Help fund an open source Facebook alternative: Appleseed

http://indiegogo.com/Open-Source-Social-Networking

by michaelchisari • 16 years ago

49 58 16 years ago

johnny222• 16 years ago

it's just too bad you never got back to me last year mike (via red emmas) :( not sure how else to contact you. I'll delete this post later

michaelchisari20• 16 years ago

Not sure who this is, but my email is michael.chisari@gmail.com if you need to get in touch.

johnny222• 16 years ago

cool thanks. and now i realize it's too late to delete. Sorry folks :(

wccrawford• 16 years ago

"Install your Appleseed node ($1,000 minimum) Free installation of Appleseed on your servers for any Appleseed node with less than 1,000 users."

Is it FOSS or not? It sure doesn't sound like it is.

"We've already accomplished much of what we set out to do"

Then why are you asking for $10k?

There's a lot of text on that page that directly contradicts other text on the page.

michaelchisari20• 16 years ago

It doesn't get much more open source than this:

http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed

Source has been available under the GPL v2 for quite a while now.

And we're asking for funding, because there's always more to do. The foundation is set, the features are there, but a project like this is never really done. There's security, threat modeling, scalability and stress testing, and just plain development of future features and bug testing.

michaelchisari20• 16 years ago

To address the money issue further, the $1,000 minimum donation means the donor receives consulting services setting up and administering a node. Anyone with experience with LAMP is able to set up their own node without paying a dime.

And as for funding, I've been working on Appleseed almost full time for quite a while now (started in 2004). I've been working a full time job as well most of the time I've been doing this, so at some point, I'd like to be able to focus on this exclusively, and funding can help make that happen, which means the software will improve faster as a result.

roel_v2• 16 years ago

Maybe off topic but I LOL at doublespeak like "$1,000 minimum donation", and the cognitive dissonance that lies at its foundation. I can just see the whole story behind it: the idealists who preach the 'software should be FREE!' mantra, the myopic hatred against software companies who (gasp) charge money for their software, the realization (after trying to make worth while software themselves) that it actually costs money to, you know, live and pay expenses, and the grasping for straws that is "let's call it a 'minimum donation, then we're not actually charging for it".

Not to pick on these guys, I don't know them and for all I know they're the outlier, it's just such a cliche that it's becoming an indicator of a team that has much to learn about how the software business works.

heresy• 16 years ago

Why don't you join forces with Diaspora?

Or, why would someone decide to donate to you over Diaspora?

michaelchisari20• 16 years ago

To answer your first question, I did email them back in May offering help but never received a response. I had a chance to catch up with them at the Federated Social Web Conference, and spoke with a lot of similar projects and we're all interested in a common protocol, so in that sense, we're all "joined forces." However, since their project is Ruby on Rails + MongoDB, and Appleseed is LAMP, beyond the protocol, there's not much collaboration on codebases that can happen.

As for why to donate to Appleseed over Diaspora:

1. Appleseed is a much more mature codebase. We've been in development for a while now, and already have around 80 nodes in the wild.

2. Appleseed has a much more experienced developer at the helm. I've been programming web apps professionally since 1997.

3. We have a much clearer roadmap and protocol specification compared to Diaspora, which has yet to hammer out most any specifics in that arena.

4. Appleseed is much easier to install (about 5 min for anyone who's installed LAMP software before).

5. Appleseed is more ambitious. Diaspora aims to be a social networking app, but Appleseed is a social framework, with an extensible MVC model, meant for building new social components.

6. Diaspora already has $200k. :)

nlco• 16 years ago

is there any work on a common protocol yet? (mostly looking for a link)

newt• 16 years ago

here's not much collaboration on codebases that can happen

Colaboration on codebases is overrated. Common protocols are where it's at. Stop and think about the web - is a common codebase needed to implement a web server or a web browser? Nope. In both cases there are more than one independent implementations out there. The protocol between the two pieces of software is the common part.

petervandijck• 16 years ago

Is there a site somewhere about this project (not just github)? Screenshots? Features? Information? Can't seem to find a link anywhere?

Edit: here we go: http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

michaelchisari20• 16 years ago

Here's all the resources associated with Appleseed. They're on the indiegogo page, but they're a little hard to find.

