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I'm working on flockingbird (dot social), which is a federated professional network. No blockchain, just activitypub (mastodon, peertube, pixelfed et.al.) The

by berkes 6y ago

I'm working on flockingbird (dot social), which is a federated professional network. No blockchain, just activitypub (mastodon, peertube, pixelfed et.al.) The only feature is to be 'a Rolodex on steroids', or 'an adressbook in which some entries are maintained by the contacts themselves' No social network features beyond that. We're doing our best to align the businessmodel with this. And truly believe it can carve out a niche (and slowly grow from there) without adding all the perverse attentionseeking, 'garbage layers'. Is that naive?

rapnie 6y ago
Very interesting. Do you have pointers to some more reading & background on the platform you are developing?
- berkes 6y ago
  Anyone interested can drop me a mail at ber at berk dot es for a longer version. I try to post some updates and insights on @flockingbird@fosstodon.org as well. Not sure if this is an appropriate thread to drop this, but since you asked: The idea is simple, though: you have a profile on which you put contact details, a list of aspirations and competences. Each such data can be kept private, shared public, or within your network. You add people to your contact list, tag them, keep notes on them or add rich oneway relations (Foo has worked for Bar, from datex to datey at Acmeinc.). Basic crm features. Again, each such data has several privacy levels. You can search through your contacts and search through the contacts of your contacts. E.g. if you need to find a translater, but don't know any yourself, one of your contacts might know one, and might have shared some data, notes, tags and relations with that translator. A 'network' is basically a server, instance, in fediverse-speak. An instance would be hosted by your startup-hub, coworking-space, university, etc. You register with one (or more) such instance, and become part of that community, but can add anyone from any other instance, as long as they have a public profile.
Aeolun 6y ago
If you call it flockingbird, and host it on a .social domain, I think maybe it is. At least I wouldn’t consider it a serious professional network just based on that. That may be incredibly shallow, but those are the only datapoints I have right now. I guess it’s a matter of adoption though. I’d never have considered google either :)
- berkes 6y ago
  Good points. I'm really happy with the name and domain, but if they don't emit the right vibe, they're wrong. Thanks. Any pointers as to what puts you off? From your feedback, I get that you find the name and domain too much hinting at a social network?
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Yeah, if you host it on .social, it basically tells me that: 1. You couldn’t afford/find a good/similar .com 2. It’s meant to be, well, a social network. The name flockingbird just sounds casual to me, maybe I get an association with twitter? It doesn’t scream business network to me anyway :) That said, I like the name flockingbird too. I would want to try it based on the name. I just wouldn’t expect what you just described.
chaz6 6y ago
I wanted to view your website, but the SSL certificate expired yesterday (fingerprint 01:03:F8:89:77:72:11:C2:BC:45:12:E9:EF:04:8E:21:D8:BC:77:83:81:26:B4:38:6E:9C:81:A6:4B:07:C2:70).
- berkes 6y ago
  Thanks for the warning. This is one of my last servers with nginx. Nginx and letsencrypt is ... cumbersome, unstable; once every few months I have to manually reboot and/or renew the certs. ugh. Time to move this one to Caddy too.
  - sitzkrieg 6y ago
    or just make a cronjob to restart nginx after you run certbot
    - berkes 6y ago
      Going offtopic here; but this is exactly the problem. There is a cronjob that restarts nginx after a certbot rerun. This makes at least three assumptions, all of which will fail at some point: 1. certbot does not need to stop nginx to renew a cert (some modes do). 2. the certbot run succeeded (all certs have been renewed, no network issues, etc) 3. all certs are written correctly so that nginx config is valid (can reach and parse the certs) In this particular case, for some reason, one of the 7 sites hosted here had a misconfigured DNS, letsencrypt servers could not reach it, certbot failed, no nginx restart was attempted. This case falls in #1, fixable by force-reloading nginx every day after certbot run regardless of whether a cert has been renewed. All solutions with nginx are cludges like that. Don't get me wrong: certbot/letsencrypt is miles ahead of automation before they came along (I've built en ran several hosting companies, certs automation is a disgrace), but it remains hacky, cludgy and therefore unstable and somewhat unreliable.
      - sitzkrieg 6y ago
        huh i hear ya, but really the only thing ive ran into is updating certs not taking till nginx restart, in fact im suspect certbot might restart it for you at this point. i dont doubt it drops on the floor in any intermittent outages which isn't unheard of when it runs every 3 months

by berkes 6y ago

rapnie 6y ago

Very interesting. Do you have pointers to some more reading & background on the platform you are developing?

