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GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

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211–220 of 259 posts

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#211

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…

I would have felt the same way about MySpace. The reality is, alternatives can arise. Facebook won't last forever, and Twitter even less so (although one of my favorite attempted "Myspace killers" was a social network for karaoke singers)

Right, but look at history: MySpace died out (mostly), and was replaced, but by what? Facebook, another centralized, proprietary service. And then came Twitter, which was yet another centralized, proprietary service.

When has an open, decentralized product or service ever supplanted a centralized, closed, proprietary one? Never, that I can think of. Linux never replaced Windows, not for the vast majority of users. It did become very popular for servers, but really it took over from proprietary UNIX there, and really created its own market because back in the early 90s there was no such thing as a webserver; the whole use-case is different with Linux on servers. So UNIX was never really entrenched in exactly the things that Linux servers are used for now. Then there's smartphones and embedded devices like that, but there again Linux really created its own market; before Linux, small devices generally didn't have enough power to run a heavyweight OS like Linux. Android (semi-open, uses Linux) came about pretty much simultaneously with the iPhone. So here again, there wasn't some single proprietary thing that was dominant and entrenched in a mature market. There's the Apache webserver, but here again, there was no big dominant proprietary player. LibreOffice hasn't had much success in supplanting MS Office. MySQL is very popular, but here again there was no dominant proprietary web database; MySQL created that market (though PostgreSQL has become a serious competitor to it, but it's also open).

So in summary, the only time I've seen open, non-proprietary solutions win out is when the environment changed, frequently because of their presence and availability, making them the natural pick. I've never seen them beat out an entrenched dominant player in a mature market. So I definitely don't expect to see it happen with Facebook. What I could see happening is something coming up which uses a non-proprietary or decentralized system which creates a whole new market, rendering one of those things obsolete. I have no idea what that could be though, but then again 20 years ago I wouldn't have imagined that people would want to spend massive amounts of time on a "social network" sharing inane pictures and videos and making idiotic comments to each other about them.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#212
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What's to stop you from getting mattl@hotmail.com and pretending to be me in email?

Same thing, really.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#213
post #208
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Quitter is someone else's interface to GNU social. You'd have to ask them about it.

I'm not sure if the founders of email would care for names like Thunderbird and Icedove, but you'd have to ask them.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#214
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Your address ends with "@SERVER" so you can't register with a duplicate prefix name on any given server.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#215
post #212
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What's to stop you from getting mattl@hotmail.com and pretending to be me in email? Same thing, really.

You get an email that you respond to to finish the registration process.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#216
post #195

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…

Why did you decide on that server, out of all the others?

Pretty much a random decision.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#217
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's to stop you from getting mattl@hotmail.com and pretending to be me in email? Same thing, really.

You get an email that you respond to to finish the registration process.

No, I mean... what is the difference between a user called mattl being on two GNU social servers, and a user called mattl being on two common, gratis email servers?

I could go and make a webmail account called mark_l_watson@whatever.com and people shouldn't assume it was you.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#218
post #212
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What's to stop you from getting mattl@hotmail.com and pretending to be me in email? Same thing, really.

So it's still a major problem.

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#219
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Your address ends with "@SERVER" so you can't register with a duplicate prefix name on any given server.

But how prominent is the @SERVER part? Is is something that people will pay attention to? Or will they just see "mark_l_watson", assume it's you, and take whatever is being said as being said by you, even though it's not on the server you use?

Re: GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter

#220
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Your family doesn't use HN or reddit, but you do. You can use GNU Social the same way, and maybe it will attract your family to it over time as well. (my mother has a reddit account, gods help me)

Apples and oranges. I use HN and Reddit because those have communities centered around certain interests (tech news here on HN for instance). So I come here to chat with people about tech topics. The design of the forum facilitates this, by people posting links to articles and then us discussing them. Places like Facebook are full of random people, generally who you know but for a brand-new social network would be ju…

The nature of gnu social and ostatus is that the users of it, by the nature of it being niche, are technical. The major feed usually contains almost exclusively developers and FOSS activists talking about coding or software freedom.

That is the commonality right now on ostatus, and new communities can join it any time and form new centers of commonality.

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