5 ms·

OpenDolphin: Contribute to a truly open social network

48 points by denysvitali 4y ago

corytheboyd 4y ago
I don't really get it, but I'm also someone that hasn't used or missed mass social media in years. Anyone can say they are "truly open", but also I feel like the massive amount of people needed to make a social media site work... don't care about that. I don't really get Mastodon either fwiw, sounds like people want it to be twitter but it just isn't and never will be that. I think I'm just burnt out on social media in general. I wish you good luck and prosperity! Hopefully others are more optimistic and helpful lol
- monkey26 4y ago
  I lump participating in Hacker News comments as social media.
  - corytheboyd 4y ago
    I do too, but I definitely don't consider it mass social media. It's not engineered to extract my time, it just does it naturally by being a good source of information :)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  FWIW I don’t want mastodon to “be twitter” but I absolutely want mastodon to adopt many of the very nice features that Twitter, the original and biggest microblogging site, has long since figured out and popularized. Like I realized the other day that when certain news events hit, I have to go to twitter to find the info I need, because search engines don’t have the raw info of networks like twitter. But I strongly dislike that I have to go to twitter and cannot do this on mastodon. I would rather be searching on mastodon. And on twitter I use quote tweets to provide updates to my own projects in new threads which reference old threads. This works great for readability and yet I can’t do it on mastodon without just sharing the link, which doesn’t render properly on many clients and has other issues. I just want mastodon to have nice features that Twitter happens to have pioneered. I also want DMs to make sense and feel like DMs on mastodon. I’m afraid of confusing people when I DM them on mastodon so I always say “this is a DM by the way, that’s not always clear”.
  - captainmuon 4y ago
    Yeah, I think many people in the Fediverse don't understand what makes specific networks like Twitter great. Twitter is instant, unfiltered news. You get new information much faster than through other media. If the people running Mastodon instances are so vocal against global search, they are missing out on one of the most important Twitter features. Likewise, (early) Facebooks killer feature was that you could "stalk" people (I mean that in a non-creepy way, hope that ironic usage translates to English ;-)). You could look up and get into contact with people that you know from real life. Friends, Classmates, Friends of friends. It was a social telephone book. And I think it was a great aid especially if you were not extremely socially inclinded and extroverted, because it helped you interact more with people in your life. At some point, FB changed radically. Afterwards it was more about adding random acquaintances and getting stupid articles in your feed. The social USP went completely missing. Same for a myriad of other smaller sites that have closed. Every site had their unique appeal, but nowadays many sites define themselves as what the are not.
roywiggins 4y ago
This kinda has the vibe of every project that inevitably explodes due to the devs and mods either all burning out, or all turning on each other, or turning on the community, or vice versa, or all of the above. - big ambitions - a kitchen-sink list of features that don't have any particular philosophical bent other than "be good" - a proposed audience of everyone - insisting that it will be responsive to the community, unlike those other projects, but without any particular ideas about how governance will work better this time around (there is approximately one single good centralized website with community governance and social aspects and it's Wikipedia. That's the only one. This would be the second.)
- djbusby 4y ago
  Is there one or two attributes you could point to? Or, what's a general symptom to look out for?
  - roywiggins 4y ago
    edited, but really it's kind of a vibe. I remember reading similar announcements of programming language projects (we'll have ALL the good features and none of the bad ones and it will compile fast and we'll have a great community) and game mods (we'll have ALL the good features and we'll have the coolest mechanics and we'll do it collectively and anyone can participate, we just need a couple more dozen people to donate their time, also does anyone know how to use Blender?) Sometimes wildly ambitious projects work out, to be fair, but still. It's familiar.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    If it becomes popular, success and money will inevitably follow. The question is to whom does that flow to and how does everyone else e.g. backers, contributors, public feel about that. And if there are disagreements how are they dealt with or in most cases not dealt with.
    - denysvitali 4y ago
      All of these are very good points, and as such they should be decided together by the community. Maybe the first thing I should start looking at is a voting / discussion platform, so that we have democratic ways of proceeding towards a goal. In any case, the initial idea exposed in the "About" page and some other project pages is that we'll first pay for the infrastructure and then divide the money equally based on the contributions a project member did. We hope to be as transparent as possible and most probably the best way to handle the money situation (if we'll ever come to that) is to have a foundation behind - similar to Wikimedia
stonogo 4y ago
How do I participate in the project? Introduce yourself in this GitHub issue and/or join our Slack instance! So much for open.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- denysvitali 4y ago
  What alternative do you suggest? Should we use Matrix / IRC instead?
  - stonogo 4y ago
    A method for contributions which doesn't require a signup would be nice, even if it's just an email address to contact.
    - denysvitali 4y ago
      Good point, thanks! I'll try to find a way to not use proprietary tools for this - maybe a public mailing list might work better? It would be cool to integrate Slack / GH with this system to avoid having duplicated content
nbittich 4y ago
I looked at the code, there is nothing, just vapor. another project designed to attract attention and GH stars, with the minimum effort
- denysvitali 4y ago
  Why don't you contribute? The goal is to decide beforehand with the community how to steer the project rather than having an implementation that was built by a single person
  - Double_a_92 4y ago
    You can't crowdsource starting from 0, unless your goal is absolute chaos. At this point this project is nothing more than "I have a cool idea, now I just free need devs to implement it..."
    - denysvitali 4y ago
