6 ms·

Help fund an open source Facebook alternative: Appleseed

49 points by michaelchisari 16y ago

johnny22 16y ago
it's just too bad you never got back to me last year mike (via red emmas) :( not sure how else to contact you. I'll delete this post later
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  Not sure who this is, but my email is michael.chisari@gmail.com if you need to get in touch.
  - johnny22 16y ago
    cool thanks. and now i realize it's too late to delete. Sorry folks :(
wccrawford 16y ago
"Install your Appleseed node ($1,000 minimum) Free installation of Appleseed on your servers for any Appleseed node with less than 1,000 users." Is it FOSS or not? It sure doesn't sound like it is. "We've already accomplished much of what we set out to do" Then why are you asking for $10k? There's a lot of text on that page that directly contradicts other text on the page.
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  It doesn't get much more open source than this: http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed Source has been available under the GPL v2 for quite a while now. And we're asking for funding, because there's always more to do. The foundation is set, the features are there, but a project like this is never really done. There's security, threat modeling, scalability and stress testing, and just plain development of future features and bug testing.
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  To address the money issue further, the $1,000 minimum donation means the donor receives consulting services setting up and administering a node. Anyone with experience with LAMP is able to set up their own node without paying a dime. And as for funding, I've been working on Appleseed almost full time for quite a while now (started in 2004). I've been working a full time job as well most of the time I've been doing this, so at some point, I'd like to be able to focus on this exclusively, and funding can help make that happen, which means the software will improve faster as a result.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Maybe off topic but I LOL at doublespeak like "$1,000 minimum donation", and the cognitive dissonance that lies at its foundation. I can just see the whole story behind it: the idealists who preach the 'software should be FREE!' mantra, the myopic hatred against software companies who (gasp) charge money for their software, the realization (after trying to make worth while software themselves) that it actually costs money to, you know, live and pay expenses, and the grasping for straws that is "let's call it a 'minimum donation, then we're not actually charging for it". Not to pick on these guys, I don't know them and for all I know they're the outlier, it's just such a cliche that it's becoming an indicator of a team that has much to learn about how the software business works.
    - michaelchisari 16y ago
      That's a donation, not a fee, and this isn't a business model, it's a perk for making a donation. If you look at similar projects on sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, that's how crowd-sourced funding works, with perks provided to people who donate (like t-shirts and servers for the Diaspora funders). As for "software should be free", the idealists have been qualifying that with "Free as in Speech, Not as in Beer" for as long as I can remember, so we're all fully aware of the material concerns required.
      - roel_v 16y ago
        Seriously, come on. A rose is a rose is a rose. "minimum donation" = fee "perk for making a donation" = services bought "crowd-sourced funding" = a bunch of customers pay for products or services. I mean I'm not being negative here or criticizing you, but let's call things like they are. Why make up fluffy feel-good terms for things for which we already have perfectly viable words? Referencing the Diaspora guys basically reinforces my point re: the inexperienced team - a bunch of kids straight out of college why manage to hype together 200k and then turn out a complete disaster after a couple of months does not a trustworthy example make.
heresy 16y ago
Why don't you join forces with Diaspora? Or, why would someone decide to donate to you over Diaspora?
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  To answer your first question, I did email them back in May offering help but never received a response. I had a chance to catch up with them at the Federated Social Web Conference, and spoke with a lot of similar projects and we're all interested in a common protocol, so in that sense, we're all "joined forces." However, since their project is Ruby on Rails + MongoDB, and Appleseed is LAMP, beyond the protocol, there's not much collaboration on codebases that can happen. As for why to donate to Appleseed over Diaspora: 1. Appleseed is a much more mature codebase. We've been in development for a while now, and already have around 80 nodes in the wild. 2. Appleseed has a much more experienced developer at the helm. I've been programming web apps professionally since 1997. 3. We have a much clearer roadmap and protocol specification compared to Diaspora, which has yet to hammer out most any specifics in that arena. 4. Appleseed is much easier to install (about 5 min for anyone who's installed LAMP software before). 5. Appleseed is more ambitious. Diaspora aims to be a social networking app, but Appleseed is a social framework, with an extensible MVC model, meant for building new social components. 6. Diaspora already has $200k. :)
  - nlco 16y ago
    is there any work on a common protocol yet? (mostly looking for a link)
    - michaelchisari 16y ago
      That's a good question, without a simple answer, but here goes: Right now, we're using something I call QuickSocial: http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/quicksocial/ http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/quicksocial/ This protocol is very much in flux, and being modified regularly. And it may not be the protocol that Appleseed ends up with. Appleseed is a very flexible system, all the protocol work has been abstracted out into framework "hooks" (plugins), and you can easily replace one set of protocol hooks with another, or even have multiple protocol hooks operating concurrently. So at some point, there will be support for OAuth, OStatus, Webfinger, etc. And if a unified protocol emerges as a standard, Appleseed will be updated with a new set of protocol hooks to support it. The advantage of using a homegrown protocol like QuickSocial is that we can focus on userflow and end features without having to cater to another protocol specification, which is fine since we're at such an early point with distributed social networking protocols anyways.
