networks (if a very "heavy" and overdone one, but cool), but on the "Fediverse" page (which I guess is the "About" page?) there's a buried and unlinked "Join Fediverse!" call to action with no details about what that might mean. Can anyone provide insight about who this is for and what problem(s) it's supposed to solve?

captchasarehard 9y ago
Thanks for the feedback. There are links now. The main goal was to have one place where you could find relevant up-to-date links related to current federated social networks. It does need more thinking on how to make it a more useful place for people completely new to the concept.

bringtheaction 9y ago

Only one of them MIT licensed. All of the others GPL or AGPL. Need more MIT licensed alternatives. Preferably written in Python ^^

egypturnash 9y ago
Welcome to your new side project.
jessaustin 9y ago
It's good that developers are starting to think seriously about who they want their work to benefit.
- amelius 9y ago
  We need a license that excludes use by user data harvesting companies, such as Google and Facebook. Even if not legally enforceable, it could make a difference, by clearly dividing between good and bad.
  - ReverseCold 9y ago
    That would make it a nonfree license, but I would use an MIT like license that does this for some projects.
  - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
    Many of those companies, including Google, allow GPL and LGPL and absolutely avoid AGPL because it applies to network services. Now you know.
gregknicholson 9y ago
If you're running an instance on your own server and not distributing binaries, you can treat the GPL like the MIT licence. The GPL's copyleft terms only kick in when you redistribute the software. Allowing other people to run the software remotely doesn't count. (This is my understanding; do check for yourself.)

bovermyer 9y ago

I like this. It's non-obvious what it is at first, but it invites you to click on things and explore.

yborg 9y ago

The main determinant of the stickiness of a social network is the network size, and having to click each icon to find this out is stupid when there are oceans of space that could present this information on the main page. That said, this is a sad commentary on open source social networks. The largest would appear to be Mastodon at ~1M 'accounts'. Facebook is what, ~2 billion active? if you want to believe their numbers.

giancarlostoro 9y ago
Facebook has a decade on these projects as well though. Also larger financial backing. These projects protocol (forget which ones) are based on an official w3c spec as well. So unlike Facebook these types of networks will be an official part of the web. Facebook can disappear one day but these sites will not go anywhere.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
swerveonem 9y ago
Let's not forget about diaspora.
aquova 9y ago
I expect Mastodon's numbers to sharply increase over the next few months, and I wouldn't be surprised if this month was by far their sharpest increase in users. The 'big' social medias have had over a decade head start, and by being centralized are more user-friendly. I've known about Mastodon for a while, but always wrote it off as "that weird Twitter clone". I've recently decided to try it again and turned my opinion around about it.
captchasarehard 9y ago
If you're curious about these networks, it might help to keep an eye on the-federation.info project. That one was made to present numbers. Currently not all networks included, but they're working on it.

zrb05293 9y ago

They forgot about micro.blog

swiley 9y ago

Mastodon is pretty underrated, I tried it a couple years ago and was unimpressed. I just tried it again today after all of the news about facebook and feel very differently. Now they have a nice web UI (nicer than most IMO, which I didn't think they'd be able to pull off with it being federated) and some really nice desktop clients (I really like madonctl with ansi colors enabled, I just added it to my .fvwmrc.)

fastball 9y ago
I like Mastodon as well but I really wish it was more than just twitteresque content. I want to be able to have photo albums and such on there as well.
- webmaven 9y ago
  For that, check out MediaGoblin (also implementing ActivityPub for interoperability): https://mediagoblin.org/ https://mediagoblin.org/
  - crowbahr 9y ago
    Now where is the reddit alternative?
    - sdrothrock 9y ago
      It was open-sourced, so reddit's alternative would be reddit... IIRC, the main competitor (voat) is based off of that source.
      - crowbahr 9y ago
        Sure while "Voat" is an alternative they're both centralized. I'm meaning decentralized reddit. Servers as subreddits, federated multi-reddits, only registered server accounts can vote on certain pieces, server by server moderation etc.

kovek 9y ago

Some people are confused about what this is. On this page you see examples of websites you can host yourself. I'll use Mastodon as an example since I've used it. I know about hubzilla slightly but have not used it. Mastodon is a platform you can run on your own server. That server you're running is called an instance. You can also register on an instance someone else is running. Think of a single Mastodon instance as a clone of Twitter. One nice thing is: Your server, your rules. Then, you can also allow your Mastodon instance and its users and their posts to be discoverable by other instances. I think it's said to be federated because no one entity controls the content that is being shared. the information is passed around from instance to instance by rules that are defined on a per-instance basis.

amelius 9y ago
Can I assume that these services (e.g. Mastodon and hubzilla) can talk to each other?
- giancarlostoro 9y ago
  Yes there isnwork by w3c to spec out this protocol. I'm not sure if its under draft or already an official spec though.
  - synchronise 9y ago
    It's called ActivityPub and it's been made an official w3c protocol recently.
    - evolve2k 9y ago
      Announcement Jan 2018: https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6785 https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6785 W3C Recommendation: https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/ https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/REC-activitypub-20180123/
- avhon1 9y ago
  That's the "federated" part of the article's name.

