16 ms·

OStatus: like Twitter, but open

185 points by chrismdp 14y ago

thesp0nge 14y ago
Guys I'd like to share another bootstrapped Italian startup in the microblogging panorama: www.meemi.com Full Disclosure: I know the creator, not by person but on the Net
samikc 14y ago
This looks interesting. We built ScoopSpot[1] to make microblog better, one of the core proposition was to allow the application developers work with the statuses more openly. However, it didn't caught attention of the people. One interesting aspect of ScoopSpot was to allow user follow a tag or topic. The possibility of application built on what users' interests are limitless (at least that's what I think). I will look into the protocol of OStatus to see how can we make our API's open. [1]https://www.scoopspot.com https://www.scoopspot.com
chrismdp 14y ago
Would love to know what HNers think we can do to push this forward.
- patrickaljord 14y ago
  Is it fully compatible with status.net already? Edit: I tried to post from my status.net client choqok and it failed with "Creating the new post failed. The result data could not be parsed.". Is the api url https://rstat.us/api https://rstat.us/api ?
  - wilkie 14y ago
    The client api and the backend that implements the protocol are different. I mean, you simply need html to provide a means of building a client. But, no client will really do that. rstat.us will try to support existing apis, but that's not there just yet. The backend in rstat.us does support ostatus, and can interoperate with status.net, but does not have the same api as of yet.
  - EwanToo 14y ago
    It's meant to work, for example see here https://github.com/hotsh/rstat.us/issues/387 https://github.com/hotsh/rstat.us/issues/387
- scrrr 14y ago
  Unless Twitter angers their users greatly there's not much that can be done. Twitter stands for status updates just like Google stands for search. A competing product would have to have a (slightly?) different feature-set I think..
davedx 14y ago
How does this compare to tent.io?
- EwanToo 14y ago
  From what I've seen, the tent protocol (and service) is more complex than OStatus, and capable of a lot more. To me, tent.io is more like a distributed tumblr than twitter.
rmccue 14y ago
I think the big problem with distributed systems is how to address people. "@abc" is getting more and more synonymous with "abc" as a Twitter username, and App.net uses the same style. This already leads to confusion when they don't match (e.g. Marco Arment is @marcoarment on Twitter and @marco on App.net); I have no idea how you fix this for decentralising. "@example.com/abc" is one (not particularly nice) way of doing it, but I'm struggling to think of any way that would work nicely.
- EwanToo 14y ago
  You're right, but at the same time email addresses have worked pretty well for the last 20+ years, even my parents cope with it...
  - ryanslade 14y ago
    I was going to say the same thing. What's wrong with marco@example.com?
    - spindritf 14y ago
      It implies an e-mail address and the expectation would probably be for the provider to receive an e-mail sent to that address. Not unlike @facebook.com addresses, so it may work.
      - sandeepshetty 14y ago
        See webfinger.
      - wilkie 14y ago
        Email is a federated system just like status.net, rstat.us etc. We can all have our own clients, servers, and still interact, communicate, and play well with every other email server. Using the same means of locating a person seems very very reasonable from both a technical aspect (it works for them just fine) and from the viewpoint that people already understand that an email address represents somebody's online presence and this is how you can communicate with them. Concept familiarity is extremely important for adoption, so that should be considered.
vindicated 14y ago
As a developer, I would love to see this get more traction. I really would. It's really painful working with Twitter now. Twitter's display 'requirements' and other aspects of the API are super restrictive after their latest update. However, the sad truth is that the population of Twitter users isn't going to be shifting anywhere else anytime soon. Most users hardly care about the 'openness' of the platform. I imagine the best way for a competitor to succeed would be by allowing users to cross post statuses to Twitter.. but Twitter API restrictions would kick in there too!
- bradwestness 14y ago
  I agree, I don't see how implementing the same thing as Twitter but with missing features (like posting via SMS) is supposed to draw away Joe Everyuser. The reason Twitter is popular is because there's a large active community of users and they do a good job of enabling you to discover and follow people you're likely to be interested in. It doesn't really matter how "open" it is, any more than it matters if Facebook or Tumblr are open. WordPress works with a distributed "install it yourself" model because people use it to power their websites and they want configurability and extensibility. With social networks like Twitter, they want community and baked in support with devices and other services.
- graue 14y ago
  rstat.us does let you cross-post statuses to Twitter. And most of the API restrictions have limited reading, not writing, so this feature may be safe for some time.
ordinary 14y ago
I would love for this to work, but "like X but open" is not enough. What you need is "better than X and open". I wish I knew how to do "better", but unfortunately, I don't.
- chrismdp 14y ago
  A fair point. Much of the advantages are for developers, not the wider userbase.
  - moystard 14y ago
    Giving developers an environment they can play with and build great products around is the best way of achieving success. Let's not forget that Twitter would have never been that successful without its developer community. If you can attract developers to rstat.us, then you will probably attract more users over time.
    - gavinlynch 14y ago
      But that developer community is a given if you are making a competitive or alternative service to something like Twitter. It's a prerequisite, not a bonus. I would argue you're still not giving the users enough of a bone.
- eloisant 14y ago
  If "like Twitter but open" was enough, Laconica/StatusNet would have won already.
  - chrismdp 14y ago
    I don't see the user experience of those platforms being on a par with Twitter. Yet.
    - MMN-o 14y ago
      I don't see the user experience on Twitter being on a par with neither StatusNet nor any of the third-party clients out there. Third-party clients have, however, not implemented StatusNet support despite the fact SN has a Twitter-compatible API. _That_ is something I don't understand why.
