On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 3:03 AM, Ted Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 20:45 -0500, Matt Lee wrote:
> > On 03/04/2010 08:38 PM, Ted Smith wrote:
> >
> > > I want to be able to point to GNU Social and daisycha.in as a drop-in
> > > replacement for non-free network services.
> >
> > I don't want anyone to create a monolithic service, where everyone uses
> > one big instance. Not for this.
>
> I'm not advocating for a monolithic or centralized system; just one that
> can solve existing problems, like identi.ca solves the twitter problem.
>
I love identi.ca and what it stands for, but it doesn't "solve the twitter
problem". I am on both systems, but the vast majority of my friends,
colleagues and contacts are using Twitter, even if they have also set up an
Identi.ca account. What's worse is that interop across the two is weak; I
need to maintain a mental map of my friend's IDs on the two systems, because
my Identi.ca posts flow automatically to twitter. Since @-addressing isn't
automatically rewritten, sometimes the meaning of a message (eg. identica's
@maxf is twitter's @therealmaxf and not @maxf). These systematic and
standards aspects are more important imho to address than "building a big
site X that looks like site Y except for the source code license".
I'd also stress that the real control/freedom aspect with Facebook is not
that I can't get my data back out (I can); or that I can't customise the
software (many interesting pieces *are* free/opensource), but that my
account there is locked into running within the same instance as millions of
others, and is identified by a domain name I don't control ('facebook.com').
Even though I can customise the sources behind identi.ca, the use of a
single domain means I have to run up a new instance elsewhere on my own
server if I want my ability to hack the source to affect my online
experience.
This is new territory for GNU and it's worth treading carefully. There are
lots of different - intricately related - freedoms to value here, beyond the
freedom to hack on the source code. For me with the FOAF project, I've been
thinking of these four in particular lately: freedom of expression (ie.
never let the engineeering and product depts of some big company limit what
you can say about yourself); freedom of choice (to find the best
site/service that meets your needs); of association (to engage freely with
folk who made different choices and use different systems); freedom of
movement (to change your mind later and switch services without having to
beg; and to keep lifelong control of your data and online identity, without
being tied to the fate of someone's project or company).
What I would value most from GNU is an effort to make sure the supporting
software libraries for standards-based social Web interop are solid, tested
and up to date, and that they are integrated throughout the GNU collection
of software packages and the wider software scene. Why doesn't Mailman do
oauth or openid? Why even today do my attempts to use my lhttps://
mail.google.com/a/danbri.org/#inbox/1272674a65026194ocal Wordpress's openid
provision to log into my locally installed MediaWiki often fail? GNU's
reputation is in worldclass free software; I'd suggest sticking close to
that and focussing on asking ourselves what we can do to take this massive
network of free software installations, and integrate them to improve
people's social experience of the Web.
We already have 'social networks' scattered across the entire Internet/Web,
and this is as it should be. The challenge isn't to move them all to one
giant replacement service or network, but to patch them together, the way
the Internet itself was patched together from its constituent ancestors.
Take IRC for example: the popular Freenode IRC network is apparently powered
by GNU software including it's ircd, http://dev.freenode.net/ircd-seven ...
http://freenode.net/development.shtml ... now thousands of people happily
use IRC daily to socialise, share and communicate. Thousands of others use
GNU Mailman to do similar in email. Let's not get distracted by the
impossible dream of cloning the facebook experience in a 'free' way, when we
have real vibrant online communities already, thanks to GNU software. I look
to the GNU Social initiative not to add just another software package to the
mix, but to take a lead - by workshops, evangelism, free beers, code
reviews, whatever it takes - in getting more integration and standards
support across the existing suite of GNU social software. Why can't we
better integrate the IRC community on Freenode with the network of mailman
installations out there? Work on XMPP support in ircd to modernise the
underlying standards, or integrate IRC's notion of user identity (nickserv)
with that of the Web?
Or let's take Wikis. I look in my MediaWiki source tree, and what do I see?
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Wikipedia is hurting from the delete wars between deletionists and
cover-everythingists (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion) ie feeling the
pain of being a giant site which has to meet the needs of a huge and diverse
audience... meanwhile 1000s of smaller wikis running their same GPL-licensed
software are hurting or closing because each is under spam attack, and we
lack the federated trust systems that make it easy to understand which
comments/edits come from reliable members of the Web community acting in
good faith, and which come from spammers, bots and suchlike.
Consider blogs, both as another form of online social activity, and as
another GNU-facilitated thing threatened by spam and fragmented by lack of
integration. Download the popular blogging toolkit Wordpress for your site,
and look inside the zip file at license.zip:
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Don't like Wordpress? Don't like PHP? Go grab
http://www.movabletype.org/instead and you'll find GPL software.
Either has support for many standards,
but offer potential for richer integration (discovery, search,
notifications,...).
For me, this is the GNU Social project's core business. I picked on a
handful of well known projects that are using the GNU license. Some are
fully wholeheartedly GNU projects, some are social and GNU licensed but
really not engaging beyond the choice of licensing. GNU Social could be the
existing vast network of collaboration facilitated already by GNU free
software. I encourage folk here to figure out what's missing from that
world that will improve people's experience of the existing deployed social
Web. Maybe it's something as simple as integrating the RSS/Atom patch into
the Mailman core distribution, or providing standards-based views into
systems so that interface designers can experiment with innovative and
integrative interfaces to things that were previously clunky, geeky and
fragmented. Maybe there are entirely new software products to create that
will help bridge these sites to create a more integrated global network. I'd
suggest beginning with a survey of what's out there. It is often more
appealling to start a fresh project than to help patch up old ones; but with
GNU Social I think the tradeoffs are different. GNU as a project has the
authority, respect and attention to make hundreds of projects sit up and
take notice, and to attract the energy of thousands of brilliant-minded
developers. It just needs a clear message and a simple-enough,
detailed-enough roadmap...
imho etc.,
Dan
