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Mobilizon – A free, federated tool for events and groups

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Re: Mobilizon – A free, federated tool for events and groups

#41

Post by aklemm »

Nextgrid wrote: post #6

I feel like this misses the point. People dislike Facebook and other centralized platforms not because they're centralized per-se, but because the user experience is terrible (due to mismatched incentives - these platforms make money off ads, so their only objective is to make you engage with the ads as much as possible). The solution is a platform that doesn't have these mismatched incentives (either paid for, ran b…

Step one is dev buy-in, then people start federating it and THEY help realize the UX needs. /imo

Re: Mobilizon – A free, federated tool for events and groups

#42

Post by jtbayly »

Spearchucker wrote: post #26
jtbayly wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This use case seems orthogonal at best to the idea of Mobilizon.

Arguably. Forums have been supplanted by Facebook groups. Mobilizon seeks to do the same to Facebook. I can't create a group so I cannot definitively say anything about it. You may very well be right.

I haven't read much, but it seemed to me to be about events, much more than groups.

Re: Mobilizon – A free, federated tool for events and groups

#43

Post by GoblinSlayer »

linspace wrote: post #9

This got me surprised: "Mobilizon is designed so that you can follow the news of a group, but not of an individual : it is impossible to follow a single profile. In Mobilizon, profiles have no « wall », « thread » or « story » : only groups can publish posts. The goal is to get rid of the self-promotional reflexes where we stage our lives to be the person at the center of our followers. With Mobilizon, it is not the…

As I understand, it's a forum. Some forums allow you to see posts made by certain user, just mobilizon doesn't. Like ycombinator is not your personal blog, but a group, to which you can contribute.

Re: Mobilizon – A free, federated tool for events and groups

#44

Post by kemenaran »

Nextgrid wrote: post #6

I feel like this misses the point. People dislike Facebook and other centralized platforms not because they're centralized per-se, but because the user experience is terrible (due to mismatched incentives - these platforms make money off ads, so their only objective is to make you engage with the ads as much as possible). The solution is a platform that doesn't have these mismatched incentives (either paid for, ran b…

It seems Mobilizon invested a great deal in the usability of this tool.

(Not specifically the visual design, but the ease of use and the matching of user needs).

I've seen projects advertising decentralization as the main selling point. Mobilizon seems to also push strong on the user experience, and I'm glad they do.

Re: Mobilizon – A free, federated tool for events and groups

#45

Post by throwawaysea »

What is Mobilizon's policy on deplatforming, censorship, etc. How will they protect against owner/employee bias? I ask this because Mastodon's founders also pitched a federated tool to the world but then turned out to be very much the same authoritarian pro-censorship actor as the centralized platform we'd all like to get away from.

Re: Mobilizon – A free, federated tool for events and groups

#46

Post by GoblinSlayer »

fwsgonzo wrote: post #18
linspace wrote: post #9

This got me surprised: "Mobilizon is designed so that you can follow the news of a group, but not of an individual : it is impossible to follow a single profile. In Mobilizon, profiles have no « wall », « thread » or « story » : only groups can publish posts. The goal is to get rid of the self-promotional reflexes where we stage our lives to be the person at the center of our followers. With Mobilizon, it is not the…

Considering how vapid the current lineup of social networking is, I'm willing to see how it turns out. There are some other great features too, but I didn't see anything about video-conferencing, which would be a killer feature.

There's (was?) https://framatalk.org/ which is jitsi meet https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet

Re: Mobilizon – A free, federated tool for events and groups

#47

Post by ravenstine »

Nextgrid wrote: post #6

I feel like this misses the point. People dislike Facebook and other centralized platforms not because they're centralized per-se, but because the user experience is terrible (due to mismatched incentives - these platforms make money off ads, so their only objective is to make you engage with the ads as much as possible). The solution is a platform that doesn't have these mismatched incentives (either paid for, ran b…

> The solution is a platform that doesn't have these mismatched incentives (either paid for, ran by donations, etc) but that otherwise has the user experience of the mainsteam platforms.

Isn't it kind of inevitable that those incentives manifest themselves? A company can run a centralized platform, do a good job of it, then get bought out for millions(if not billions) by a large corporation and redesigned to maximize ad revenue and the egos of those looking for greater job titles. This isn't exactly unheard of. Decentralization would supposedly section this kind of thing off if it even happens at all.

You're right that the average person doesn't care about decentralization, let alone understand it. That's fine. Before Facebook, people used forums supported by vBulletin, and those were effectively "decentralized" in the sense that they weren't all owned by the same entity. The only difference was that there wasn't sharing of data between 2 or more web forums, like there could be with something that supports ActivityPub or the like.

Re: Mobilizon – A free, federated tool for events and groups

#48

Post by suyash »

solarkraft wrote: post #5

That looks amazing! From its look it seems a lot like it'd be a replacement for Meetup/Eventbrite, which is something I've been waiting for for a while. Framasoft is great!

yes more of a meetup.com alternative than anything. However the hard part is how do I migrate my large meetup community to a new platform.

Re: Mobilizon – A free, federated tool for events and groups

#49

Post by GoblinSlayer »

throwawaysea wrote: post #45

What is Mobilizon's policy on deplatforming, censorship, etc. How will they protect against owner/employee bias? I ask this because Mastodon's founders also pitched a federated tool to the world but then turned out to be very much the same authoritarian pro-censorship actor as the centralized platform we'd all like to get away from.

That's the difference: they aren't centralized.

Re: Mobilizon – A free, federated tool for events and groups

#50

Post by prophesi »

meetups323 wrote: post #34

I'm about 2 hours into setting up an Mobilizon instance for outdoor socially distant activities, but running into problems [1] and at the end of the day federation isn't important to me and I'd prefer the learning opportunity and flexibility of building my own [2]. Curious if any HNers in the PNW region might use such a service to pod up for outdoor socially distant activities (hiking, wilderness cleanup, kayaking, p…

Once the docker installation is documented, it should take considerably less time to self-host.

This is for `yarn build`, but perhaps it applies to `yarn install` as well: there's a note in the documentation that says compiling the front-end requires 2gb of RAM. You'll need to set it to use only 1gb RAM to accommodate the $5 droplet's specs via `NODE_BUILD_MEMORY=1024 yarn build`

As for the technology & stack, most of the code is from Pleroma, essentially a lightweight Elixir/Phoenix version of Mastodon, with Vue for the frontend. If there's any part of the architecture that's closed, the project would highly appreciate raising an issue, as it wishes to be a fully libre project.

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