axx 14y ago
There is a hot discussion going on about Tent.io, a project with a very similar and promising direction: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4572427 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4572427 They launched there first Alpha Status App that's build on top of the Tent.io protocol: https://tent.is/ https://tent.is/ If you like to get more information about the Tent.io protocol, checkout: http://tent.io/ http://tent.io/
- joshbetz 14y ago
  Sounds cool, but I like that there is an OStatus W3C community group.
- chrismdp 14y ago
  Cool, thanks. Love that there are others trying to do similar things: we all need to work together as much as possible.
modernerd 14y ago
WordPress(.org) is one of the few open source projects to have encouraged large numbers of non-technical users to download, setup, and host their own serverside software. I think the Ostatus "movement" could learn a lot from it. A single OStatus-based PHP app, marketed well, and with an easy install path, might make widespread adoption of OStatus more likely. It could even piggyback on existing WordPress installations as a plugin. Then, anyone with a self-hosted WordPress blog would be able to host their own status updates under a fixed path appended to their existing blog, such as example.com/status/. It also offers the potential for anyone with a WordPress blog to become a provider of status pages for people who didn't want to host their own (because WordPress has an inbuilt user registration system), which could create a distributed, portable network with no lock-in. There are supposedly 60 million WordPress installations out there. These users already understand the value of owning and hosting their own content. That's an awful lot of potential to kickstart the uptake of a distributed social network, and I'm not sure that anyone's thought to exploit this yet.
- chrismdp 14y ago
  Great thoughts. I especially like the idea of a WordPress plugin to implement the OStatus protocol... looks like someone has already thought of that: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ostatus-for-wordpress/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ostatus-for-wordpress/ Once installed, there's nothing to stop you sharing your entire posts (or snippets) as OStatus messages.
  - struppi 14y ago
    FYI, there also seems to be a drupal plugin: http://drupal.org/sandbox/sanduhrs/1132580 http://drupal.org/sandbox/sanduhrs/1132580 - but it seems to be experimental at the moment. Also, I did not try it out myself - yet.
  - modernerd 14y ago
    That plugin's a good start. It's only been downloaded 708 times, though, possibly because it's not being actively developed or promoted, and perhaps also because it has a long list of dependencies that would make setup too hard for most. I think it could also be a branding issue. If I was building a distributed OStatus-based social network on the back of private WordPress installations, I would: 1. Market it under a different name than "OStatus". WordPress users need not know that their blog is automatically syndicated via RSS, and users of this new social service need not know that it's powered by OStatus. It is easier to market ideas than it is to market technologies and protocols. 2. Present users with an interface they're familiar with from other social networks, without stealing intellectual property. 3. Create a pretty marketing page that sold the project on its merits as a free social network that nobody owns. Give it a mascot or a bold logo. 4. Encourage the thousands of WordPress-related blogs to write about it, with a goal to drive WordPress developer adoption that might trickle down to other WordPress users too.
donpdonp 14y ago
A distributed message bus seems to be the most promising model. It'll be better than 'twitter but open' through the variety of messages being passed (see the sidebar of the UI mockup below). I believe the messages being spoken will come from activitystrea.ms, but the bus itself has yet to be determined. There is some interesting work along these lines from the founder of StatusNet going on in https://github.com/evanp/activitypump https://github.com/evanp/activitypump A UI mockup of a client that would read from the 'pump' is here: http://statusnetdev.net/inbox.html http://statusnetdev.net/inbox.html
elimisteve 14y ago
I really appreciate what StatusNet is doing, but I've found that it's just not useful enough to... use. It's Twitter but more free and with far fewer users. That's rather different from Diaspora and Tent.io's visions. FYI: Today, Tent.is -- the first implementation of Tent.io, a protocol for fully decentralized social networking -- went from 0 users to 2000. In a day. ...And since it's free, I bet it'll grow MUCH faster than App.net which, after TONS of media coverage and endorsements from the likes of not just Scobleizer, but The Washington Post and even fucking CNN(!), got just ~12,000 people to sign up by the deadline. Specific sites aside, I'm glad that people are actively creating alternatives to the centralized, corporatized, developer-unfriendly services that currently dominate the landscape.
- moystard 14y ago
  Even if tent.is now has 2000 users (including myself) over 24 hours, it does not mean that it will reach 12,000 people. With this kind of projects, people tend to subscribe, play with it a few minutes and then forget about it. Adoption for a user is tied with friends' adoption. Most users won't see any interest in switching from Twitter/Facebook to a decentralized network, because they don't understand the importance of privacy and controlling your own data.
- saraid216 14y ago
  To make moystard's point more clearly–and with a chart!–, http://xkcd.com/605/ http://xkcd.com/605/
  - elimisteve 14y ago
    Tent's success is far from certain, of course. Sounds like you're convinced that just because something might not happen, it almost certainly will not. Also a fallacy.
    - saraid216 14y ago
      That is some pretty amazing putting-words-in-my-mouth. I mean, if we're going to call out fallacies.
jpswade 14y ago
How does this differ from status.net (which powers identi.ca)?
- danbee 14y ago
  OStatus is the protocol behind status.net and identi.ca.
bozho 14y ago
I see a problem with OStatus that, it seems, is also seen by others - it may not be user-friendly. When a deployment that uses OStatus shuts down/fails, that's it - the users are gone. And that seems like a dealbreaker. I've shared my thoughts on distributed social networks here http://web.bozho.net/?p=235 http://web.bozho.net/?p=235