- General Links

Main: http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

Fundraising: http://www.indiegogo.com/Open-Source-Social-Networking

Drumbeat: http://www.drumbeat.org/project/appleseed-social-networking

Beta Test: http://appleseedproject.org

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=366560616455

Twitter: http://twitter.com/appleseedproj

Identi.ca: http://identi.ca/appleseedproj

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/appleseedproj

- Development Links

Source Code: http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed

Packages: http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/download/

Bug Tracking: http://appleseedproj.lighthouseapp.com

Discussion Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/open-social-networking

mdasen2• 16 years ago

I have to ask since your site says it (http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/): how is the software maintaining the privacy and security of my data?

The reason I ask is that I don't see how that's possible. Here's an example. Let's say that I'm on MySeed and you're on Applebook. We friend each other and, lovely, now my posts get aggregated to your feed and your posts get aggregated to my feed. Life is good. Then Applebook turns evil and decides that it's going to make all posts open (they have the source code and the data). Well, now I no longer have privacy. Heck, let's say I post something and it gets aggregated to your feed. Then I delete it. Does Applebook then delete it? There's no real way to force a deletion. And I realize that anyone who saw it could have just done a copy/paste and saved the post, but it's different when it's happening automatically.

The only way I could see this working is through public key encryption. When we friend each other, I get your public key and you get mine. You can then make your postings available encrypted with my public key and when I get them I can decrypt them with my private key. BUT I must not store my private key with MySeed since then MySeed could decrypt your posts and you no longer have privacy. Right now, browsers don't have support for encryption like this where part of a web page will be encrypted not by the server, but in the data storage.

But even that has problems. It means that if you're friends with 500 people, 500 copies of any status message you post have to be encrypted and stored separately for each of those 500 people. Considering the scaling issues that Facebook has to contend with, I think adding a step where everything people post gets encrypted and stored N times (N being the number of friends you have) would be troublesome.

Heck, what about pictures? It's one thing to encrypt and store a short 140byte status 500 times. It's another to do that for an 80k photo.

tl;dr: If we're friends and you're on another service, what stops your service from aggregating my postings and then making them public to the world against my wishes?

michaelchisari20• 16 years ago

First off, your feed won't provide a full copy of your data, just a summary and a link. Other protocols may not work that way, though, but that's how Appleseed's protocol works. If access is rescinded, that user loses access to view that data. If I post a journal update or a photo, and it shows up in your feed, and then I restrict access to it, if your feed doesn't properly delete the entry, then you can still see the summary or the thumbnail, but clicking on it results in an access denied error.

Well, let's focus on your premise: This is all based on a node turning evil. That's a very big problem, and one not easily solved.

There is a basic issue here, in that users, when they trust other users, they also, on some level, trust the that user's community (node). I'm open to suggestions on how to mitigate that.

With social networking, there is always a level of trust that has to be human-based, not tech-based. But tools can be used to help humans determine trust.

Appleseed has node control, which means that administrators can "block" whole nodes if they're behaving badly. This usually means spam, but it can also mean if a node is acting in bad faith (ie, it's revealed that AppleBook is selling non-local user data), or if they're abusing the protocol. That can act as a certain type of social "shunning" on a node-to-node basis.

Admins can also "trust" nodes, which means you inherit their block list. This means, theoretically, if a node goes bad, and some nodes realize this, it'll propagate through the Appleseed network until that node is isolated.

I think there are other approaches, and some we haven't thought up yet, but one thing I'm most interested in is social pressure, and how it can easily be applied to bad nodes.

I think encryption is interesting, but I think we'll actually have to move into the browser space in order to have a reasonable UX.

mayank• 16 years ago

> This usually means spam, but it can also mean if a node is acting in bad faith (ie, it's revealed that AppleBook is selling non-local user data), or if they're abusing the protocol. That can act as a certain type of social "shunning" on a node-to-node basis.

There are interesting, open theoretical computer science questions that determine how effective such an approach can be, and how susceptible it is to attack. Without a theoretical understanding of how your reputation system works, how do you propose to solve the spam and "evil" problem? In other words, if we invest heavily (time and money) in this, how do we know that it won't eventually be overrun by spam after being mastered by a clever (or lucky) hacker?

If you haven't already, you should check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance -- the Byzantine agreement problem, which deals with a distributed system agreeing on a global decision (substitute "failure" with "evil"). These are not trivial problems to solve, and if you intend on scaling, I hope you have good solutions to them.

Distributed systems are notoriously hard to understand and maintain; it sounds very nice to propose a new distributed system, but it's hard for a hacker to accept your solution until I have some theoretical assurance about its security model.

mdasen2• 16 years ago

Wonderful. The Diaspora group had been promising end-to-end encryption without seeming to know the problem.

The remaining question I have is: while the feed provides a link/summary, what's preventing a node from following that link and then caching/storing that data?