petervandijck 16y ago
Is there a site somewhere about this project (not just github)? Screenshots? Features? Information? Can't seem to find a link anywhere? Edit: here we go: http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/ http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  Here's all the resources associated with Appleseed. They're on the indiegogo page, but they're a little hard to find. - General Links Main: http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/ http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/ Fundraising: http://www.indiegogo.com/Open-Source-Social-Networking http://www.indiegogo.com/Open-Source-Social-Networking Drumbeat: http://www.drumbeat.org/project/appleseed-social-networking http://www.drumbeat.org/project/appleseed-social-networking Beta Test: http://appleseedproject.org http://appleseedproject.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=366560616455 http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=366560616455 Twitter: http://twitter.com/appleseedproj http://twitter.com/appleseedproj Identi.ca: http://identi.ca/appleseedproj http://identi.ca/appleseedproj Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/appleseedproj http://www.youtube.com/user/appleseedproj - Development Links Source Code: http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed Packages: http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/download/ http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/download/ Bug Tracking: http://appleseedproj.lighthouseapp.com http://appleseedproj.lighthouseapp.com Discussion Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/open-social-networking http://groups.google.com/group/open-social-networking
mdasen 16y ago
I have to ask since your site says it (http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/ http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/): how is the software maintaining the privacy and security of my data? The reason I ask is that I don't see how that's possible. Here's an example. Let's say that I'm on MySeed and you're on Applebook. We friend each other and, lovely, now my posts get aggregated to your feed and your posts get aggregated to my feed. Life is good. Then Applebook turns evil and decides that it's going to make all posts open (they have the source code and the data). Well, now I no longer have privacy. Heck, let's say I post something and it gets aggregated to your feed. Then I delete it. Does Applebook then delete it? There's no real way to force a deletion. And I realize that anyone who saw it could have just done a copy/paste and saved the post, but it's different when it's happening automatically. The only way I could see this working is through public key encryption. When we friend each other, I get your public key and you get mine. You can then make your postings available encrypted with my public key and when I get them I can decrypt them with my private key. BUT I must not store my private key with MySeed since then MySeed could decrypt your posts and you no longer have privacy. Right now, browsers don't have support for encryption like this where part of a web page will be encrypted not by the server, but in the data storage. But even that has problems. It means that if you're friends with 500 people, 500 copies of any status message you post have to be encrypted and stored separately for each of those 500 people. Considering the scaling issues that Facebook has to contend with, I think adding a step where everything people post gets encrypted and stored N times (N being the number of friends you have) would be troublesome. Heck, what about pictures? It's one thing to encrypt and store a short 140byte status 500 times. It's another to do that for an 80k photo. tl;dr: If we're friends and you're on another service, what stops your service from aggregating my postings and then making them public to the world against my wishes?
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  First off, your feed won't provide a full copy of your data, just a summary and a link. Other protocols may not work that way, though, but that's how Appleseed's protocol works. If access is rescinded, that user loses access to view that data. If I post a journal update or a photo, and it shows up in your feed, and then I restrict access to it, if your feed doesn't properly delete the entry, then you can still see the summary or the thumbnail, but clicking on it results in an access denied error. Well, let's focus on your premise: This is all based on a node turning evil. That's a very big problem, and one not easily solved. There is a basic issue here, in that users, when they trust other users, they also, on some level, trust the that user's community (node). I'm open to suggestions on how to mitigate that. With social networking, there is always a level of trust that has to be human-based, not tech-based. But tools can be used to help humans determine trust. Appleseed has node control, which means that administrators can "block" whole nodes if they're behaving badly. This usually means spam, but it can also mean if a node is acting in bad faith (ie, it's revealed that AppleBook is selling non-local user data), or if they're abusing the protocol. That can act as a certain type of social "shunning" on a node-to-node basis. Admins can also "trust" nodes, which means you inherit their block list. This means, theoretically, if a node goes bad, and some nodes realize this, it'll propagate through the Appleseed network until that node is isolated. I think there are other approaches, and some we haven't thought up yet, but one thing I'm most interested in is social pressure, and how it can easily be applied to bad nodes. I think encryption is interesting, but I think we'll actually have to move into the browser space in order to have a reasonable UX.