- DanWaterworth 14y ago
  The same problem exists with email, but it seems to have done fairly well despite that.
  - bozho 14y ago
    very well then, what are we waiting for - let's have a fully distributed social network :)
- wilkie 14y ago
  As another mentioned, email has this issue. Email (smtp) is a federated system, much like http. Basically, we can all have our own clients, servers, and live on our own, but still interact as a whole. Just like ostatus powered websites. It then inherits all of these scenarios. Users can be migrated, although it is easier if the identity is separated properly. Webfinger does exist to solve a lot of the migration headaches by allowing a well-known place to link all of your services to a common identity. You want to migrate? Just link to that new service. You then have to multicast some announcement, which is the hard part, and messy... but possible. Webfinger is usable from status.net, rstat.us etc etc... but they also allow you to host your identity with them. Your privacy argument thus holds true for email as it is a pull system where your email can be read by any intermediary server. You solve this problem in both instances with keypair encryption. The problem is not a technical flaw (closed, centralized systems are opaque about your data, which can be seen as worse.) but rather a flaw in presenting and educating people to use secure practices if privacy is desired.
- wmf 14y ago
  "I don’t have time for this, I’m shutting it down" should never happen. Don't use free services with no business model and don't provide free services with no business model. Even for your friends. It sounds harsh, but it's a lesson that people need to learn IMO. I agree that DiSo apps need to have built-in continuous backups and migration support.
donpdonp 14y ago
IndieWebCamp.com is another movement towards open and federated social networking.
markmm 14y ago
It annoys me that folks with a poverty of imagination are creating clones of existing apps that have already solved the problem. Another Twitter but open or Facebook with proper privacy..etc. Fail!.
- zizee 14y ago
  This is more a protocol than an app. In the early days of computer networking lots of companies had their own proprietary email systems that couldn't talk to each other. Then an open email protocol was created and email became so much more than an interdepartmental communications tool. This is much the same. Who knows the types of exciting tools it might spawn? existing apps that have already solved the problem Obviously Twitter doesn't solve it for everyone, otherwise you wouldn't see these sort of efforts.
- mhd 14y ago
  "X, but Y" is a perfectly reasonable business model. Almost any product isn't particularly unique, from cars to shavers to operating systems to knives. Neither Twitter nor Facebook really tread virgin soil, either.
anjc 14y ago
Slightly off topic, but i've only just seen these Twitter API usage changes now, how are they going to enforce these new display requirements? It's surely not feasible to manually check the display of tweets in all apps?
- fpgeek 14y ago
  I think general expectation is that as Twitter turns up the heat on developers there eventually won't be any apps to worry about.
  - anjc 14y ago
    But surely Twitter still want to be paid by developers who rely on their data
- dpeck 14y ago
  All of Twitters API changes essentially keep the compliant developers compliant, and let them smack down the non-compliant ones that get too large. Not a lot of the requirements/agreements can be programatically enforced.
DiabloD3 14y ago
So why doesn't this guy just use status.net, the software behind identi.ca; identi.ca IS the premier FOSS microblogging site, after all.
denzil_correa 14y ago
Have you considered changing the background and/or the color of the text? Reading was very unpleasant to the eye. Edit - Personal preference
- chrismdp 14y ago
  I'm quite attached to my colour scheme :) but other feedback welcome!
  - moystard 14y ago
    I also like the color scheme. Might be a good idea in the future to allow every user to have his own color scheme, profile theme a la Twitter.
premchai21 14y ago
I have a large chunk of friends and acquaintances who now conduct their ongoing visible conversations with each other almost entirely on Twitter, many of whom have started becoming impossible to reach by other means. They also have visible half-conversations with a similar number of other people whose tweets are “protected” so that only “confirmed followers” can read them. I don't see OStatus doing anything with the latter, and I don't think those people are going to move to public streams, and if they don't move, the other people interspersed with them won't move because it'll become impossible to talk to them. This is more or less the same reason I still reluctantly keep a LiveJournal: the open-Web facilities for “but only show it to these people” are severely lacking (and I haven't found a good way of doing anything about this yet). There's also the issue of social networks including things that are de facto currency-like: “number of followers” on Twitter is an obvious one. In a distributed network these usually can be faked, or at least are that way on the UI side since it's hard to generate a UI for that that doesn't drive the user's security-related cognitive load through the roof. (Or reveal more information about subscriptions than people prefer, but that's a shakier reason since some existing networks already reveal that graph.) Is there any push for OStatus or other distributed social network approaches to handle these use cases? I haven't been able to find any, and OStatus seems to think the restricted stream case is explicitly out of scope.
- saraid216 14y ago
  > This is more or less the same reason I still reluctantly keep a LiveJournal: the open-Web facilities for “but only show it to these people” are severely lacking (and I haven't found a good way of doing anything about this yet). Google Plus seems to have achieved this fairly well. I haven't had the time to take a look at their API yet, but I can't imagine it's any less than what LJ provided.
  - premchai21 14y ago