      Why can't it be done? What I'm trying to do is to show an incredibly small PoC that we can rewrite as soon as we get ideas and contributions. We want people to actively participate because some of the choices made now have a very long term impact. Things like microblogging vs long posts or certain architecture decisions need to be made as soon as possible. Starting and getting to an MVP would make the life easier for everyone to contribute, but it would not be a product built by the community since the base was already decided by one person - which IMHO kinda misses the whole point of building it together
      - Double_a_92 4y ago
        Because who is the community? The first N people that happen to show real interest? You always need someone to have a clear vision and define an architecture for it. And if you don't want that to be an individual person you still need a stable and trustworthy team that decides on something something. But even that is already a compromise since it slows things down, by a lot. Also what if "the community" has contradicting views? One wants a platform for long in-depth posts, and one wants a twitter clone or a tiktok clone or whetever... It just doens't work. You are just projecting your own vague ideas into what you assume the people to also want.
phendrenad2 4y ago
Interesting project. Some advice: 1. Very few people care about a "free and open-source social network built with and steered by the community". You can't build a social network for just those people. It'll feel empty, and they'll leave. You need to attract lots of people who don't care about that. 2. Get rid of your landing page. See #1 for the reason. When people land on your domain they should be prompted to sign up, or look around. That's what a social network is for, after all. 3. Focus on making it work. Get to a MVP. Quietly open it to the public. Call it a beta. Don't waste time on press releases. 4. If you can't make it work, make it look like it works. No one wants to join a social media site that isn't working. "Eh, I'll join in a few months" and they'll never come back again. 5. Stay true to your principles! But keep it classy! Remember when websites would have a little "fork me on github" button in the upper-right corner? That served as a subtle indication that the project was open. That's all you need to capture the group of people I mentioned in #1. Here: https://github.com/tholman/github-corners https://github.com/tholman/github-corners
- denysvitali 4y ago
  Thank you for the feedback! Really appreciated! Unfortunately some of the points you talked about assume that the MVP is available (which it is) and that someone should decide everything beforehand, reach a point where the product is good enough to be used by anyone and the project is basically bootstrapped. This goes a bit against my idea of a community-steered project, because the decisions taken at the beginning might be wrong to the point that you'd have to re-build everything from scratch to correct them. Do you have a suggestion here? It's also true that a community like HN doesn't like projects that aren't ready to be used (see some comments here). I sadly think we'll end up having an MVP that wasn't built by the community and start asking for ideas / contributions at that point - which as stated before goes entirely against my initial ideas
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    How do you see when "the community" has decided? Won't "the community" be different after some time (due to growth, due to people leaving ...) "We are open for everything" rarely works to form a community. Why should people in est time in that? Maybe they do and then things go another way than many individually want. You need a foundation to which people attach or not otherwise there are enough other projects to be involved where I know they match my interests.
honkler 4y ago
nothing to see here folks
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
prmoustache 4y ago
Author apparently don't understand that one instance of the fediverse can be seen as a centralized local instance and can be isolated at will by the deactivation of federation or the use of a whitelist. There is no need for new code if that is the only reason for opendolphin to exist.
- denysvitali 4y ago
  I know how the fediverse works, that's not the point. Many choices of Mastodon haven't been implemented because Gargron acted as a gatekeeper for the project as a whole. For example [1]. This is obviously not the only reason, we really want to build something that is developed (not necessarily in terms of code) by the community, so that we finally have a solution that is usable, useful and overcomes the common pitfalls of decentralized social networks and the mainstream social media platforms. [1]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/853#issuecomment-381408669 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/853#issuecomment...
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    Did I mention mastodon? This is not the only tool available. And well, if someone act as a gatekeeper the beauty of free software is that you can fork it. There are already a number of mastodon forks afaik. > we really want to build something that is developed (not necessarily in terms of code) by the community This doesn't mean anything really.
rvz 4y ago
Looks like people are about to find out the hard way and realize how difficult it is to build a social network that has a better reach and network effect than Twitter. Twitter once again remains to be unchallenged. No contest for the 200M+ daily users still sitting there.
- denysvitali 4y ago
  The hardest part is not technical at all, from my understanding. The real deal is to get engaged with a network that values the product. But as usual it's the chicken-egg problem where you need a network in order to let the network grow more (see for example how Reddit started).
opan 4y ago
I know people hate naming discussion, but we already have the dolphin emulator as well as KDE's dolphin file manager, both free software (and thus "open"), so a bit confusing. I also saw some Mastodon discussion further down, so I'd like to say the author should look into Pleroma/Akkoma, Misskey/Foundkey, and other fedi software if they haven't already (not to mention the various frontends made for them). Mastodon is basically the worst fediverse software and I wouldn't judge the whole fediverse based on it.
- denysvitali 4y ago
  The name, logo and all of the other parts of the project are up for discussion, see [1]. I'm not a huge fan of the name either at the moment, but that's the best I was able to come up with. I trust that out there there is someone more creative than me to find a better name that also avoids clashing with already existing software (like KDE's Dolphin as you pointed out). Thanks for the tips on the other possible fediverse softwares - I knew some of them you mentioned but not all of them. I'll check them out too! [1]: https://github.com/OpenDolphin/brand/issues/2 https://github.com/OpenDolphin/brand/issues/2
nunobrito 4y ago
Second twitter-killer in a week. Since it is vapourware and you mention the goal of the community participating, please take a look another twitter-alternative as example of that, particularly on the nips: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips That one is open at the protocol level with several implementations of clients and nodes on just about any relevant programming language.