ashitvora 16y ago
Do we really need one more Social Network?
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  Yes, because a distributed protocol means that it will effectively be the last social network.
  - metamemetics 16y ago
    that's pretty delusional. Users don't care about protocols, they care about interface usability. And the ONLY thing that makes a social network valuable is its users. There will always be more room for more niche social networks with well defined UX constraints if developers continue the facebook trend of bloat sites with ambiguous constraints.
    - michaelchisari 16y ago
      It's really quite simple. Once an open protocol is established and popularized, then social networks are just software that connect into the distributed network. Think of it in terms of SMTP and e-mail. Mail providers come and go, but nobody has to move email providers because all their friends changed emails.
      - metamemetics 16y ago
        > Once an open protocol is established and popularized "popularized" is the most important and hardest part, you can't risk using it in an assumption. The problem domain you are working in is the exemplar of the chicken-and-egg user growth difficulties. Also if it really was just a protocol: the only thing being developed would be QuickSocial, it would not be called a social network because a protocol is not the place creating the social experience, it would be marketed to developers and bloggers as an improved and easy to add replacement for OpenID, 50% of the work would be on rigorously defining QuickSocial specification, the other 50% on developing plugins for all platforms and languages.
allantyoung 16y ago
Don't "they" know that the Appleseed family is very litigious?
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  I was going to rename it to Bananaseed, but I think someone with that name killed a bunch of nurses in Portland. /30rock
joe_the_user 16y ago
Just for kicks, Let me ask how a project like this could provide possibly any more privacy than a situation of a group of people who each having a mailing list with which they email messages to their friends? Seriously. Maybe I'm not thinking clearly tonight but I can't see any plausible way to provide "more security" than the security of deciding what message to send to what friend. Am I missing something. -- I mean, you just aren't going to keep your friends from forwarding your messages. They'll video-type to screen if they need to. You might decide not to forward them more messages but that's different.
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  I mean, you just aren't going to keep your friends from forwarding your messages. There's a difference between privacy and trust. Software can't predict when your best friend is going to turn against you for emotional or social reasons. If you share something with ten friends, and one of them betrays your trust, technology can't predict or prevent that. However, if you share something with ten friends, and they all act properly and trustworthy, you have a reasonable expectation that your data won't be available to anybody but those ten friends.
  - joe_the_user 16y ago
    Agree with this but it doesn't answer my original question. Why bother with encryption when each person having an email list would work as well as anything for distributing information? Why? It's like UPS buying armored cars to deliver your packages with but still plunking the package down outside your house when you're not home. I have a reasonable expectation of privacy sending email through a webmail account. If I was sending the corporate crown-jewels or something, I'd encrypt my message but email these days is appropriately secure. I'm asking these questions with the best intentions too. I like the idea of a Facebook alternative - I'm working on my project along those lines in fact. The thing is that to offer an alternative, you've got to be clear what services Facebook offers and how one could offer them better. It seems like a lot of upset over Facebook confuses Facebook's abuse of user data with the inherent insecurity that comes from sharing information with any group of people. We'll have to educate ourselves and our users about the difference if we want to have this Facebook alternative thing get off the ground. As far as I can tell, almost everything Facebook provides is something you can do with the "regular web". Facebook simply puts everything in a nice package (and that nice package matters a lot as we've seen). If you had a script which aggregated your friend's blogs, tweets and emails, you would have something like Facebook. The only service that would be required is friend-discovery and perhaps a "like" messaging system. The rest could just involve wrapping/packaging existing stuff. The thing about Facebook and walled-gardens in general is that they really entice people who otherwise wouldn't participate in "cyber life" to come onto the web. But Facebook users hopefully will also be learning that their walled-garden doesn't offer the protection it claims and hopefully they'll realize that nothing can simultaneously offer free-sharing and perfect privacy in the modern era - your friends' friends just aren't necessarily going to be your friends etc. So we "Facebook alternativists" have to offer something that gives the good stuff that a social network can realistically provide for people who are over the illusion that they can live in a one-identity, total-trust world.
brinchj 16y ago
Perhaps my PHP-design skills are outdated, but is it normal to have a 1500 line index.php containing a mixture of configuation code, PHP functions and HTML? Also, don't you use any template system? ... I cloned the github project, only to find myself confused :)
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  The index.php file is the install file. The actual system is re-routed using mod_rewrite. After installation, it never uses index.php again. Also, don't you use any template system? No, actually, I use a different approach. Using simple_html_dom, I target the dom within the controller. The views are layout skeletons that are then populated with data. Check out the example component's comments for more info.