    Does that really qualify as open-Web facilities, though? Is it “show it to these people”, or is it “show it to these Google Plus users”? The latter is not appreciably better than the LiveJournal case, for me, and in fact this provides a demonstration of the lock-in effect. Here's another one: Dreamwidth runs an LJ-derived codebase, arguably an improved one (they had considerably better separation of “subscribe” and “authorize” last I checked, rather than a “friends list” that conflates these), and some of the people I contact on LJ have moved there, but they all have continuous crossposts back to the original LiveJournal, and if I moved there I think either no one would read anything I wrote, or else the comment streams would be so disjoined that I would be effectively a strange-looking LJ user anyway. That last is also a concrete example of why nonexclusivity is not a complete solution. The resource that's being fought over is not where one can read but where a bunch of other people do read. If everyone views your content at Phuubaar's House of Crossposts, then if Phuubaar cuts you off, you are still hosed in the general case even if you provide the same stream somewhere else, because those users are not going to know about it or are going to find it too inconvenient to subscribe. And the tooling around Atom and RSS aggregation all seems to be built around the idea that feeds are almost always public. I haven't had any success with the idea of creating a private Atom feed and expecting any of my friends to be able to read it. Either it'll require authentication, at which point the software usually won't be able to access it, or I can try to use a capability-URL style, at which point one of them will punch it into their favorite everyone-shares-everything social aggregator (Google Reader?) and then my (illusion of) confidentiality is gone. This is terrible, and I don't know how to fix it.
tubbo 14y ago
Hey OP, Diaspora is not a closed-invite system, there are plenty of free pods out there. A great listing is http://podupti.me/ http://podupti.me/ If you'd like to know more about how we "publicly disseminate status updates", check out the documentation on federation protocol: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Federation-Protocol-Overview https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Federation-Protoco... We're also working on compatibility and interoperability with the OStatus protocol using Federation.
telent 14y ago
Does anyone know of "friend discovery" services using OStatus? Most proprietary social networks have that "let me riffle through your addressbook" thing, which I imagine the privacy-conscious would eschew (I certainly do), but e.g. my Twitter "following" list is publically available, so it shouldn't be hard to go through that and find people I'm following who are also on an ostatus-compatible service somewhere
jackreichert 14y ago
WordPress already has the complete infrastructure and adoption needed for a social network. The only missing key is interconnecting them, why the need for a separate platform? app? It's all in place. Only a plugin is needed. Anyone with the plugin would be able to connect their network into anyone else with the plugin. I would imagine it could be done with openid and xmlrpc.
- calvin 14y ago
  WordPress has BuddyPress (http://buddypress.org/ http://buddypress.org/) for social networking. I don't believe it allows interconnecting with other installations.
  - jackreichert 14y ago
    true. it's a shame.
baby 14y ago
Everytime I read about diaspora and see where it is today I feel sad...
programminggeek 14y ago
Ok, um, this is not going to work. Half of the magic of Twitter is that it's a single service, so you can subscribe to anyone, pull anyones feed into yours, retweet, share, all that junk. People use twitter because other people use twitter. An open service doesn't solve that, it just makes things more complicated and worse. Wordpress works because it's not a network platform, it's a publishing one. Wordpress is inherently not a social network, it's a CMS. Sure, there are social bits, but it works well as an installable thing because you don't have to deal with issues like connecting or discovering other blogs. You can just install it, write content, and hit publish and boom, you're publishing on your own site on the net. The only people who see a problem with Twitter right now are devs, not users. All the "open twitter" projects are going to turn out the way of Diaspora, not Wordpress.
evanprodromou 14y ago
I'm one of the co-authors of the OStatus spec and the lead developer on StatusNet (http://status.net/ http://status.net/) and the ActivityPump (http://activitypump.org/ http://activitypump.org/). I think the secret weapon in the OStatus arsenal is that there are literally hundreds of millions (literally HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS) of PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds on the Web. Blogger, YouTube, WordPress.com, Tumblr, and Posterous as well as StatusNet and Diaspora* all provide PuSH-enabled feeds. That's a huge body of content to follow in real time. Another good part is that PubSubHubbub will help with SEO -- Google Search bots subscribe to PuSH-enabled streams, which gets you indexed faster. Lots of incentive is good for getting things done. There is distinctly lower support for the other parts of the OStatus stack. But I hope we'll see this stack continue to develop.
- julien 14y ago
  Go Evan!
- sandeepshetty 14y ago
  Sent you an email about ActivityPump. Would be great to have a mailing list to discuss it.
- riffic 14y ago
  Evan, I think right now most people are getting distracted at how OStatus would benefit the end-user that they fail to see how the protocol/service stack benefits organizations.
sandeepshetty 14y ago
Evan (Founder and CEO of Status.net) is working on ActivityPump (https://github.com/evanp/activitypump https://github.com/evanp/activitypump) which is looking to replace Status.net and I'm guessing OStatus as well: http://identi.ca/notice/96065721 http://identi.ca/notice/96065721
cutie 14y ago
Better name needed.
hodder 14y ago
Does the userbase of Twitter really care about how open the platform is?
- riffic 14y ago
  nope, but I can guarantee you that organizations do. You're a government agency (lets say, state of california), and you have hundreds of departments and thousands of messages: Would you rather register a twitter username for each department? Or would you install a StatusNet instance for each organization and let them maintain control?
AVTizzle 14y ago
What ever happened to app.net? I keep waiting to see it resurface in comments related to Twitter, but it never does. Not a mention of it in any of these comments either. What gives? End of the hype?
juliendsv-mbm 14y ago
Long time ago we did this service to check if your site / email follows the ostatus specifications : http://www.madebymonsieur.com/ostatus_discovery/ http://www.madebymonsieur.com/ostatus_discovery/ Test it with you website or email adress, exemple enter http://identi.ca/glynmoody http://identi.ca/glynmoody in the form enjoy!