48 points by denysvitali 4y ago

I don't really get it, but I'm also someone that hasn't used or missed mass social media in years. Anyone can say they are "truly open", but also I feel like the massive amount of people needed to make a social media site work... don't care about that. I don't really get Mastodon either fwiw, sounds like people want it to be twitter but it just isn't and never will be that. I think I'm just burnt out on social media in general. I wish you good luck and prosperity! Hopefully others are more optimistic and helpful lol

monkey26 4y ago
I lump participating in Hacker News comments as social media.
- corytheboyd 4y ago
  I do too, but I definitely don't consider it mass social media. It's not engineered to extract my time, it just does it naturally by being a good source of information :)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
FWIW I don’t want mastodon to “be twitter” but I absolutely want mastodon to adopt many of the very nice features that Twitter, the original and biggest microblogging site, has long since figured out and popularized. Like I realized the other day that when certain news events hit, I have to go to twitter to find the info I need, because search engines don’t have the raw info of networks like twitter. But I strongly dislike that I have to go to twitter and cannot do this on mastodon. I would rather be searching on mastodon. And on twitter I use quote tweets to provide updates to my own projects in new threads which reference old threads. This works great for readability and yet I can’t do it on mastodon without just sharing the link, which doesn’t render properly on many clients and has other issues. I just want mastodon to have nice features that Twitter happens to have pioneered. I also want DMs to make sense and feel like DMs on mastodon. I’m afraid of confusing people when I DM them on mastodon so I always say “this is a DM by the way, that’s not always clear”.
- captainmuon 4y ago
  Yeah, I think many people in the Fediverse don't understand what makes specific networks like Twitter great. Twitter is instant, unfiltered news. You get new information much faster than through other media. If the people running Mastodon instances are so vocal against global search, they are missing out on one of the most important Twitter features. Likewise, (early) Facebooks killer feature was that you could "stalk" people (I mean that in a non-creepy way, hope that ironic usage translates to English ;-)). You could look up and get into contact with people that you know from real life. Friends, Classmates, Friends of friends. It was a social telephone book. And I think it was a great aid especially if you were not extremely socially inclinded and extroverted, because it helped you interact more with people in your life. At some point, FB changed radically. Afterwards it was more about adding random acquaintances and getting stupid articles in your feed. The social USP went completely missing. Same for a myriad of other smaller sites that have closed. Every site had their unique appeal, but nowadays many sites define themselves as what the are not.

