5 ms·
Org-social is a decentralized social network that runs on Org Mode
After collaborating with several communities around twtxt and gathering
many improvements requested by the community, I thought that many of the
technical limitations or wishes that people had could be resolved within
an org file. Org social is a first draft to ask the community for
feedback and see if it was something that could be useful to people. The
response has been very positive and overwhelming.
It is and will remain a niche technology, its use is intentionally
limited to a group of people who love the org format and want to share
their thoughts, articles and reflections without having to generate
HTML. In addition to being able to interact with the different Emacs
communities through mentions and replies.
I am gradually responding to everyone who has written to me, sent me
ideas and suggestions. If you really have something interesting to
contribute, please make a pull request in the repository or send me a DM
on Mastodon.
- Beretta_Vexee 1y agoThis looks like a bad hybrid between RSS and Markdown. Am I missing something?
- bitwize 1y agoReminds me of .plan files from back in the day.
- mxuribe 1y agoWell, there is https://plan.cat https://plan.cat ...which, hosts a user's plan files. :-) I guess think of it as a little microblog for displaying one's plan file?
- lemonberry 1y agoThis is kind of neat, thanks for sharing.
- temp0826 1y agoWe're rewriting the books. finger was the first social network!
- bitwize 1y agoI've observed that Unix itself was a social networking platform. Your Unix account was your identity across many services: email, finger, USENET, talk, etc. And it was distributed. And didn't rely on cruft like ActivityPub.
- ethan_smith 1y agoExactly - the finger protocol with .plan/.project files was essentially a proto-social network where users could publish status updates on Unix systems, and org-social follows that same decentralized, text-file-based philosophy but with modern tooling.
- BrouteMinou 1y agoWhat does it solve compared to a normal plain HTML blog?
- deltasquared 1y agoThis filtered out those who 1) don’t use eMacs 2) don’t use org-mode I suspect org-mode users are willing to go through an extra step if needed. My notes are in .org if I want to share with someone else I export to .md and use the output
- kyykky 1y agoThere seems to be a function to generate a feed based on the posts of the people you are following.
- OhMeadhbh 1y agoMy take on it is it's for people who live in org-mode. Though I'm thinking a org-social to html converter would be a decent tool to have. One more project to fill my copious spare time.
- gentooflux 1y agoThis seems less "decentralized social network" and more "html-less www with extra steps," especially since it's only going to allow socializing between the specific types of people who fall within 3 very specific Venn diagram circles who 1) use emacs, 2) use org-mode, and 3) want to go through the trouble of hosting their own section of the network.
- bee_rider 1y agoI guess this is an internet for the folks who are still annoyed by the Eternal September?
- Joe_Cool 1y agoI thought that was Gemini: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
- thesuitonym 1y agoGemini is for hipsters who want to look like they like Gopher, but can't live without their cat pics. (Said in jest, of course)
- macintux 1y agoYou reminded me that many years ago I gave some Microsoft sales folks grief for dropping Gopher from IIS, and then I wondered whether IIS still existed, and that led me to discover that iis.net was retired this summer. https://www.iis.net/ https://www.iis.net/ And I still don’t know whether IIS itself still exists.
- raspyberr 1y agoGemini lives rent free in the heads of like 99% of HN users. It's really weird. Look at any Gemini network posts on here. So much hate for a little network that just sits there and does its thing.
- 1y ago
- cml123 1y agoJust last week I was fiddling around with a tangentially related idea. I made some modifications locally to my setup so that when browsing a .org file in eww, org-html-export-as-html would render it in the buffer as HTML directly. eww doesn't really support much styling via shr, so I was working on adding some basic css parsing to expand the range of expression for an org-based blog approach. Many people export their org file based blogs to HTML and then publish them, but my thought would be to skip that and instead provide a path for eww to directly render org files, cutting out my html export stopgap.
- egypturnash 1y agoThis sure is a social network for a very small and specific set of people.
- jancsika 1y agoIn other words, it's a real social network.
- mtillman 1y agoI feel like https://github.com/buckket/twtxt https://github.com/buckket/twtxt didn't get enough love when it was released. Registry hosting doesn't seem to be any harder than DNS.
- stronglikedan 1y ago> harder than DNS Oh, so extremely hard then.
- arduanika 1y agoThe anti-social social network
- rhelz 1y agoYou say that like it's a bad thing? :-) I almost never see posts on facebook from my actual friends. it's all either E.D. adverts or bots pushing an agenda.
- egypturnash 1y agoI do not say it like it's a good thing or a bad thing. I'm just observing this fact. I'm not in that very small and specific set of people but I am not that far from it; last week I logged into Furrymuck for the first time in decades and attended a memorial service for one of its wizzes and remembering how that text-only MMORPG worked sure was interesting when I wasn't busy crying my face off.
- crabbone 1y agoWe kind of already have groups in Gnus... I even messaged one group, like twice in my life.