185 points by chrismdp 14y ago

Guys I'd like to share another bootstrapped Italian startup in the microblogging panorama: www.meemi.com Full Disclosure: I know the creator, not by person but on the Net

samikc 14y ago

This looks interesting. We built ScoopSpot[1] to make microblog better, one of the core proposition was to allow the application developers work with the statuses more openly. However, it didn't caught attention of the people. One interesting aspect of ScoopSpot was to allow user follow a tag or topic. The possibility of application built on what users' interests are limitless (at least that's what I think). I will look into the protocol of OStatus to see how can we make our API's open. [1]https://www.scoopspot.com https://www.scoopspot.com

chrismdp 14y ago

Would love to know what HNers think we can do to push this forward.

patrickaljord 14y ago
Is it fully compatible with status.net already? Edit: I tried to post from my status.net client choqok and it failed with "Creating the new post failed. The result data could not be parsed.". Is the api url https://rstat.us/api https://rstat.us/api ?
- wilkie 14y ago
  The client api and the backend that implements the protocol are different. I mean, you simply need html to provide a means of building a client. But, no client will really do that. rstat.us will try to support existing apis, but that's not there just yet. The backend in rstat.us does support ostatus, and can interoperate with status.net, but does not have the same api as of yet.
- EwanToo 14y ago
  It's meant to work, for example see here https://github.com/hotsh/rstat.us/issues/387 https://github.com/hotsh/rstat.us/issues/387
scrrr 14y ago
Unless Twitter angers their users greatly there's not much that can be done. Twitter stands for status updates just like Google stands for search. A competing product would have to have a (slightly?) different feature-set I think..

davedx 14y ago

How does this compare to tent.io?

EwanToo 14y ago
From what I've seen, the tent protocol (and service) is more complex than OStatus, and capable of a lot more. To me, tent.io is more like a distributed tumblr than twitter.

rmccue 14y ago

I think the big problem with distributed systems is how to address people. "@abc" is getting more and more synonymous with "abc" as a Twitter username, and App.net uses the same style. This already leads to confusion when they don't match (e.g. Marco Arment is @marcoarment on Twitter and @marco on App.net); I have no idea how you fix this for decentralising. "@example.com/abc" is one (not particularly nice) way of doing it, but I'm struggling to think of any way that would work nicely.

EwanToo 14y ago
You're right, but at the same time email addresses have worked pretty well for the last 20+ years, even my parents cope with it...
- ryanslade 14y ago
  I was going to say the same thing. What's wrong with marco@example.com?
  - spindritf 14y ago
    It implies an e-mail address and the expectation would probably be for the provider to receive an e-mail sent to that address. Not unlike @facebook.com addresses, so it may work.
    - sandeepshetty 14y ago
      See webfinger.
    - wilkie 14y ago
      Email is a federated system just like status.net, rstat.us etc. We can all have our own clients, servers, and still interact, communicate, and play well with every other email server. Using the same means of locating a person seems very very reasonable from both a technical aspect (it works for them just fine) and from the viewpoint that people already understand that an email address represents somebody's online presence and this is how you can communicate with them. Concept familiarity is extremely important for adoption, so that should be considered.

vindicated 14y ago

As a developer, I would love to see this get more traction. I really would. It's really painful working with Twitter now. Twitter's display 'requirements' and other aspects of the API are super restrictive after their latest update. However, the sad truth is that the population of Twitter users isn't going to be shifting anywhere else anytime soon. Most users hardly care about the 'openness' of the platform. I imagine the best way for a competitor to succeed would be by allowing users to cross post statuses to Twitter.. but Twitter API restrictions would kick in there too!

bradwestness 14y ago
I agree, I don't see how implementing the same thing as Twitter but with missing features (like posting via SMS) is supposed to draw away Joe Everyuser. The reason Twitter is popular is because there's a large active community of users and they do a good job of enabling you to discover and follow people you're likely to be interested in. It doesn't really matter how "open" it is, any more than it matters if Facebook or Tumblr are open. WordPress works with a distributed "install it yourself" model because people use it to power their websites and they want configurability and extensibility. With social networks like Twitter, they want community and baked in support with devices and other services.
graue 14y ago
rstat.us does let you cross-post statuses to Twitter. And most of the API restrictions have limited reading, not writing, so this feature may be safe for some time.

ordinary 14y ago

I would love for this to work, but "like X but open" is not enough. What you need is "better than X and open". I wish I knew how to do "better", but unfortunately, I don't.

chrismdp 14y ago
A fair point. Much of the advantages are for developers, not the wider userbase.
- moystard 14y ago
  Giving developers an environment they can play with and build great products around is the best way of achieving success. Let's not forget that Twitter would have never been that successful without its developer community. If you can attract developers to rstat.us, then you will probably attract more users over time.
  - gavinlynch 14y ago
    But that developer community is a given if you are making a competitive or alternative service to something like Twitter. It's a prerequisite, not a bonus. I would argue you're still not giving the users enough of a bone.
eloisant 14y ago
If "like Twitter but open" was enough, Laconica/StatusNet would have won already.
- chrismdp 14y ago
  I don't see the user experience of those platforms being on a par with Twitter. Yet.
  - MMN-o 14y ago
    I don't see the user experience on Twitter being on a par with neither StatusNet nor any of the third-party clients out there. Third-party clients have, however, not implemented StatusNet support despite the fact SN has a Twitter-compatible API. _That_ is something I don't understand why.