roywiggins 4y ago

This kinda has the vibe of every project that inevitably explodes due to the devs and mods either all burning out, or all turning on each other, or turning on the community, or vice versa, or all of the above. - big ambitions - a kitchen-sink list of features that don't have any particular philosophical bent other than "be good" - a proposed audience of everyone - insisting that it will be responsive to the community, unlike those other projects, but without any particular ideas about how governance will work better this time around (there is approximately one single good centralized website with community governance and social aspects and it's Wikipedia. That's the only one. This would be the second.)

djbusby 4y ago
Is there one or two attributes you could point to? Or, what's a general symptom to look out for?
- roywiggins 4y ago
  edited, but really it's kind of a vibe. I remember reading similar announcements of programming language projects (we'll have ALL the good features and none of the bad ones and it will compile fast and we'll have a great community) and game mods (we'll have ALL the good features and we'll have the coolest mechanics and we'll do it collectively and anyone can participate, we just need a couple more dozen people to donate their time, also does anyone know how to use Blender?) Sometimes wildly ambitious projects work out, to be fair, but still. It's familiar.
- threeseed 4y ago
  If it becomes popular, success and money will inevitably follow. The question is to whom does that flow to and how does everyone else e.g. backers, contributors, public feel about that. And if there are disagreements how are they dealt with or in most cases not dealt with.
  - denysvitali 4y ago
    All of these are very good points, and as such they should be decided together by the community. Maybe the first thing I should start looking at is a voting / discussion platform, so that we have democratic ways of proceeding towards a goal. In any case, the initial idea exposed in the "About" page and some other project pages is that we'll first pay for the infrastructure and then divide the money equally based on the contributions a project member did. We hope to be as transparent as possible and most probably the best way to handle the money situation (if we'll ever come to that) is to have a foundation behind - similar to Wikimedia

stonogo 4y ago

How do I participate in the project? Introduce yourself in this GitHub issue and/or join our Slack instance! So much for open.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
denysvitali 4y ago
What alternative do you suggest? Should we use Matrix / IRC instead?
- stonogo 4y ago
  A method for contributions which doesn't require a signup would be nice, even if it's just an email address to contact.
  - denysvitali 4y ago
    Good point, thanks! I'll try to find a way to not use proprietary tools for this - maybe a public mailing list might work better? It would be cool to integrate Slack / GH with this system to avoid having duplicated content

nbittich 4y ago

I looked at the code, there is nothing, just vapor. another project designed to attract attention and GH stars, with the minimum effort

denysvitali 4y ago
Why don't you contribute? The goal is to decide beforehand with the community how to steer the project rather than having an implementation that was built by a single person
- Double_a_92 4y ago
  You can't crowdsource starting from 0, unless your goal is absolute chaos. At this point this project is nothing more than "I have a cool idea, now I just free need devs to implement it..."
  - denysvitali 4y ago
    Why can't it be done? What I'm trying to do is to show an incredibly small PoC that we can rewrite as soon as we get ideas and contributions. We want people to actively participate because some of the choices made now have a very long term impact. Things like microblogging vs long posts or certain architecture decisions need to be made as soon as possible. Starting and getting to an MVP would make the life easier for everyone to contribute, but it would not be a product built by the community since the base was already decided by one person - which IMHO kinda misses the whole point of building it together
    - Double_a_92 4y ago
      Because who is the community? The first N people that happen to show real interest? You always need someone to have a clear vision and define an architecture for it. And if you don't want that to be an individual person you still need a stable and trustworthy team that decides on something something. But even that is already a compromise since it slows things down, by a lot. Also what if "the community" has contradicting views? One wants a platform for long in-depth posts, and one wants a twitter clone or a tiktok clone or whetever... It just doens't work. You are just projecting your own vague ideas into what you assume the people to also want.