- ontigola 1y ago[dead]
- danluvscock 1y ago[dead]
- giancarlostoro 1y agoFinally a social network that only true nerdy people will ever join, I might just finally pick up emacs again.
- scubbo 1y agoWhat about Mastodon? (I'm, like, 80% joking)
- krapp 1y agoAs far as I can tell, Mastodon is nothing but nerds, which is what I like about it.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoAnyone can get past a dog, nobody f$;&&) with a lion. Anyone can get on mastodon, nobody f&)@) with emacs. But seriously the barrier to entry is high enough you will only get the true geeks.
- scubbo 1y agoA barrier-to-entry isn't necessary if no non-geeks want to join in the first place (which is, IME, true of Mastodon). Mastodon has successfully made itself a place that no non-geek would ever _want_ to spend time on anyway, so no barriers-to-entry are necessary to maintain that state. (You can decide for yourself whether this comment is praising or criticizing Mastodon)
- throwaway81523 1y agoIt sounds more like a blog than a network, I think. From way back: http://ahungry.com/blog/2013-04-01-blogging-with-org-mode.html http://ahungry.com/blog/2013-04-01-blogging-with-org-mode.ht...
- jraph 1y agoIf this takes off and becomes mainstream, will you show some inclusiveness towards poor people like me who will dare editing their org social files with an editor like Kate?
- jethronethro 1y agoWhile an interesting idea, it's kind of niche. I somehow doubt that this will become mainstream, even among techies.
- jraph 1y agoOh yeah, I was being humorous, I don't think this can take off neither.
- nosioptar 1y ago(I don't use org mode or Kate. Love Kate, but prefer vim.) At least one person's set Kate up for org mode. https://akselmo.dev/posts/kate-and-orgmode/ https://akselmo.dev/posts/kate-and-orgmode/
- jayde2767 1y agoIn the end, Streaming Services have proven to be nothing more than advertising platforms scattered with brief moments of content. The ads outweigh the content making it less cost effective than going back to Cable, which is still terrible also. Hence the need to pirate and control what content you see.
- monkeywork 1y agothink you replied on the wrong post friend.
- t_mann 1y agoSounds a bit like the idea that Bluesky started out with. I don't really get why specifically org mode though, sounds like you could be doing the same thing with a simple Markdown file. And while you're at it, why not just use HTML and read your friends' blogs in the browser?
- tocs3 1y agoI think you can use whatever. The markdown is very org mode like.
- metalliqaz 1y agoBecause that would require leaving emacs, I guess. Just a guess. I'm a Vim user so unlike emacs users I do know how to shower but like emacs users I can't manage to carry a conversation with someone in person. We only think partly alike.
- abdullahkhalids 1y agoOrg mode is far more structured than markdown. Structured enough that so you can naturally store data in, and easily access/edit it later. Whenever someone tries to do something similar in markdown, they have to invent an extension of markdown to do it.
- SoftTalker 1y agoYes markdown is simply about formatting text. Org is a data format.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- philipwhiuk 1y ago> Because of the decentralised nature it is very difficult to discover new users. You have to think of it as a technology similar to email or RSS feeds. The natural flow to find new addresses, URLs, or nodes, is because you have been given the address or because you have seen a link on a website. Org-social is the same. You have to share your address with your friends or on social media. Feels like it's missing the point.
- kogasa240p 1y agoAs someone who uses org-mode to take notes this seems genuinely wonderful, personally cannot stand HTML/CSS drudgery.
- OhMeadhbh 1y agoI made a few patches to coax it into working. But I haven't gotten around to making a new GitHub account and I can't find @tanrax's email address. So... * Patch 1: https://www.bi6.us/ER/MSH/0001-add-closing-paren-to-org-social-parse-feed-to-comple.patch * Patch 2: https://www.bi6.us/ER/MSH/0002-Add-my-social-URL-to-the-registers.txt-file.patch Well, yes, technically you only need the first patch to get it to work. The second patch adds my name to the list of social-org sites. They're both one line changes, so it should be easy to verify I'm not adding to the global index of chicanery through software. And if it's been a while since you applied a patch to a repo (instead of just pulled from a repo you merged into), here's the HOWTO I wrote about it: * https://www.bi6.us/GI/B/#/The%20Caveats/Applying%20Patches%20to%20Bare%20Repositories
- ruslan 1y agoHow about social.md which is gpg signed ?
- 3036e4 1y agoI am a heavy ORG-mode user, but this looks like a more complex variant of a gemlog. A gemlog is just a gemtext file with a list of links to posts, including the date of each post in the link text. Then each post is just a gemtext file. Gemtext being the extremely simple, line-based, format that is used for making Gemini sites. A gemlog is basically a blog that is also its own RSS feed, without any of the complexities of things on the real web. It is never going to go mainstream, but there is a critical mass of people using it and it is probably for the best if it never grows much beyond that. https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/gemtext-specification.gmi https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/gemtext-specification.gmi