181–190 of 259 posts
Before the site has given me any reason to join, it makes me choose between 7 virtually indistinguishable options of providers with subtle technical advantages and disadvantages. Ah, GNU projects. Never change.
http://imgur.com/4K5rsbO I can't even.
what leaves me skeptic about these kind of alternative services like GNUSocial and Diaspora is not much when, if ever, or how they will be able to attract the necessary critical mass of users that makes them relevant. Instead, it what would happen after that. The main two questions I would be interested in would be: (1) do they scale to the size of, say, Twitter (~400M Daily Active Users, Facebook ~1B DAU)? (2) what…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> GNU projects always remind me why programmers alone isn't enough, apps also need good design and UX. Some people need others to think for them. Some people like to make their own decisions. GNU is for the latter ones. GNU has always been freedom of choice. Design is overrated. Functionality and reliability are more important. Even Apple has to admit that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11061111
Yea.... No. If you are presented with 6 choices and you cannot reasonably tell the difference between them without spending 15-30 minutes researching all of the options, you have a bad user experience. Design is important. People like using things that look good. UX is vital. If a user can't figure out how to navigate through an app in a reasonable amount of time without a great deal of existing knowledge (which they…
Having watched kids, teens, and 20-somethings, I've concluded that "a reasonable amount of time" to them is something on the order of 5 seconds on the outside. On a PC, they might look around and thoughtfully click on things. On a tablet or phone app, they just mash their fingers for about 3 seconds, then if they haven't seen something, move on.
This even extends to 20-somethings and game controllers. I've seen 20-somethings walk up to an 80's emulated arcade game, waggle the sticks on a controller for 2 seconds, not understand why the screen was shaking, then walk away.
Oh boy, strcmp() for passwords.
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Haha I don't even know which one to join. Feels like I'll make the wrong choice. GNU projects always remind me why programmers alone isn't enough, apps also need good design and UX.
> GNU projects always remind me why programmers alone isn't enough, apps also need good design and UX. Some people need others to think for them. Some people like to make their own decisions. GNU is for the latter ones. GNU has always been freedom of choice. Design is overrated. Functionality and reliability are more important. Even Apple has to admit that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11061111
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For an enterprise, yes, analytics would certainly be more important; because you'd want to measure success of whatever...but those are goals more for a company. If I only wish to share with, say, my family and a few important friends (without resorting to email blasts) the types of things folks normally share on a centralized social network, then analytics isn't important for me. I just basically need to host "the pa…
No, it is for something bigger than a company, it is for the world: if there is a earthquake or tsunami you want to receive the alert immediately. I am not pro Twitter, I am just saying that from the computer science point of view you can't find a distributed solution to one of the problems Twitter is trying to solve.
For what i will call "broadcast" events - such as your very valid tsunami, earthquake examples - sure it would be essential for those alerts to get out...But whether you're using a centralized or a decentralized approach shouldn't matter - assuming of course that one of the nodes of the decentralized method gets the needed input about the alert - in order to pass it on to the other peers of the decent. network. Much like email and websites, and to some degree mobile phone carriers, having a decentralized network does not necessarily prevent fast distribution of important/up-to-the-minute/broadcast information such as alerts. In fact, one might argue that having a decentralized approach might help with overall resilience. That being said, as much as i am a proponent of decentralized (and open) social networks, they have many non-trivial obstacles to contend with...but i do hope for one day to not have to exclusively depend on closed and centralized platforms like twitter et al.
What an irony to use twitter bootstrap to make a FLOSS twitter :)
what leaves me skeptic about these kind of alternative services like GNUSocial and Diaspora is not much when, if ever, or how they will be able to attract the necessary critical mass of users that makes them relevant. Instead, it what would happen after that. The main two questions I would be interested in would be: (1) do they scale to the size of, say, Twitter (~400M Daily Active Users, Facebook ~1B DAU)? (2) what…
Stuff like this is never going to work, because it suffers from the chicken-and-egg problem. Everyone (who cares about Twitter or something like it) uses Twitter because everyone else uses Twitter. You can make an account on Quitter or Diaspora or any other decentralized FLOSS network, but it'll be useless because all your non-nerd friends (and most of your nerd friends too) won't have accounts there, and will contin…
> it'll be useless because all your non-nerd friends (and most of your nerd friends too) won't have accounts there Call it Eternal September, the unwashed masses, the quality of online communities dropping as they grow, call it whatever, I'm ready for a reboot, desperate even. You are probably right — there'll be a chicken and egg problem even with hardcore nerdy gnu fans, but if new networks are created that attract…
I plan on posting a lot to GNU Social and see what the experience is ike after a month or two.
After reading about GNU Social on HN last night I created an account on the first of the 6 provides, loadaverage.org I like the service and I am considering running my own server. My account is https://loadaverage.org/markwatson and I am going to start out by cross posting some of the things I post on Twitter and G+ and see where this goes. When I quit consulting at Google in 2013 the first thing I did when I got hom…
I guess the mentioned article is http://blog.markwatson.com/2014/07/practical-internet-privac... Have you modified your approach since then?