GNU social and GNU FM

https://gnu.io/

by tvvocold • 11 years ago

138 37 11 years ago

gnu.io

chris_wot• 11 years ago

What exactly IS GNU Social?!?

ah-• 11 years ago

From https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/tree/master:

GNU social is a free social networking platform. It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short status updates, do polls, announce events, or other social activities (and you can add more!). Users can choose which people to "follow" and receive only their friends' or colleagues' status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter, Google+ or Facebook, but is much more awesome.

programmernews3• 11 years ago

The continuation of StatusNet, which was the codebase behind identi.ca until the owner wrote pump.io in nodejs and migrated to that.

gobengo2• 11 years ago

A federated social web implementation

mastax• 11 years ago

Chrome's giving me a Certificate Invalid Error on this site. Anyone else having problems?

[Edit] Interestingly enough, desktop chrome has no problems but chrome on my android phone complains that the certificate authority is invalid. I think I've had problems like this in the past also.

mayli• 11 years ago

Same here, I got a red https on chrome/android.

yarrel4• 11 years ago

Thank you for reporting this. I'll (gnu.io admin) take a look.

yarrel4• 11 years ago

Which version of Android/Chrome and which network provider?

I'm not seeing an issue with Chrome 43 on Android 5.1.1 over wifi.

alecdbrooks2• 11 years ago

gnusocial.de has a better pitch, at least for the Hacker News crowd. My translation:

We are a community of microbloggers, distributed over a worldwide federation of independent GNU Social servers, also known as StatusNet. We're the right choice for users like you, to whom ethics and solidarity matter and who no longer want to use centralized commercial services.

A nice touch is that if you mouse over the word for federation ("Verbund"), it explains that you can communicate with gnusocial.de users through any GNU Social instance or even other implementations of the same protocol.

It looks like it's open-source, distributed Twitter. The references to a public timeline on gnusocial.de and other sites [0] make me think you can make some tweets private and others public, rather than the all-or-nothing approach Twitter takes.

[0] https://gnu.io/social/try/

detaro• 11 years ago

Yeah, good introductions to the stuff for new people is something that many of these projects seem to lack. Same for pump.io, last time I looked into it it was no problem to find good documentation for protocols etc, but nearly nothing that would motivate me to USE it. If you want people to join a community, tell/show something about the community!

aaron-lebo• 11 years ago

The "official" translation on the English version of the site is:

We are a federation of microbloggers who care about ethics and solidarity and want to quit the centralised capitalist services.

Which is a bit more political and perhaps radical.

Twitter allows private DMs. Are you sure gnusocial can do that? I'm not sure how you'd keep private data truly private over a federated network.

notspanishflu2• 11 years ago

You beat me by 3 min with the same comment.

I wonder why the German version is somewhat more professional than the majority of other versions.

shiggerino• 11 years ago

Agreed, they should definitely change that. Software freedom is the real goal here, not converting people from one economic system to another.

A_COMPUTER• 11 years ago

What do they have solidarity with?

notspanishflu2• 11 years ago

You don't need to translate it, you can choose different languages (top right).

I want to highlight that your translation sounds more professional and less militant (radical?) that the current one I'm seeing in gnusocial.de

We are a federation of microbloggers who care about ethics and solidarity and want to quit the centralised capitalist services.

"no longer want to use centralized commercial services" sounds better than "want to quit the centralised capitalist services".

Maybe is just me.

alecdbrooks2• 11 years ago

Thanks to you and aaron-lebo for pointing that out. I'm not sure how I missed that, as I distinctly remembering noticing the language selection in the corner.

I probably should have written something like "no longer want to participate in." "Use" is too passive, probably. That being said, "quit" feels distinctly stronger than how the German version.

gobengo2• 11 years ago

If you like this, you may also like

* http://indiewebcamp.com/ There are biweekly meetups in SF and other cities https://indiewebcamp.com/Homebrew_Website_Club

* W3C Social WG - https://www.w3.org/Social/WG

dmritard96• 11 years ago

So much open source enthusiasm seems to come out of Europe...am I wrong on this observation? Are there reasons behind this (distrust of the US, desire for independence, etc)?

w0rm• 11 years ago

It's only a guess, but I think some OSS projects are more often "based" in Europe as we do not have Software Patents here.