it's just too bad you never got back to me last year mike (via red emmas) :( not sure how else to contact you. I'll delete this post later

michaelchisari 16y ago
Not sure who this is, but my email is michael.chisari@gmail.com if you need to get in touch.
- johnny22 16y ago
  cool thanks. and now i realize it's too late to delete. Sorry folks :(

wccrawford 16y ago

"Install your Appleseed node ($1,000 minimum) Free installation of Appleseed on your servers for any Appleseed node with less than 1,000 users." Is it FOSS or not? It sure doesn't sound like it is. "We've already accomplished much of what we set out to do" Then why are you asking for $10k? There's a lot of text on that page that directly contradicts other text on the page.

michaelchisari 16y ago
It doesn't get much more open source than this: http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed Source has been available under the GPL v2 for quite a while now. And we're asking for funding, because there's always more to do. The foundation is set, the features are there, but a project like this is never really done. There's security, threat modeling, scalability and stress testing, and just plain development of future features and bug testing.
michaelchisari 16y ago
To address the money issue further, the $1,000 minimum donation means the donor receives consulting services setting up and administering a node. Anyone with experience with LAMP is able to set up their own node without paying a dime. And as for funding, I've been working on Appleseed almost full time for quite a while now (started in 2004). I've been working a full time job as well most of the time I've been doing this, so at some point, I'd like to be able to focus on this exclusively, and funding can help make that happen, which means the software will improve faster as a result.
- roel_v 16y ago
  Maybe off topic but I LOL at doublespeak like "$1,000 minimum donation", and the cognitive dissonance that lies at its foundation. I can just see the whole story behind it: the idealists who preach the 'software should be FREE!' mantra, the myopic hatred against software companies who (gasp) charge money for their software, the realization (after trying to make worth while software themselves) that it actually costs money to, you know, live and pay expenses, and the grasping for straws that is "let's call it a 'minimum donation, then we're not actually charging for it". Not to pick on these guys, I don't know them and for all I know they're the outlier, it's just such a cliche that it's becoming an indicator of a team that has much to learn about how the software business works.
  - michaelchisari 16y ago
    That's a donation, not a fee, and this isn't a business model, it's a perk for making a donation. If you look at similar projects on sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, that's how crowd-sourced funding works, with perks provided to people who donate (like t-shirts and servers for the Diaspora funders). As for "software should be free", the idealists have been qualifying that with "Free as in Speech, Not as in Beer" for as long as I can remember, so we're all fully aware of the material concerns required.
    - roel_v 16y ago
      Seriously, come on. A rose is a rose is a rose. "minimum donation" = fee "perk for making a donation" = services bought "crowd-sourced funding" = a bunch of customers pay for products or services. I mean I'm not being negative here or criticizing you, but let's call things like they are. Why make up fluffy feel-good terms for things for which we already have perfectly viable words? Referencing the Diaspora guys basically reinforces my point re: the inexperienced team - a bunch of kids straight out of college why manage to hype together 200k and then turn out a complete disaster after a couple of months does not a trustworthy example make.