You've come up with a nice way of propagating block lists and kudos for addressing the problem. However, with Facebook, I only have to worry about Facebook behaving badly. I don't have to worry about multiple companies and different bad behavior.

Plus, sometimes bad behavior can become public much later. Let's say that I operate Applebook. I'm running a nice Appleseed server that has some users. I decide to start storing the data from other nodes. Maybe I'm even doing it for practical reasons like performance or as a service to my users. Then 5 years down the line, my fortunes take a turn for the worse. I decide to go evil! Sure, maybe the second I turn evil it gets propagated out fast and I can't get access to any future data. However, I still have all that past data!

And this is a concern with Facebook as well. They could turn evil some day and betray us all. However, it's one company to worry about rather than dozens or more.

Also, as an aside, sometimes the summaries might contain the information people want deleted. If you have a 140 character status update Twitter-style, there isn't much of a summary to be made.

Right now, we're used to being allowed to remove things from social networks. Unlike email, it's communication that we can take back. Wall posts, status updates, photos, etc. can be deleted. If I email you a photo, it's always there for you. In some ways, a distributed social network is more like email. Once you've sent it out to your friends, it can't really be taken back. That's very different from Facebook. With Facebook, users expect to be able to remove content at any time and it's inaccessible to other users (unless they decided to copy/paste or save it in another way).

The question is: how many people would prefer this more email-like system? The advantage is that one wouldn't be beholden to a central service like Facebook or Twitter. Users have been skittish about privacy anytime Facebook changes something. How much of that is posturing and how much of it is users who would discontinue using it if they thought they couldn't remove things from the view of others?

joe_the_user13• 16 years ago

If access is rescinded, that user loses access to view that data.

And if the user has a script that saves all the data they momentarily had access to, what happens? I mean, I'd do that since I expect continued access to any data I get. I don't think that makes me "evil".

The whole thing seem ridiculous. If you have 500 different messages for 500 different people, send them each an encrypted email and be done with it. If you're sending the same message to 500 people, the chances that you'll be able to rescind it seem negligible. I mean, for 500 people not to share a message either 1. It's very boring enough they wouldn't bother, 2. They are really tight with you somehow, 3. They're part of a very tight, well managed organization. But none of this can be controlled by software.

If a node is just supplying information transport, that is different and encryption works and is intended for that situation. But thinking there's a way to send information to your friends to read and somehow force them to keep it secret seems ten times as preposterous of earlier "trusted platform" end-to-end DRM schemes.

Am I missing something? Tell me.

joe_the_user13• 16 years ago

I don't think you'll get that kind of security in this space-time continuum...

If you send an open message to X, you just aren't going to keep X from sharing that message with others.

-- There no real way around this. It's essentially the "problem" that DRM aimed to "solve". Thankfully, it couldn't. Only share things that are appropriate for a given friend or group of friends. This applies on Facebook or anywhere.

bad_user4• 16 years ago

Then why bother with a Facebook alternative?

qntm• 16 years ago

I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks this. Friendship is not an idempotent operation. Facebook connects up hundreds of millions of people and makes it extremely simple for them to share information. It's a social internet. To make any kind of attempt to preserve privacy is practically oxymoronic.

beza1e1• 16 years ago

For example, clipperz en-/decrypts in the browser and not on the server.

joe_the_user13• 16 years ago

Ah but while the browser may be running client side, it hardly seems like the piece of software I'd want to trust to do my encryption given that it is designed with many hooks to allow servers to do stuff.

"sure, don't trust me, do it on your own machine. I'll even give you the software..."

mnutt• 16 years ago

I was thinking of a similar thing the other day. Could one make an easy-enough-to-use public-key encrypted social network?

One of the ways that sites often scale is denormalization, so if they're generating each person's activity feed anyway there's no storage overhead. And I'm pretty sure that pgp encryption performance is measured in MB/s, so as javascript performance catches up the encryption time will be less of an issue.

Obviously even if everything is encrypted on the client side, what's to stop the server from sending down a broken javascript encryption mechanism, or javascript to send your messages in the clear? I don't think there's a good solution to this, but you could make some (optional) browser plugins to monitor outgoing requests, and that might be enough to keep server operators honest.

Even if someone overcame all of that, there are still a lot of features that just can't be built without the server having access to the data. But it's interesting to think about.

joe_the_user13• 16 years ago

Actually,

For distributing information to a group, you'd only need a single group private key, which you would send to each member using their public key. After that, you just encrypt the message with the group's public key.

