GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

> You go through the list, find every successful open source project, and try to explain why it doesn't count.

Wrong, I explain why in each case, they've completely changed the market, they didn't just come in and take over from a successful and dominant proprietary player.

>Oracle was the big dominant proprietary player when Yahoo decided to risk going with MySQL

No, they weren't. Oracle was never big in web databases. Ever heard of the LAMP stack? There was never a "LAOP" stack. Oracle was never used as part of a stack with Linux and Apache and Perl or PHP. Oracle was used in a bunch of big-iron systems back then (and still are), but they were never a serious player in small webservers. MySQL helped create that market.

This is something like claiming that Harley-Davidson took over part of the market owned by the Ford Model T truck.

>Now think how many websites are running on WordPress. It pains me to say it (because the code quality is so bad), but that's an example of successful open source project.

Which proprietary product did it out-compete? That's right, none. WordPress created a whole new market. It's just like all my other successful FOSS examples. It never successfully out-competed a dominant proprietary product.

>Git is up there too.

git is probably about the only FOSS product, now that you mention it, that's made any real inroads against proprietary products, and even here, not that much. It's used all over the place for FOSS development of course, but there was never a dominant proprietary product used for source control for FOSS development. BitKeeper was the closest to it, and that was only used for a single project AFAIK (the kernel), and using a special gratis license. FOSS development has always been done with FOSS VCSes: CVS, SVN, Mercurial, etc. Now, git has made some inroads against ClearCase and Perforce in corporate software development (as have all the other ones: SVN, CVS, Hg, etc.), but usually only for new projects. ClearCase has been very hard to dislodge in the companies where it's been standardized on (even though it's an absolutely abysmal version-control system that only succeeds in hindering progress).

>So if you define the category narrowly enough

I've already stated my requirement. Show me a good example of a FOSS product completely taking over for a highly successful and dominant proprietary one, instead of just creating a new market or expanding the market (while not displacing the proprietary product at all). I don't think you'll be able to come up with a single one.

Another benefit most people don't realize aren't the individuals that self-host a Gnu social instance, but those organizations that should own their own social infrastructure and namespace. Trusting a single entity (Twitter) with that is a bit absurd.

How would you solve this? I think that GNU Social's goals are to decentralize social networks. How would you "fix" this without some kind of centralized identity verifying registry? If someone hosted a GNU social where impersonators were not purged, I think other GNU socials would exclude them from their circle of trusts in addition to purging bad users from their own systems. The centralization will most likely be rejected by the privacy and small government advocates in the community.

I believe that rather than saying your issue is not solved, the issue has been replaced with a new one: how would does GNU social's network of trust work? When a spammer starts or occupies a GNU social, what is required to prevent my host GNU social from suffering? How would a new user from a centralized social network know which GNU social is the right one to start with?

I have not read enough about how GNU social works and hope to find out how/if this issue can be resolved.

Do you really believe that nonsense?

> I tried, because you can argue that is silly to complain about not enough people using a social network if you don't start using it yourself;

No, not at all. That's the Network Effect [1] in a nutshell.

Practically, what this means is that apart from possibly instagram, microblogging is twitter's market to lose. So long as twitter does not abuse the trust users have placed in them to manage the service, then upstart competitors (whether centralized or decentralized) will find it difficult to overcome the network advantage.

However, if twitter does not honor the informal contract and decides to abuse their power for political or social ends, they will be devaluing their product for a large segment of users. Those betrayed users are more likely to decide en masse to join a network not subject to a centralized autocratic authority. This accusation was in fact recently leveled against them [2], so you may see growing support for politically neutral alternatives.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

[2] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/02/16/exclusive-twitter-s...