confounded 9y ago

It’s a HN meme, but please don’t mess with scrolling! Even with JS off it still seems to happen. Regardless, I enjoyed the summaries. One suggestion would be screenshots.

evv 9y ago

Seems to be missing SSB/Patchwork. Technically it is not federated because you can use it without servers at all, but I think the most practical case is to use "pub" servers, which act as federated hubs.

amelius 9y ago

How much safer is my data on these networks compared to Facebook? E.g. is my friends list safe from people outside my network? And also from people running federated servers?

vermilingua 9y ago
So long as you trust your server’s admin, your data should be safe from them and non-federated servers. However once your server is linked to another, the whole map of connected servers can see your outward-facing info. If you are DMing users outside your network, you can also consider those messages non-private, as your server, the destination server, and possibly intermediatry servers will have seen it. Services like this would do well to integrate the Signal protocol, although I don’t know how well it scales with federated servers, I can’t recall any actual tests of that functionality yet.
- robotmay 9y ago
  Ah interesting coincidence; I've just started experimenting with building a social network using the Signal protocol. Not made much progress so far, but I think it's a sensible avenue to explore.

bhhaskin 9y ago

Nice! I just started hosting a GNU social instance for myself. Like it so far.

srikz 9y ago

Sandstorm[1] has not been in news lately ever since they decided to stop their for-profit offerings. But it seems like a good base layer for people to host these apps. [1]: https://www.sandstorm.io https://www.sandstorm.io

Shoothe 9y ago

Movim [0] is also a federated social service. [0]: https://movim.eu/ https://movim.eu/

agentultra 9y ago

I'm curious what the differentiation is between some of these projects. "Written in Rust" or "Written in Go" don't really tell me anything as a user. This is a really cool idea. I never really understood what "the social web" was really about in the mid-aughts. The Internet was always a social tool before Facebook and Flickr and all that happened. It's nice to see it come back around to being distributed again. I hope protocols take over again.

captchasarehard 9y ago
That's a challenge. Some networks (exactly the ones you mentioned) are in alpha or pre-aplha stage. It's more of the potential than the real thing we're talking about. Still good to list them all, in case passing by hackers get interested and join the development teams. But it's a good idea to enumerate some unique features where possible, yes. Added to todos.

qwerty456127 9y ago

Aren't all of these a way too complex? All I want of a "social network" is to create a page to express my personality efficiently (by presenting whoever interested some pictures, music and quotes I like, publishing some thoughts of mine perhaps) and let them leave me a message (not to talk, just to leave a message, I will contact them by the contacts they may provide (e.g. WhatsApp/Telegram/email) if and when I want). Nothing else. The page is to be easy to find for everybody and free for me to have (requiring no maintenance nor a hosting subscription). What options match this the best? There are Reddit and HN for crowd discussions, there are WhatsApp and Telegram to chat with friends, there is Twitter (with relaxed message length limit, finally!) to post your updates if you want and to contact people publicly. All we actually need "a facebook" for is to present ourselves.

EGreg 9y ago
About.me. Wordpress. The World Wide Web. However, if you want something that actually promotes social, it is NOT posting stuff about what happened in the past. What you read, saw, some news article about what happened. And then enlessly waste time contributing comments about it. No, it's this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

johnchristopher 9y ago

Every time I see a Facebook, privacy or a social network topic on HN and then read about alternatives such as tent.io, mastodon and others I ask myself why the open source world is so bent on reproducing it. Half of those topics dwell on privacy issues (might be fixable), half deals with the effects on the mind and on society. That won't be solved by the open-source software stack.

s73v3r_ 9y ago
Well, people clearly like this kind of social network thing. It makes sense that the open source community would try to replicate the experience without the tracking.
captchasarehard 9y ago
You would be even right if you go as far as saying these alternatives do not provide privacy, quite often. It's still all in "the cloud". Yet there's one thing. The content. You'll never get that kind of content in mainstream networks (or maybe you will, some foss groups?) but not in such concentration. Once you become a regular user of "alternatives" there's no turning back (I hope it doesn't sound trite). So the effect on the mind and on society is the answer to your question, imho.

jonathankoren 9y ago

Off topic complaining about the website: What’s up with scrolling on that site? I’m on iOS safari, and when I click through to one of the pages (say Mastsdon) and do a quick “throw scroll” (you know, when you move your thumb quickly across the page and lift up and the page keeps scrolling by inertia), the page stops immediately after my thumb leaves. (See any HN page for a working counter example.) Why does this happen? Why is someone overriding scroll events? Why not just leave stuff alone and allow a consistent experience? Why? Why? Why?

DpdC 9y ago

Vague information. too complicated for the average facebook user. this is positive zero. The average Facebook user needs a visible face to trust. Here there is nothing like it. Tell Elon Musk. That would be a blow. If you really want to win at Facebook, you need to play. with your owns weapons: advertising and people.