If you want to kick someone out, you'd just start a new group in similar manner but excluding the someone you wanted to kick out. In this way, your group messages would only have to be encrypted once.

Each person would have a different group public key so there wouldn't be much more to it than this.

But all this is kind of overkill. You reasonably expect webmail provider will give you privacy right now just as reasonably you expect a locked door will keep your stuff safe even though a determined person can break either of those protections.

(and as said earlier, no magic technology is going to keep your friends from making stuff public)

ashitvora2• 16 years ago

Do we really need one more Social Network?

michaelchisari20• 16 years ago

Yes, because a distributed protocol means that it will effectively be the last social network.

metamemetics2• 16 years ago

that's pretty delusional. Users don't care about protocols, they care about interface usability. And the ONLY thing that makes a social network valuable is its users. There will always be more room for more niche social networks with well defined UX constraints if developers continue the facebook trend of bloat sites with ambiguous constraints.

ashitvora2• 16 years ago

I don't agree with this. There are many other problems to be solved. World doesn't need yet another Social Network.

allantyoung• 16 years ago

Don't "they" know that the Appleseed family is very litigious?

michaelchisari20• 16 years ago

I was going to rename it to Bananaseed, but I think someone with that name killed a bunch of nurses in Portland. /30rock

joe_the_user13• 16 years ago

Just for kicks,

Let me ask how a project like this could provide possibly any more privacy than a situation of a group of people who each having a mailing list with which they email messages to their friends?

Seriously.

Maybe I'm not thinking clearly tonight but I can't see any plausible way to provide "more security" than the security of deciding what message to send to what friend. Am I missing something.

-- I mean, you just aren't going to keep your friends from forwarding your messages. They'll video-type to screen if they need to. You might decide not to forward them more messages but that's different.

michaelchisari20• 16 years ago

I mean, you just aren't going to keep your friends from forwarding your messages.

There's a difference between privacy and trust. Software can't predict when your best friend is going to turn against you for emotional or social reasons.

If you share something with ten friends, and one of them betrays your trust, technology can't predict or prevent that.

However, if you share something with ten friends, and they all act properly and trustworthy, you have a reasonable expectation that your data won't be available to anybody but those ten friends.

joe_the_user13• 16 years ago

Agree with this but it doesn't answer my original question.

Why bother with encryption when each person having an email list would work as well as anything for distributing information? Why? It's like UPS buying armored cars to deliver your packages with but still plunking the package down outside your house when you're not home.

I have a reasonable expectation of privacy sending email through a webmail account. If I was sending the corporate crown-jewels or something, I'd encrypt my message but email these days is appropriately secure.

I'm asking these questions with the best intentions too. I like the idea of a Facebook alternative - I'm working on my project along those lines in fact. The thing is that to offer an alternative, you've got to be clear what services Facebook offers and how one could offer them better. It seems like a lot of upset over Facebook confuses Facebook's abuse of user data with the inherent insecurity that comes from sharing information with any group of people. We'll have to educate ourselves and our users about the difference if we want to have this Facebook alternative thing get off the ground.

As far as I can tell, almost everything Facebook provides is something you can do with the "regular web". Facebook simply puts everything in a nice package (and that nice package matters a lot as we've seen). If you had a script which aggregated your friend's blogs, tweets and emails, you would have something like Facebook. The only service that would be required is friend-discovery and perhaps a "like" messaging system. The rest could just involve wrapping/packaging existing stuff.

The thing about Facebook and walled-gardens in general is that they really entice people who otherwise wouldn't participate in "cyber life" to come onto the web. But Facebook users hopefully will also be learning that their walled-garden doesn't offer the protection it claims and hopefully they'll realize that nothing can simultaneously offer free-sharing and perfect privacy in the modern era - your friends' friends just aren't necessarily going to be your friends etc.

So we "Facebook alternativists" have to offer something that gives the good stuff that a social network can realistically provide for people who are over the illusion that they can live in a one-identity, total-trust world.

brinchj• 16 years ago

Perhaps my PHP-design skills are outdated, but is it normal to have a 1500 line index.php containing a mixture of configuation code, PHP functions and HTML?

Also, don't you use any template system?

... I cloned the github project, only to find myself confused :)

michaelchisari20• 16 years ago

The index.php file is the install file.

The actual system is re-routed using mod_rewrite. After installation, it never uses index.php again.

Also, don't you use any template system?

No, actually, I use a different approach. Using simple_html_dom, I target the dom within the controller. The views are layout skeletons that are then populated with data. Check out the example component's comments for more info.

Help fund an open source Facebook alternative: Appleseed

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