axx 14y ago

There is a hot discussion going on about Tent.io, a project with a very similar and promising direction: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4572427 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4572427 They launched there first Alpha Status App that's build on top of the Tent.io protocol: https://tent.is/ https://tent.is/ If you like to get more information about the Tent.io protocol, checkout: http://tent.io/ http://tent.io/

joshbetz 14y ago
Sounds cool, but I like that there is an OStatus W3C community group.
chrismdp 14y ago
Cool, thanks. Love that there are others trying to do similar things: we all need to work together as much as possible.

modernerd 14y ago

WordPress(.org) is one of the few open source projects to have encouraged large numbers of non-technical users to download, setup, and host their own serverside software. I think the Ostatus "movement" could learn a lot from it. A single OStatus-based PHP app, marketed well, and with an easy install path, might make widespread adoption of OStatus more likely. It could even piggyback on existing WordPress installations as a plugin. Then, anyone with a self-hosted WordPress blog would be able to host their own status updates under a fixed path appended to their existing blog, such as example.com/status/. It also offers the potential for anyone with a WordPress blog to become a provider of status pages for people who didn't want to host their own (because WordPress has an inbuilt user registration system), which could create a distributed, portable network with no lock-in. There are supposedly 60 million WordPress installations out there. These users already understand the value of owning and hosting their own content. That's an awful lot of potential to kickstart the uptake of a distributed social network, and I'm not sure that anyone's thought to exploit this yet.

chrismdp 14y ago
Great thoughts. I especially like the idea of a WordPress plugin to implement the OStatus protocol... looks like someone has already thought of that: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ostatus-for-wordpress/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ostatus-for-wordpress/ Once installed, there's nothing to stop you sharing your entire posts (or snippets) as OStatus messages.
- struppi 14y ago
  FYI, there also seems to be a drupal plugin: http://drupal.org/sandbox/sanduhrs/1132580 http://drupal.org/sandbox/sanduhrs/1132580 - but it seems to be experimental at the moment. Also, I did not try it out myself - yet.
- modernerd 14y ago
  That plugin's a good start. It's only been downloaded 708 times, though, possibly because it's not being actively developed or promoted, and perhaps also because it has a long list of dependencies that would make setup too hard for most. I think it could also be a branding issue. If I was building a distributed OStatus-based social network on the back of private WordPress installations, I would: 1. Market it under a different name than "OStatus". WordPress users need not know that their blog is automatically syndicated via RSS, and users of this new social service need not know that it's powered by OStatus. It is easier to market ideas than it is to market technologies and protocols. 2. Present users with an interface they're familiar with from other social networks, without stealing intellectual property. 3. Create a pretty marketing page that sold the project on its merits as a free social network that nobody owns. Give it a mascot or a bold logo. 4. Encourage the thousands of WordPress-related blogs to write about it, with a goal to drive WordPress developer adoption that might trickle down to other WordPress users too.

donpdonp 14y ago

A distributed message bus seems to be the most promising model. It'll be better than 'twitter but open' through the variety of messages being passed (see the sidebar of the UI mockup below). I believe the messages being spoken will come from activitystrea.ms, but the bus itself has yet to be determined. There is some interesting work along these lines from the founder of StatusNet going on in https://github.com/evanp/activitypump https://github.com/evanp/activitypump A UI mockup of a client that would read from the 'pump' is here: http://statusnetdev.net/inbox.html http://statusnetdev.net/inbox.html

elimisteve 14y ago

I really appreciate what StatusNet is doing, but I've found that it's just not useful enough to... use. It's Twitter but more free and with far fewer users. That's rather different from Diaspora and Tent.io's visions. FYI: Today, Tent.is -- the first implementation of Tent.io, a protocol for fully decentralized social networking -- went from 0 users to 2000. In a day. ...And since it's free, I bet it'll grow MUCH faster than App.net which, after TONS of media coverage and endorsements from the likes of not just Scobleizer, but The Washington Post and even fucking CNN(!), got just ~12,000 people to sign up by the deadline. Specific sites aside, I'm glad that people are actively creating alternatives to the centralized, corporatized, developer-unfriendly services that currently dominate the landscape.

moystard 14y ago
Even if tent.is now has 2000 users (including myself) over 24 hours, it does not mean that it will reach 12,000 people. With this kind of projects, people tend to subscribe, play with it a few minutes and then forget about it. Adoption for a user is tied with friends' adoption. Most users won't see any interest in switching from Twitter/Facebook to a decentralized network, because they don't understand the importance of privacy and controlling your own data.
saraid216 14y ago
To make moystard's point more clearly–and with a chart!–, http://xkcd.com/605/ http://xkcd.com/605/
- elimisteve 14y ago
  Tent's success is far from certain, of course. Sounds like you're convinced that just because something might not happen, it almost certainly will not. Also a fallacy.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    That is some pretty amazing putting-words-in-my-mouth. I mean, if we're going to call out fallacies.

jpswade 14y ago

How does this differ from status.net (which powers identi.ca)?

danbee 14y ago
OStatus is the protocol behind status.net and identi.ca.

bozho 14y ago

I see a problem with OStatus that, it seems, is also seen by others - it may not be user-friendly. When a deployment that uses OStatus shuts down/fails, that's it - the users are gone. And that seems like a dealbreaker. I've shared my thoughts on distributed social networks here http://web.bozho.net/?p=235 http://web.bozho.net/?p=235