berkes 6y ago
Anyone interested can drop me a mail at ber at berk dot es for a longer version. I try to post some updates and insights on @flockingbird@fosstodon.org as well. Not sure if this is an appropriate thread to drop this, but since you asked: The idea is simple, though: you have a profile on which you put contact details, a list of aspirations and competences. Each such data can be kept private, shared public, or within your network. You add people to your contact list, tag them, keep notes on them or add rich oneway relations (Foo has worked for Bar, from datex to datey at Acmeinc.). Basic crm features. Again, each such data has several privacy levels. You can search through your contacts and search through the contacts of your contacts. E.g. if you need to find a translater, but don't know any yourself, one of your contacts might know one, and might have shared some data, notes, tags and relations with that translator. A 'network' is basically a server, instance, in fediverse-speak. An instance would be hosted by your startup-hub, coworking-space, university, etc. You register with one (or more) such instance, and become part of that community, but can add anyone from any other instance, as long as they have a public profile.

Aeolun 6y ago

If you call it flockingbird, and host it on a .social domain, I think maybe it is. At least I wouldn’t consider it a serious professional network just based on that. That may be incredibly shallow, but those are the only datapoints I have right now. I guess it’s a matter of adoption though. I’d never have considered google either :)

berkes 6y ago
Good points. I'm really happy with the name and domain, but if they don't emit the right vibe, they're wrong. Thanks. Any pointers as to what puts you off? From your feedback, I get that you find the name and domain too much hinting at a social network?
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Yeah, if you host it on .social, it basically tells me that: 1. You couldn’t afford/find a good/similar .com 2. It’s meant to be, well, a social network. The name flockingbird just sounds casual to me, maybe I get an association with twitter? It doesn’t scream business network to me anyway :) That said, I like the name flockingbird too. I would want to try it based on the name. I just wouldn’t expect what you just described.

chaz6 6y ago

I wanted to view your website, but the SSL certificate expired yesterday (fingerprint 01:03:F8:89:77:72:11:C2:BC:45:12:E9:EF:04:8E:21:D8:BC:77:83:81:26:B4:38:6E:9C:81:A6:4B:07:C2:70).

berkes 6y ago
Thanks for the warning. This is one of my last servers with nginx. Nginx and letsencrypt is ... cumbersome, unstable; once every few months I have to manually reboot and/or renew the certs. ugh. Time to move this one to Caddy too.
- sitzkrieg 6y ago
  or just make a cronjob to restart nginx after you run certbot
  - berkes 6y ago
    Going offtopic here; but this is exactly the problem. There is a cronjob that restarts nginx after a certbot rerun. This makes at least three assumptions, all of which will fail at some point: 1. certbot does not need to stop nginx to renew a cert (some modes do). 2. the certbot run succeeded (all certs have been renewed, no network issues, etc) 3. all certs are written correctly so that nginx config is valid (can reach and parse the certs) In this particular case, for some reason, one of the 7 sites hosted here had a misconfigured DNS, letsencrypt servers could not reach it, certbot failed, no nginx restart was attempted. This case falls in #1, fixable by force-reloading nginx every day after certbot run regardless of whether a cert has been renewed. All solutions with nginx are cludges like that. Don't get me wrong: certbot/letsencrypt is miles ahead of automation before they came along (I've built en ran several hosting companies, certs automation is a disgrace), but it remains hacky, cludgy and therefore unstable and somewhat unreliable.
    - sitzkrieg 6y ago
      huh i hear ya, but really the only thing ive ran into is updating certs not taking till nginx restart, in fact im suspect certbot might restart it for you at this point. i dont doubt it drops on the floor in any intermittent outages which isn't unheard of when it runs every 3 months