heresy 16y ago

Why don't you join forces with Diaspora? Or, why would someone decide to donate to you over Diaspora?

michaelchisari 16y ago
To answer your first question, I did email them back in May offering help but never received a response. I had a chance to catch up with them at the Federated Social Web Conference, and spoke with a lot of similar projects and we're all interested in a common protocol, so in that sense, we're all "joined forces." However, since their project is Ruby on Rails + MongoDB, and Appleseed is LAMP, beyond the protocol, there's not much collaboration on codebases that can happen. As for why to donate to Appleseed over Diaspora: 1. Appleseed is a much more mature codebase. We've been in development for a while now, and already have around 80 nodes in the wild. 2. Appleseed has a much more experienced developer at the helm. I've been programming web apps professionally since 1997. 3. We have a much clearer roadmap and protocol specification compared to Diaspora, which has yet to hammer out most any specifics in that arena. 4. Appleseed is much easier to install (about 5 min for anyone who's installed LAMP software before). 5. Appleseed is more ambitious. Diaspora aims to be a social networking app, but Appleseed is a social framework, with an extensible MVC model, meant for building new social components. 6. Diaspora already has $200k. :)
- nlco 16y ago
  is there any work on a common protocol yet? (mostly looking for a link)
  - michaelchisari 16y ago
    That's a good question, without a simple answer, but here goes: Right now, we're using something I call QuickSocial: http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/quicksocial/ http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/quicksocial/ This protocol is very much in flux, and being modified regularly. And it may not be the protocol that Appleseed ends up with. Appleseed is a very flexible system, all the protocol work has been abstracted out into framework "hooks" (plugins), and you can easily replace one set of protocol hooks with another, or even have multiple protocol hooks operating concurrently. So at some point, there will be support for OAuth, OStatus, Webfinger, etc. And if a unified protocol emerges as a standard, Appleseed will be updated with a new set of protocol hooks to support it. The advantage of using a homegrown protocol like QuickSocial is that we can focus on userflow and end features without having to cater to another protocol specification, which is fine since we're at such an early point with distributed social networking protocols anyways.

petervandijck 16y ago

Is there a site somewhere about this project (not just github)? Screenshots? Features? Information? Can't seem to find a link anywhere? Edit: here we go: http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/ http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

michaelchisari 16y ago
Here's all the resources associated with Appleseed. They're on the indiegogo page, but they're a little hard to find. - General Links Main: http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/ http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/ Fundraising: http://www.indiegogo.com/Open-Source-Social-Networking http://www.indiegogo.com/Open-Source-Social-Networking Drumbeat: http://www.drumbeat.org/project/appleseed-social-networking http://www.drumbeat.org/project/appleseed-social-networking Beta Test: http://appleseedproject.org http://appleseedproject.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=366560616455 http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=366560616455 Twitter: http://twitter.com/appleseedproj http://twitter.com/appleseedproj Identi.ca: http://identi.ca/appleseedproj http://identi.ca/appleseedproj Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/appleseedproj http://www.youtube.com/user/appleseedproj - Development Links Source Code: http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed Packages: http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/download/ http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/download/ Bug Tracking: http://appleseedproj.lighthouseapp.com http://appleseedproj.lighthouseapp.com Discussion Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/open-social-networking http://groups.google.com/group/open-social-networking

