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Ask HN: Why are you supporting App.net over Status.net?
Status.net has been around for a few years now - it's an open source twitter clone, with federation and open protocols all baked in. So my question is simply, why are people choosing to support the closed source, centralised app.net over it?
- revorad 14y agoBecause we need an aggregator. It's not like a blogging engine, where I can just use Wordpress. A social network needs people. A lot of people complain about the quality of HN going down. Why don't they take the arc or reddit source code and run their own news site? Because a social network without people isn't.
- EwanToo 14y agoTrue, but the main public status.net implementation so far (identi.ca) already has users, and was surprisingly popular back when twitter was having all the fail whale issues. Twitter would go down, and a minority of the people I followed would start posting on identi.ca
- revorad 14y agoRight, so why did it fizzle out? It takes a lot of energy and resources to make something like this work. Dalton and his team clearly have enough to at least kindle a small fire. Github didn't invent git. But, it became the first really good aggregator of git repos, which has turned it into a massive social network. There's nothing stopping you and me from hosting our repos on our own servers and pushing and pulling code from each other. That protocol is established. Github gives us an easy way to connect with lots of other people like us, without having to bother with hosting our own repos.
- yen223 14y ago> Because a social network without people isn't. Then the question becomes, why support app.net over Twitter?
- revorad 14y agoThat's why I and most people haven't. I considered supporting App.net for ideological reasons alone, but it's not exactly in the clear in that department either. It's a product of a 3-year old VC-funded company. By the time enough people move to app.net, they will be looking for an exit and who knows what they will do then. So, to me personally, they are not that much better than Twitter.
- thinkingisfun 14y agoBecause we need an aggregator. It's not like a blogging engine, where I can just use Wordpress. A social network needs people. http://status.net/wiki/List_of_servers http://status.net/wiki/List_of_servers http://encyclomundi.org/wiki/List_of_Independent_Statusnet_Instances http://encyclomundi.org/wiki/List_of_Independent_Statusnet_I... http://jpope.org/federatedusers http://jpope.org/federatedusers What's stopping anyone from building an aggregator? Say, everybodytwitnow.com, where you can register your OStatus page, which then gets followed by the server and publically displayed? Bam, it's like Twitter, only actually cool.
- revorad 14y agoYou've answered your own question. There's nothing stopping anyone from building an aggregator. But to keep running it, you need money. Ideals are not enough.
- thinkingisfun 14y agoHow do people find other people to follow on Twitter? Not usually by looking at the global tweet stream, but rather by following links from homepages and blogs. So what's the point of a monolithic aggregator in the first place? That is made obsolete by OStatus, just like email doesn't require a global email aggregator, either.
- revorad 14y agoI haven't looked at any data on following, but at least I follow most new people based on Twitter's recommendations, or by directly looking at who my friends follow. But anyway, I don't see what that has to do with my point. Following people is just the first step. After you've followed them, you read and interact with them. An aggregator provides a place for doing that. In fact, you don't even need to follow anyone to interact with them. I don't see how you can compare it to email either. Email is completely private. Twitter is completely public by default, unless you explicitly use a private message (DM). It's like saying what's the point of Hacker News, when we can email each others links to our blog posts. The public forum is the point.
- thinkingisfun 14y agoI really, really want to implement OStatus in my CMS. However, this page is a joke: http://ostatus.org/2010/10/04/how-ostatus-enable-your-application http://ostatus.org/2010/10/04/how-ostatus-enable-your-applic... And I couldn't find anything better, much less in-depth and comprehensive yet. What a shame - the protocol exists and works, yet is mostly enjoyed by the few people who, I dunno, hung out on mailing lists when it was created? Or am I missing something? Where are the newbie guides for OStatus? Where is the example mini-blogging-app, etc.? I cannot help others understand or use something that is a book with seven seals to me.
- andrewhillman 14y agoI think people decided to support it because they wanted to see what the team will come up with. I believe the curiosity factor is the reason.