GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter • Hacker News Board

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#201

Post by st3v3r » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 7:06 PM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #174

atmosx wrote: post #150

I just realized that decentralization is awesome for privacy and all, but for social networks sucks big time.

I have only been using GNU Social for about 18 hours, but so far the decentralization does not seem to be a problem. When you have an account on one person's (or organization's) server, you can "remote follow" people elsewhere and that seems to work just fine.

How do they handle the issue of keeping usernames unique? If I were to sign up on one server with my handle, what's to stop someone from signing up on another server with that same handle to impersonate me?

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#202

Post by st3v3r » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 7:08 PM UTC

tagrun wrote: post #14

dcw303 wrote: post #12

I don't get it. I went to gnusocial.no to join, and there's no link to sign up. I eventually found a register link off the help page (not visible on mobile for some reason), and I just get a messsage "Sorry, only invited people can register". Do they want people to join this or not?

You can't expect all GNU Social instances to be open for public registration, that's not what fedaration means. loadaverage.org seems to be open to everyone though. Also, do you have an OpenID?

Then why don't they just come out and say that? If they want people to use the service, they have to make it as friction free as possible. Otherwise people will give up.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#203

Post by st3v3r » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 7:20 PM UTC

cazum wrote: post #43

DasIch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is not one single global point of failure, which has other implications regarding things like censorship. In other words it doesn't just ignore abuse and harrassment one of the biggest problems - maybe the biggest problem - twitter has a communications platform, it practically encourages it.

I haven't used gnusocial, but I'd imagine they have a ignore/block-user feature.

But as Twitter has shown us, that's pretty worthless, as the cost to creating a new account to get around it is pretty much zero.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#204

Post by reidrac » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

st3v3r wrote: post #200

reidrac wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my humble opinion, that's what ruined indenti.ca back in the day. If you're mirroring Twitter and losing the interactions you have in GNU Social, your account is just a bot and you're not really using the social network .

Does someone have a client that can work with both? Because, lets face it, Twitter is the 800 lb gorilla in the room. Most people, if they want to try this out, would also like to maintain their activity on Twitter. Hopefully there would be some way that you can do both, and be alerted to messages and replies on both, and even have a unified timeline in one app. (And if you're not interested in maintaining presence o…

My point was that mirroring Twitter on identi.ca made identi.ca worse. Lots of people were automatically posting their Twitter updates on identi.ca, but never replying or caring about the interactions they had there. Same with blogs RSS feeds being fed to identi.ca.

I don't know where we are with multi-protocol clients. Back then I was using https://launchpad.net/gwibber (before it was rewritten to use CouchDB and stopped working for me, I don't know what is its current status).

I didn't post like that, I had two accounts and used both; until I got bored of bots on identi.ca and, in practice, I was only using Twitter.

EDIT: changed Gwibber link to launchpad as the .com doesn't seem to be maintained.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#205

Post by nickik » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

mattl wrote: post #170

ywecur wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be as easy as just recommending one at random every time you load the page. I don't understand why they don't implement this.

It's a static site, but also maintaining a huge list of servers, monitoring them, etc seems like a lot of work when the real goal should be "start your own server"

For most people "start your own server" is not the real goal. People who want to run their own will choice to do so and are able to look in the docs.

People who just want twitter should just get that.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#206

Post by Johnny_Brahms » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 8:26 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #55

Johnny_Brahms wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, you will find lots of people that claim scheme is the best programming language. I myself am torn between the caml family of languages and scheme. Most serious stuff I write in Scheme, and when I got parsack (parsec for Racket) I now no longer have any reason to leave.

I was reminded of a quote saying this kind of question (scheme or caml) is discussing brand of waters while lost in a desert dying of thirst. Although PHP post 5.5 matured enormously, I'm still rooting for a scheme.

Who isn't? :D

I rewrote most of my old linux projects (for home use, most of them) in Scheme48 just because I like scsh so much.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#207

Post by mattl » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 9:16 PM UTC

nickik wrote: post #205

mattl wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a static site, but also maintaining a huge list of servers, monitoring them, etc seems like a lot of work when the real goal should be "start your own server"

For most people "start your own server" is not the real goal. People who want to run their own will choice to do so and are able to look in the docs. People who just want twitter should just get that.

People who just want Twitter will find GNU social a very different experience immediately anyway, and I'd rather leave that offering to a particular server (such as Quitter) rather than the whole project.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#208

Post by dilap » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 9:18 PM UTC

mattl wrote: post #181

dilap wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://imgur.com/4K5rsbO I can't even.

"Something which looks like Twitter, great for new users coming over from Twitter"

So "Quitter" is obliquely referencing someone that has "quit twitter"?

I guess there's a certain logic behind it, then -- but as a name that (1) creates a positive emotional feeling and (2) is intuitively obvious, it falls very short.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#209

Post by mattl » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 9:19 PM UTC

st3v3r wrote: post #185

progman wrote: post #140

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

No. What good is all the functionality in the world if it's prohibitively difficult to use? Especially for something like a social network, where the value is directly related to how many people are on there, and who.

The goal of GNU social isn't to provide a social network. It's to provide social networking software.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#210

Post by mattl » Tue, Feb 09, 2016, 9:24 PM UTC

st3v3r wrote: post #191

bcg1 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps instead of just complaining, people could help out with the documentation: https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social Then again, you're right... some things never change.

Except we don't know enough about the project to do so. And it seems like those involved in the project that could do so have no interest in doing so. This is not a "blame the people who complain for not contributing" thing. This is a "the people who are presenting the project are doing a horrible job of it."

I'm the GNU social founder, so please talk to me about a horrible job.

I think there's a misunderstanding in this submission, and perhaps around the project in general. The goal of the project isn't to provide a social network, or to provide an alternative to Twitter, but rather to provide some software that can be used for a bunch of things, and using it instead of Twitter is a subset of that.

I chose the name because I didn't want people to think of it as a "GNU social network" (GNUbook, GNUspace, etc) but rather just software that could be used to enable communication between people.

Some people have made interfaces for it that mimic Twitter, and a lot of people are using it for that kind of communication, but I don't think the project website has to make it easy for people who want to quit Twitter to use GNU social, but we can certainly point people at servers and interfaces that do that job.