mdasen 16y ago

I have to ask since your site says it (http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/ http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/): how is the software maintaining the privacy and security of my data? The reason I ask is that I don't see how that's possible. Here's an example. Let's say that I'm on MySeed and you're on Applebook. We friend each other and, lovely, now my posts get aggregated to your feed and your posts get aggregated to my feed. Life is good. Then Applebook turns evil and decides that it's going to make all posts open (they have the source code and the data). Well, now I no longer have privacy. Heck, let's say I post something and it gets aggregated to your feed. Then I delete it. Does Applebook then delete it? There's no real way to force a deletion. And I realize that anyone who saw it could have just done a copy/paste and saved the post, but it's different when it's happening automatically. The only way I could see this working is through public key encryption. When we friend each other, I get your public key and you get mine. You can then make your postings available encrypted with my public key and when I get them I can decrypt them with my private key. BUT I must not store my private key with MySeed since then MySeed could decrypt your posts and you no longer have privacy. Right now, browsers don't have support for encryption like this where part of a web page will be encrypted not by the server, but in the data storage. But even that has problems. It means that if you're friends with 500 people, 500 copies of any status message you post have to be encrypted and stored separately for each of those 500 people. Considering the scaling issues that Facebook has to contend with, I think adding a step where everything people post gets encrypted and stored N times (N being the number of friends you have) would be troublesome. Heck, what about pictures? It's one thing to encrypt and store a short 140byte status 500 times. It's another to do that for an 80k photo. tl;dr: If we're friends and you're on another service, what stops your service from aggregating my postings and then making them public to the world against my wishes?

michaelchisari 16y ago
First off, your feed won't provide a full copy of your data, just a summary and a link. Other protocols may not work that way, though, but that's how Appleseed's protocol works. If access is rescinded, that user loses access to view that data. If I post a journal update or a photo, and it shows up in your feed, and then I restrict access to it, if your feed doesn't properly delete the entry, then you can still see the summary or the thumbnail, but clicking on it results in an access denied error. Well, let's focus on your premise: This is all based on a node turning evil. That's a very big problem, and one not easily solved. There is a basic issue here, in that users, when they trust other users, they also, on some level, trust the that user's community (node). I'm open to suggestions on how to mitigate that. With social networking, there is always a level of trust that has to be human-based, not tech-based. But tools can be used to help humans determine trust. Appleseed has node control, which means that administrators can "block" whole nodes if they're behaving badly. This usually means spam, but it can also mean if a node is acting in bad faith (ie, it's revealed that AppleBook is selling non-local user data), or if they're abusing the protocol. That can act as a certain type of social "shunning" on a node-to-node basis. Admins can also "trust" nodes, which means you inherit their block list. This means, theoretically, if a node goes bad, and some nodes realize this, it'll propagate through the Appleseed network until that node is isolated. I think there are other approaches, and some we haven't thought up yet, but one thing I'm most interested in is social pressure, and how it can easily be applied to bad nodes. I think encryption is interesting, but I think we'll actually have to move into the browser space in order to have a reasonable UX.

ashitvora 16y ago

Do we really need one more Social Network?