DanWaterworth 14y ago
The same problem exists with email, but it seems to have done fairly well despite that.
- bozho 14y ago
  very well then, what are we waiting for - let's have a fully distributed social network :)
wilkie 14y ago
As another mentioned, email has this issue. Email (smtp) is a federated system, much like http. Basically, we can all have our own clients, servers, and live on our own, but still interact as a whole. Just like ostatus powered websites. It then inherits all of these scenarios. Users can be migrated, although it is easier if the identity is separated properly. Webfinger does exist to solve a lot of the migration headaches by allowing a well-known place to link all of your services to a common identity. You want to migrate? Just link to that new service. You then have to multicast some announcement, which is the hard part, and messy... but possible. Webfinger is usable from status.net, rstat.us etc etc... but they also allow you to host your identity with them. Your privacy argument thus holds true for email as it is a pull system where your email can be read by any intermediary server. You solve this problem in both instances with keypair encryption. The problem is not a technical flaw (closed, centralized systems are opaque about your data, which can be seen as worse.) but rather a flaw in presenting and educating people to use secure practices if privacy is desired.
wmf 14y ago
"I don’t have time for this, I’m shutting it down" should never happen. Don't use free services with no business model and don't provide free services with no business model. Even for your friends. It sounds harsh, but it's a lesson that people need to learn IMO. I agree that DiSo apps need to have built-in continuous backups and migration support.

donpdonp 14y ago

IndieWebCamp.com is another movement towards open and federated social networking.

markmm 14y ago

It annoys me that folks with a poverty of imagination are creating clones of existing apps that have already solved the problem. Another Twitter but open or Facebook with proper privacy..etc. Fail!.

zizee 14y ago
This is more a protocol than an app. In the early days of computer networking lots of companies had their own proprietary email systems that couldn't talk to each other. Then an open email protocol was created and email became so much more than an interdepartmental communications tool. This is much the same. Who knows the types of exciting tools it might spawn? existing apps that have already solved the problem Obviously Twitter doesn't solve it for everyone, otherwise you wouldn't see these sort of efforts.
mhd 14y ago
"X, but Y" is a perfectly reasonable business model. Almost any product isn't particularly unique, from cars to shavers to operating systems to knives. Neither Twitter nor Facebook really tread virgin soil, either.

anjc 14y ago

Slightly off topic, but i've only just seen these Twitter API usage changes now, how are they going to enforce these new display requirements? It's surely not feasible to manually check the display of tweets in all apps?

fpgeek 14y ago
I think general expectation is that as Twitter turns up the heat on developers there eventually won't be any apps to worry about.
- anjc 14y ago
  But surely Twitter still want to be paid by developers who rely on their data
dpeck 14y ago
All of Twitters API changes essentially keep the compliant developers compliant, and let them smack down the non-compliant ones that get too large. Not a lot of the requirements/agreements can be programatically enforced.

DiabloD3 14y ago

So why doesn't this guy just use status.net, the software behind identi.ca; identi.ca IS the premier FOSS microblogging site, after all.

denzil_correa 14y ago

Have you considered changing the background and/or the color of the text? Reading was very unpleasant to the eye. Edit - Personal preference

chrismdp 14y ago
I'm quite attached to my colour scheme :) but other feedback welcome!
- moystard 14y ago
  I also like the color scheme. Might be a good idea in the future to allow every user to have his own color scheme, profile theme a la Twitter.

premchai21 14y ago

I have a large chunk of friends and acquaintances who now conduct their ongoing visible conversations with each other almost entirely on Twitter, many of whom have started becoming impossible to reach by other means. They also have visible half-conversations with a similar number of other people whose tweets are “protected” so that only “confirmed followers” can read them. I don't see OStatus doing anything with the latter, and I don't think those people are going to move to public streams, and if they don't move, the other people interspersed with them won't move because it'll become impossible to talk to them. This is more or less the same reason I still reluctantly keep a LiveJournal: the open-Web facilities for “but only show it to these people” are severely lacking (and I haven't found a good way of doing anything about this yet). There's also the issue of social networks including things that are de facto currency-like: “number of followers” on Twitter is an obvious one. In a distributed network these usually can be faked, or at least are that way on the UI side since it's hard to generate a UI for that that doesn't drive the user's security-related cognitive load through the roof. (Or reveal more information about subscriptions than people prefer, but that's a shakier reason since some existing networks already reveal that graph.) Is there any push for OStatus or other distributed social network approaches to handle these use cases? I haven't been able to find any, and OStatus seems to think the restricted stream case is explicitly out of scope.