AceJohnny2• 11 years ago

Yeah, it's been my impression as well. And on the opposite end, so little coming out of india, despite the size of the IT industry there.

My inkling is that it has to do with wealth of the society and social protection. In many countries of Europe, people aren't as beholden to companies for livelihood, and can thus better afford to spend personal time on projects they care about. There's a better social conscience. In India, at the opposite end, those same skills put you above social average and are a valuable tool that you wouldn't want to give away for free (unless you're from an affluent background).

This is, of course, just my feeling and not backed by any actual research :)

pgeorgi• 11 years ago

My guess is that it's because Europe consists of relatively rich societies (so home computers were available since the 80s) that had limited access to US software (pre-Internet, software availability over here was pretty hit and miss).

That led to an active European freeware, shareware, and eventually open source software scene.

bjelkeman-again• 11 years ago

Maybe it is because

a) it's in the water b) we are a bunch of socialists c) we are trained from when we are young that money is ugly

Actually, There is a lot of open source coming out of the US as well. But there are a lot more possibilities in the US to get good funding for software projects and there is a strong culture of "making it" in the US, which probably influences things towards more proprietary.

nextos• 11 years ago

I'm European, and while I appreciate your point, in all fairness there's a lot of stuff coming from the US as well. Arguably, the movement originated there.

amelius• 11 years ago

Corollary: most open source software is created in Europe and monetized in the US.

jordigh• 11 years ago

As these are GNU packages, they probably prefer to be called by the synonym "free software" instead of "open source".

logn• 11 years ago

I'm not sure if it applies in this case, but your point make me think of something William Binney said:

"Just the fact that people are being surveilled inhibits their ability or feeling that they have the opportunity to do new and creative and innovative things. So that kind of reduces their risk taking basically, which in turn means you get less and less creativity and innovation and more and more stagnation of civilization. That's what happened in the Soviet Union. That's what happened in East Germany and the Communist plot. They stagnated because people were being so surveilled that they were afraid to do things. It made people afraid to take a risk."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgbJqFrwhbw&t=9m38s

When the description of a project is "We are a federation of microbloggers who care about ethics and solidarity and want to quit the centralised capitalist services", I can see why citizens of a police/surveillance state might not be inclined to create or work on it, even if subconsciously. But I could be wrong; Europe seems pretty heavily surveilled too.

erkose2• 11 years ago

GNUSocial is based on Status Net which was made in Montreal, Canada https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/statusnet

yarrel4• 11 years ago

GNU Social and the awesome StatusNet shared a codebase, GNU Social is now continuing its development.

It's an international project. The lead developers are in Europe, admins are in North America, servers and users are all over.

reitanqild• 11 years ago

And I'm still wondering what happened to pump.io and tent.

dublinben• 11 years ago

Pump.io is still being used and developed.

Sami_Lehtinen• 11 years ago

See Cupcake: https://cupcake.io/

dethos• 11 years ago

I'm thinking in setting up a gnu social server for personal use. Do you recommend it? Does the federation work well or it has known issues?

yarrel4• 11 years ago

GNU social team member here, so I'm biased, but yes people have personal instances (I ran one on a plug server several years ago - http://foocorp.net/projects/fooplug/ ). The federation works well, the only issues I've had are when people's themes for their sites have got in the way.

ilpianista• 11 years ago

May I suggest Choqok as desktop client? It handles both GNU social and pump.io (and twitter), and I'm working to implement missing features because it seems we lack client here

listic• 11 years ago

Is there another client that is not reliant on KDE? Also, I thought pump.io is GNU Social?

LukeShu• 11 years ago

GNU social is a fork/continuation* of the StatusNet software (PHP, "OStatus" protocol). pump.io is a similar piece of software (node.js, "Activity Streams" protocol) written by the original StatusNet developers.

*It started life as a fork, but in June 2013 they merged and it became the continuation.

GNU social and GNU FM

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