michaelchisari 16y ago
Yes, because a distributed protocol means that it will effectively be the last social network.
- metamemetics 16y ago
  that's pretty delusional. Users don't care about protocols, they care about interface usability. And the ONLY thing that makes a social network valuable is its users. There will always be more room for more niche social networks with well defined UX constraints if developers continue the facebook trend of bloat sites with ambiguous constraints.
  - michaelchisari 16y ago
    It's really quite simple. Once an open protocol is established and popularized, then social networks are just software that connect into the distributed network. Think of it in terms of SMTP and e-mail. Mail providers come and go, but nobody has to move email providers because all their friends changed emails.
    - metamemetics 16y ago
      > Once an open protocol is established and popularized "popularized" is the most important and hardest part, you can't risk using it in an assumption. The problem domain you are working in is the exemplar of the chicken-and-egg user growth difficulties. Also if it really was just a protocol: the only thing being developed would be QuickSocial, it would not be called a social network because a protocol is not the place creating the social experience, it would be marketed to developers and bloggers as an improved and easy to add replacement for OpenID, 50% of the work would be on rigorously defining QuickSocial specification, the other 50% on developing plugins for all platforms and languages.

allantyoung 16y ago

Don't "they" know that the Appleseed family is very litigious?

michaelchisari 16y ago
I was going to rename it to Bananaseed, but I think someone with that name killed a bunch of nurses in Portland. /30rock

joe_the_user 16y ago

Just for kicks, Let me ask how a project like this could provide possibly any more privacy than a situation of a group of people who each having a mailing list with which they email messages to their friends? Seriously. Maybe I'm not thinking clearly tonight but I can't see any plausible way to provide "more security" than the security of deciding what message to send to what friend. Am I missing something. -- I mean, you just aren't going to keep your friends from forwarding your messages. They'll video-type to screen if they need to. You might decide not to forward them more messages but that's different.

michaelchisari 16y ago
I mean, you just aren't going to keep your friends from forwarding your messages. There's a difference between privacy and trust. Software can't predict when your best friend is going to turn against you for emotional or social reasons. If you share something with ten friends, and one of them betrays your trust, technology can't predict or prevent that. However, if you share something with ten friends, and they all act properly and trustworthy, you have a reasonable expectation that your data won't be available to anybody but those ten friends.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Agree with this but it doesn't answer my original question. Why bother with encryption when each person having an email list would work as well as anything for distributing information? Why? It's like UPS buying armored cars to deliver your packages with but still plunking the package down outside your house when you're not home. I have a reasonable expectation of privacy sending email through a webmail account. If I was sending the corporate crown-jewels or something, I'd encrypt my message but email these days is appropriately secure. I'm asking these questions with the best intentions too. I like the idea of a Facebook alternative - I'm working on my project along those lines in fact. The thing is that to offer an alternative, you've got to be clear what services Facebook offers and how one could offer them better. It seems like a lot of upset over Facebook confuses Facebook's abuse of user data with the inherent insecurity that comes from sharing information with any group of people. We'll have to educate ourselves and our users about the difference if we want to have this Facebook alternative thing get off the ground. As far as I can tell, almost everything Facebook provides is something you can do with the "regular web". Facebook simply puts everything in a nice package (and that nice package matters a lot as we've seen). If you had a script which aggregated your friend's blogs, tweets and emails, you would have something like Facebook. The only service that would be required is friend-discovery and perhaps a "like" messaging system. The rest could just involve wrapping/packaging existing stuff. The thing about Facebook and walled-gardens in general is that they really entice people who otherwise wouldn't participate in "cyber life" to come onto the web. But Facebook users hopefully will also be learning that their walled-garden doesn't offer the protection it claims and hopefully they'll realize that nothing can simultaneously offer free-sharing and perfect privacy in the modern era - your friends' friends just aren't necessarily going to be your friends etc. So we "Facebook alternativists" have to offer something that gives the good stuff that a social network can realistically provide for people who are over the illusion that they can live in a one-identity, total-trust world.

brinchj 16y ago

Perhaps my PHP-design skills are outdated, but is it normal to have a 1500 line index.php containing a mixture of configuation code, PHP functions and HTML? Also, don't you use any template system? ... I cloned the github project, only to find myself confused :)

michaelchisari 16y ago
The index.php file is the install file. The actual system is re-routed using mod_rewrite. After installation, it never uses index.php again. Also, don't you use any template system? No, actually, I use a different approach. Using simple_html_dom, I target the dom within the controller. The views are layout skeletons that are then populated with data. Check out the example component's comments for more info.