Movim: A social network on XMPP • Hacker News Board

Re: Movim: A social network on XMPP

#11

Post by erikb » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 10:20 PM UTC

The question with social networks are never technical. As you can see by nearly all real life examples, the technology can suck, can exploit, can be this or that engine/framework/language. What matters is who is in there. If you build a social network based on a technology you will never achieve a significant size, especially if you choose a chat platform that is less and less often used.

Just make it work and then get influencers to use and talk about it. That's how you win with a social network. Or if you care about reasonable income without winning big scale then go the Hipchat way and integerate well with some special usecase (like they integrate with all the other Atlassian products and development tools).

Re: Movim: A social network on XMPP

#12

Post by tacone » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 10:28 PM UTC

striking wrote: post #4

Unfortunately the AGPL licensing basically guarantees no other social network will be able to integrate with this one using the stock libraries. Which is a shame. It seems like a cool idea for a project, certainly, but it's more of a tech demo than a social network because it doesn't have users yet. I am trying it now, though. And I'll edit this post (or reply to it) with my findings. EDIT 1: Requires a password inst…

The AGPL choice puts them in the very same field of play of the (now dead?) status.net/identi.ca.

Was it a good choice? I'd say not.

Re: Movim: A social network on XMPP

#13

Post by striking » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 10:29 PM UTC

davexunit wrote: post #10

striking wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not call it a bug, and I'm not disagreeing with its use. I made an observation about it. Why do you believe this, though? Would a BSD/MIT/X11 (even LGPL) license not be more appropriate?

Lax licenses, and even the regular GPL, do not legally entitle users of a web application to the corresponding source code. The AGPL does with its copyleft-over-network "Affero" clause. If you don't think copyleft is important, or think that it's OK to permit proprietary derivative works, then the AGPL will seem like a poor license choice. I am extremely pro-copyleft, especially for applications (vs. libraries), and…

What if the license were just an entitlement to your personal data? That you could take it back and share it only according to your terms rather than those of the server operators?

I think the AGPL works very well for applications that employ it. I simply think that perhaps this one shouldn't. Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions, it should just work better or have more value than a non-free version.

Re: Movim: A social network on XMPP

#14

Post by simoncion » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 10:59 PM UTC

striking wrote: post #13

davexunit wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lax licenses, and even the regular GPL, do not legally entitle users of a web application to the corresponding source code. The AGPL does with its copyleft-over-network "Affero" clause. If you don't think copyleft is important, or think that it's OK to permit proprietary derivative works, then the AGPL will seem like a poor license choice. I am extremely pro-copyleft, especially for applications (vs. libraries), and…

What if the license were just an entitlement to your personal data? That you could take it back and share it only according to your terms rather than those of the server operators? I think the AGPL works very well for applications that employ it. I simply think that perhaps this one shouldn't. Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions, it should just work better or have more value than a non-free v…

Not infrequently, one's data is less than useful without the software that manipulates it.

Re: Movim: A social network on XMPP

#15

Post by MadcapJake » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 11:02 PM UTC

striking wrote: post #4

Unfortunately the AGPL licensing basically guarantees no other social network will be able to integrate with this one using the stock libraries. Which is a shame. It seems like a cool idea for a project, certainly, but it's more of a tech demo than a social network because it doesn't have users yet. I am trying it now, though. And I'll edit this post (or reply to it) with my findings. EDIT 1: Requires a password inst…

Hey! I'm 'Jake'! Not sure why it won't use the nickname field I entered. I'm MadcapJake@lightwitch.org (they need to add this to the profile or config or something, I had to go back to check my email to remember where I signed up)

Re: Movim: A social network on XMPP

#16

Post by fsiefken » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 11:26 PM UTC