saraid216 14y ago
> This is more or less the same reason I still reluctantly keep a LiveJournal: the open-Web facilities for “but only show it to these people” are severely lacking (and I haven't found a good way of doing anything about this yet). Google Plus seems to have achieved this fairly well. I haven't had the time to take a look at their API yet, but I can't imagine it's any less than what LJ provided.
- premchai21 14y ago
  Does that really qualify as open-Web facilities, though? Is it “show it to these people”, or is it “show it to these Google Plus users”? The latter is not appreciably better than the LiveJournal case, for me, and in fact this provides a demonstration of the lock-in effect. Here's another one: Dreamwidth runs an LJ-derived codebase, arguably an improved one (they had considerably better separation of “subscribe” and “authorize” last I checked, rather than a “friends list” that conflates these), and some of the people I contact on LJ have moved there, but they all have continuous crossposts back to the original LiveJournal, and if I moved there I think either no one would read anything I wrote, or else the comment streams would be so disjoined that I would be effectively a strange-looking LJ user anyway. That last is also a concrete example of why nonexclusivity is not a complete solution. The resource that's being fought over is not where one can read but where a bunch of other people do read. If everyone views your content at Phuubaar's House of Crossposts, then if Phuubaar cuts you off, you are still hosed in the general case even if you provide the same stream somewhere else, because those users are not going to know about it or are going to find it too inconvenient to subscribe. And the tooling around Atom and RSS aggregation all seems to be built around the idea that feeds are almost always public. I haven't had any success with the idea of creating a private Atom feed and expecting any of my friends to be able to read it. Either it'll require authentication, at which point the software usually won't be able to access it, or I can try to use a capability-URL style, at which point one of them will punch it into their favorite everyone-shares-everything social aggregator (Google Reader?) and then my (illusion of) confidentiality is gone. This is terrible, and I don't know how to fix it.

tubbo 14y ago

Hey OP, Diaspora is not a closed-invite system, there are plenty of free pods out there. A great listing is http://podupti.me/ http://podupti.me/ If you'd like to know more about how we "publicly disseminate status updates", check out the documentation on federation protocol: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Federation-Protocol-Overview https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Federation-Protoco... We're also working on compatibility and interoperability with the OStatus protocol using Federation.

telent 14y ago

Does anyone know of "friend discovery" services using OStatus? Most proprietary social networks have that "let me riffle through your addressbook" thing, which I imagine the privacy-conscious would eschew (I certainly do), but e.g. my Twitter "following" list is publically available, so it shouldn't be hard to go through that and find people I'm following who are also on an ostatus-compatible service somewhere

jackreichert 14y ago

WordPress already has the complete infrastructure and adoption needed for a social network. The only missing key is interconnecting them, why the need for a separate platform? app? It's all in place. Only a plugin is needed. Anyone with the plugin would be able to connect their network into anyone else with the plugin. I would imagine it could be done with openid and xmlrpc.

calvin 14y ago
WordPress has BuddyPress (http://buddypress.org/ http://buddypress.org/) for social networking. I don't believe it allows interconnecting with other installations.
- jackreichert 14y ago
  true. it's a shame.

baby 14y ago

Everytime I read about diaspora and see where it is today I feel sad...

programminggeek 14y ago

Ok, um, this is not going to work. Half of the magic of Twitter is that it's a single service, so you can subscribe to anyone, pull anyones feed into yours, retweet, share, all that junk. People use twitter because other people use twitter. An open service doesn't solve that, it just makes things more complicated and worse. Wordpress works because it's not a network platform, it's a publishing one. Wordpress is inherently not a social network, it's a CMS. Sure, there are social bits, but it works well as an installable thing because you don't have to deal with issues like connecting or discovering other blogs. You can just install it, write content, and hit publish and boom, you're publishing on your own site on the net. The only people who see a problem with Twitter right now are devs, not users. All the "open twitter" projects are going to turn out the way of Diaspora, not Wordpress.

evanprodromou 14y ago

I'm one of the co-authors of the OStatus spec and the lead developer on StatusNet (http://status.net/ http://status.net/) and the ActivityPump (http://activitypump.org/ http://activitypump.org/). I think the secret weapon in the OStatus arsenal is that there are literally hundreds of millions (literally HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS) of PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds on the Web. Blogger, YouTube, WordPress.com, Tumblr, and Posterous as well as StatusNet and Diaspora* all provide PuSH-enabled feeds. That's a huge body of content to follow in real time. Another good part is that PubSubHubbub will help with SEO -- Google Search bots subscribe to PuSH-enabled streams, which gets you indexed faster. Lots of incentive is good for getting things done. There is distinctly lower support for the other parts of the OStatus stack. But I hope we'll see this stack continue to develop.

julien 14y ago
Go Evan!
sandeepshetty 14y ago
Sent you an email about ActivityPump. Would be great to have a mailing list to discuss it.
riffic 14y ago
Evan, I think right now most people are getting distracted at how OStatus would benefit the end-user that they fail to see how the protocol/service stack benefits organizations.

sandeepshetty 14y ago

Evan (Founder and CEO of Status.net) is working on ActivityPump (https://github.com/evanp/activitypump https://github.com/evanp/activitypump) which is looking to replace Status.net and I'm guessing OStatus as well: http://identi.ca/notice/96065721 http://identi.ca/notice/96065721

cutie 14y ago

Better name needed.

hodder 14y ago

Does the userbase of Twitter really care about how open the platform is?

riffic 14y ago
nope, but I can guarantee you that organizations do. You're a government agency (lets say, state of california), and you have hundreds of departments and thousands of messages: Would you rather register a twitter username for each department? Or would you install a StatusNet instance for each organization and let them maintain control?

AVTizzle 14y ago

What ever happened to app.net? I keep waiting to see it resurface in comments related to Twitter, but it never does. Not a mention of it in any of these comments either. What gives? End of the hype?

juliendsv-mbm 14y ago

Long time ago we did this service to check if your site / email follows the ostatus specifications : http://www.madebymonsieur.com/ostatus_discovery/ http://www.madebymonsieur.com/ostatus_discovery/ Test it with you website or email adress, exemple enter http://identi.ca/glynmoody http://identi.ca/glynmoody in the form enjoy!