phendrenad2 4y ago

Interesting project. Some advice: 1. Very few people care about a "free and open-source social network built with and steered by the community". You can't build a social network for just those people. It'll feel empty, and they'll leave. You need to attract lots of people who don't care about that. 2. Get rid of your landing page. See #1 for the reason. When people land on your domain they should be prompted to sign up, or look around. That's what a social network is for, after all. 3. Focus on making it work. Get to a MVP. Quietly open it to the public. Call it a beta. Don't waste time on press releases. 4. If you can't make it work, make it look like it works. No one wants to join a social media site that isn't working. "Eh, I'll join in a few months" and they'll never come back again. 5. Stay true to your principles! But keep it classy! Remember when websites would have a little "fork me on github" button in the upper-right corner? That served as a subtle indication that the project was open. That's all you need to capture the group of people I mentioned in #1. Here: https://github.com/tholman/github-corners https://github.com/tholman/github-corners

denysvitali 4y ago
Thank you for the feedback! Really appreciated! Unfortunately some of the points you talked about assume that the MVP is available (which it is) and that someone should decide everything beforehand, reach a point where the product is good enough to be used by anyone and the project is basically bootstrapped. This goes a bit against my idea of a community-steered project, because the decisions taken at the beginning might be wrong to the point that you'd have to re-build everything from scratch to correct them. Do you have a suggestion here? It's also true that a community like HN doesn't like projects that aren't ready to be used (see some comments here). I sadly think we'll end up having an MVP that wasn't built by the community and start asking for ideas / contributions at that point - which as stated before goes entirely against my initial ideas
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  How do you see when "the community" has decided? Won't "the community" be different after some time (due to growth, due to people leaving ...) "We are open for everything" rarely works to form a community. Why should people in est time in that? Maybe they do and then things go another way than many individually want. You need a foundation to which people attach or not otherwise there are enough other projects to be involved where I know they match my interests.

honkler 4y ago

nothing to see here folks

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

prmoustache 4y ago

Author apparently don't understand that one instance of the fediverse can be seen as a centralized local instance and can be isolated at will by the deactivation of federation or the use of a whitelist. There is no need for new code if that is the only reason for opendolphin to exist.

denysvitali 4y ago
I know how the fediverse works, that's not the point. Many choices of Mastodon haven't been implemented because Gargron acted as a gatekeeper for the project as a whole. For example [1]. This is obviously not the only reason, we really want to build something that is developed (not necessarily in terms of code) by the community, so that we finally have a solution that is usable, useful and overcomes the common pitfalls of decentralized social networks and the mainstream social media platforms. [1]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/853#issuecomment-381408669 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/853#issuecomment...
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Did I mention mastodon? This is not the only tool available. And well, if someone act as a gatekeeper the beauty of free software is that you can fork it. There are already a number of mastodon forks afaik. > we really want to build something that is developed (not necessarily in terms of code) by the community This doesn't mean anything really.

rvz 4y ago

Looks like people are about to find out the hard way and realize how difficult it is to build a social network that has a better reach and network effect than Twitter. Twitter once again remains to be unchallenged. No contest for the 200M+ daily users still sitting there.

denysvitali 4y ago
The hardest part is not technical at all, from my understanding. The real deal is to get engaged with a network that values the product. But as usual it's the chicken-egg problem where you need a network in order to let the network grow more (see for example how Reddit started).

opan 4y ago

I know people hate naming discussion, but we already have the dolphin emulator as well as KDE's dolphin file manager, both free software (and thus "open"), so a bit confusing. I also saw some Mastodon discussion further down, so I'd like to say the author should look into Pleroma/Akkoma, Misskey/Foundkey, and other fedi software if they haven't already (not to mention the various frontends made for them). Mastodon is basically the worst fediverse software and I wouldn't judge the whole fediverse based on it.

denysvitali 4y ago
The name, logo and all of the other parts of the project are up for discussion, see [1]. I'm not a huge fan of the name either at the moment, but that's the best I was able to come up with. I trust that out there there is someone more creative than me to find a better name that also avoids clashing with already existing software (like KDE's Dolphin as you pointed out). Thanks for the tips on the other possible fediverse softwares - I knew some of them you mentioned but not all of them. I'll check them out too! [1]: https://github.com/OpenDolphin/brand/issues/2 https://github.com/OpenDolphin/brand/issues/2

nunobrito 4y ago

Second twitter-killer in a week. Since it is vapourware and you mention the goal of the community participating, please take a look another twitter-alternative as example of that, particularly on the nips: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips That one is open at the protocol level with several implementations of clients and nodes on just about any relevant programming language.