So if I understand correctly this network is distributed but not anonymous like for example Twister is. So I can see my feed in atom/rss and chat with all my contacts. This means it should be compatible with something like thunderbird or newsbeuter/mcabber. Almost exactly what we need! I cannot save my locality it seems. my movim id: fsiefken@lightwitch.org my movim feed: https://nl.movim.eu/?q=feed&f=fsiefken@lightwitch.org

Re: Movim: A social network on XMPP

#17

Post by davexunit » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 11:40 PM UTC

striking wrote: post #13

davexunit wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lax licenses, and even the regular GPL, do not legally entitle users of a web application to the corresponding source code. The AGPL does with its copyleft-over-network "Affero" clause. If you don't think copyleft is important, or think that it's OK to permit proprietary derivative works, then the AGPL will seem like a poor license choice. I am extremely pro-copyleft, especially for applications (vs. libraries), and…

What if the license were just an entitlement to your personal data? That you could take it back and share it only according to your terms rather than those of the server operators? I think the AGPL works very well for applications that employ it. I simply think that perhaps this one shouldn't. Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions, it should just work better or have more value than a non-free v…

>Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions

That's a real sneaky way to describe copyright infringement.

Re: Movim: A social network on XMPP

#18

Post by SwellJoe » Sun, Sep 06, 2015, 4:27 AM UTC

erikb wrote: post #11

The question with social networks are never technical. As you can see by nearly all real life examples, the technology can suck, can exploit, can be this or that engine/framework/language. What matters is who is in there. If you build a social network based on a technology you will never achieve a significant size, especially if you choose a chat platform that is less and less often used. Just make it work and then g…

Is XMPP "less and less often used"? I just started using it seriously relatively recently. It's quite nice and there are multiple excellent open server implementations, and I've been thinking on ways to integrate it into some of my own projects. I don't really follow trends in this area, so I don't know what people are doing with it...I do know that Facebook and Google have abandoned XMPP, but that's to be expected. They want to own their users, and they have enough power to do so, regardless of the ethics of the question.

Re: Movim: A social network on XMPP

#19

Post by JesperRavn » Sun, Sep 06, 2015, 5:02 AM UTC

davexunit wrote: post #17

striking wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the license were just an entitlement to your personal data? That you could take it back and share it only according to your terms rather than those of the server operators? I think the AGPL works very well for applications that employ it. I simply think that perhaps this one shouldn't. Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions, it should just work better or have more value than a non-free v…

>Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions That's a real sneaky way to describe copyright infringement.

I agree. While I'm not very pro copy-left in general, I think for a social network it makes more sense. If there are concerns about privacy, and the solution is open source, then why leave the door open to a proprietary version that would completely defeat the purpose of this software? It's especially ridiculous to refer to enforcing the AGPL as "legally bludgeoning" someone, since the proprietary code derived from this would presumably like to "legally bludgeon" anyone who distributed or modified their source code.

Re: Movim: A social network on XMPP

#20

Post by sethhochberg » Sun, Sep 06, 2015, 5:06 AM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #18

erikb wrote: post #11

The question with social networks are never technical. As you can see by nearly all real life examples, the technology can suck, can exploit, can be this or that engine/framework/language. What matters is who is in there. If you build a social network based on a technology you will never achieve a significant size, especially if you choose a chat platform that is less and less often used. Just make it work and then g…

Is XMPP "less and less often used"? I just started using it seriously relatively recently. It's quite nice and there are multiple excellent open server implementations, and I've been thinking on ways to integrate it into some of my own projects. I don't really follow trends in this area, so I don't know what people are doing with it...I do know that Facebook and Google have abandoned XMPP, but that's to be expected.…

At my day job we recently migrated away from XMPP for our internal chat rooms and IM (all on Slack now). XMPP worked fine, but, its one less service for us to maintain ourselves and everybody using a more consistent client by default instead of the mix of Adium / Trillian / Pidgin / etc has been nice from a feature standpoint. I think many other companies are in the same boat, based on Slack and Hipchat and the other chat-as-a-service providers having huge growth.