Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mobilizon – A free, federated tool for events and groups

framablog.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 101 posts

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

#81

Post by Seirdy »

laurent123456 wrote: post #69

Looks like they self-host their source code too: https://framagit.org/framasoft/mobilizon/ It appears to be developed in some language called "Euphoria"?? That's such a strange choice and is going to seriously limit contributions from other developers.

Mobilizon is written in Elixir because it is based on Pleroma, a Mastodon-compatible/Mastodon-alternative server for the Fediverse. Elixir isn't one of the most popular langs out there, but it is far from being a "niche" language.

Okay that was a lot of words. Maybe I should explain for those less familiar:

Users on the Fediverse can interact without being aware of the fact that their servers are running completely different software. While Fediverse members such as Mastodon take inspiration from Twitter, others have different focuses: Peertube is YouTube inspired, Pixelfed is Instagram-inspired, and some like Pleroma are kinda doing their own thing imo.

I personally prefer Pleroma to Mastodon, as evidenced from my bio; it's lightweight, easier to set up, and has a great variety of first- and third-party front-ends (including a lightly-modified version of the Mastodon front-end and a Gopher-accessible one).

It appears that Mobilizon devs wanted to create a new Fediverse server with a different focus: something that warranted writing a back-end based on Pleroma instead of just creating a new Pleroma front-end. Basing off Pleroma was a good choice because unlike Mastodon, Pleroma is lightweight enough to run off a singe-board computer like a Raspberry Pi. Being written in Elixir definitely has a lot to do with this.

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

#82

Post by mxuribe »

jonstaab wrote: post #58

Is it just me, or has "federated" come to mean just mean multi-tenant SaaS (maybe with some features that cross boundaries) that's also open source?

With all due respect, i think that might just be you. Email has operated as federated for so many years, and while there are certainly large providers like gmail, etc....There are also plenty of non-multi-tenant, non-SaaS instances of email servers (and associated mailboxes).

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

#83

Post by mxuribe »

kaushikt wrote: post #23

Meetup has done a standup job with events. I would love to see them do more with groups too. It's annoying to join the meetup "group" and then join their adjacent Slack or Telegram group.

Even though i've never been a fan of centralized services, i never hated meetup.com that much...Or, rather, i never hated the concept of what meetup.com represents (or could represent). But over the years, i really have always disliked the overall experience. And as years pass by, i seem to dislike the meetup.com experience more and more.

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

#84

Post by Seirdy »

agumonkey wrote: post #28

What else is there in this field ?

If you mean other federated FOSS alternatives to mainstream social media, I gave a brief overview in another comment [0]. You can get a bird's-eye view at https://fediverse.party/ or a more detailed look at https://fediverse.network/. Many of these services use the Activitypub protocol to allow them to inter-operate. Two examples with excellent interop are Pleroma and Mastodon; as a Pleroma user, I can't even tell the difference between a Pleroma and Mastodon user until I open another user's profile on their own instance.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24911239

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

#85

Post by Seirdy »

throwawaysea wrote: post #57
Jtsummers wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Mastodon censored? Specific instances or is the general community actively censoring content across instances?

My understanding is that the project founder and/or leads are pursuing a campaign to pressure all instances to not peer with instances on their political blacklist, and adding those who refuse to their peering demands to the blacklist. In effect the “fediverse” that is claimed as a benefit is in name only. I’m not sure what benefit the project offers anymore over centralized platforms since it is becoming the same th…

There exist a number of self-described free speech extremist instances, and moderated instances that only blacklist spammers like bot servers. There also exist instances that will blacklist servers with high levels of hate speech. You can pick or create an instance that meets your wants and needs, but other instances can exercise their freedom of association and choose not to federate with you.

Things on the fediverse are also less black-and-white than you're portraying them. Some instances will prevent one instance's posts from showing up in the default public timeline of the whole known network, but will still federate with them; users will still be able to follow or be followed by members of the filtered instance normally.

Users on Mastodon can also migrate their account to other Mastodon instances and keep their followers, but migrating from Mastodon to Pleroma is a bit lacking; fortunately, you can still put a redirect on your profile for future followers.

TLDR: no, I don't think the fediverse is just like centralized social media.

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

#86

Post by forgotmypw17 »

What an amazing looking project!

I think this type of "someone in the group runs an instance" type deal will become more and more frequent.

Each family/community will have a "tech guy" or two who manages this type of thing, maybe on an offline device, and everyone chips in a couple satoshi per year for the hardware and network.

If you store your data in something easy like text files, you can even have several redundant devices, all for the price of a couple raspberry pis.

Imagine a raspberry pi with a terabyte of storage attached. Certainly that's enough for a "Familybook" of your closest people.

This is the type of device I am developing for today. I'm writing the simplest HTML possible, always no-JS friendly, using the most common interfaces supported by the most common web servers, and completely portable with just a zip file of text files. :)

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

#87

Post by glenstein »

jarofgreen wrote: post #78

I'm very pleased to see this launch, but have one feature request - and I'm posting it here because it's a request I would make to anyone doing event software. Please have open feeds in iCal format for your site, including one that lets people get all public data. This will make the data on your website so much more reusable and useful. And definetly iCal - it's so popular, and most personal calendars can even import…

I hadn't thought of this, but this is a great suggestion and I hope your suggestion gets implemented!

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

#88

Post by glenstein »

jtbayly wrote: post #12
FourthProtocol wrote: post #10

Wow that's pretty ambitious, and pretty relevant for me right now. I build models, and so used to frequent forums to post to build threads detailing what I'd done with photos, sometimes a Word doc, video, and always some plain text. Problem with the forums is that they're dated. It's easy enough to find old content because search is usually pretty ok. Who owns content is still not a solved thing though. A forum in Ge…

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

Yeah, I had the same reaction. Was that parent comment posted in the right thread? Mobilizon is about events and that comment seems to have nothing to do with the link.

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

#89

Post by glenstein »

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.

Mobilizon is intended to put events on the activitypub protocol. In that sense, it's a replacement for a slice of Facebook. I wouldn't say it's a replacement for all of Facebook.

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

#90

Post by glenstein »

Deukhoofd wrote: post #2

I really enjoy what Framasoft is trying to do, making the internet decentralized again. I truly hope they're successful in their endeavours!

Strongly agree! I love everything framasoft is doing. It's mana for the internet.

It's also a great way to create a sense of perspective for how pro-social (or not) the frightful five are. You would never see Microsoft, or Apple, or Google etc bother to support open protocols or work to flush them out so that events, photos, tweeting, and all the major social activities are put on a foundation of open and interoperable protocols that anyone can use. They certainly could have moved in that direction if they wanted to, but they just haven't wanted to. And while I appreciate for framasoft for what they're doing at face value, on an entirely different level I appreciate the contrast between their projects and the projects of the F5.

Post reply on HN