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.
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.
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!
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)?
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 :)
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
There is no leadership, even when Evan was involved. There are enumerable basic feature bugs that aren't addressed. The only real change has been a skin that makes it look like twitter, which I find ironic, but then again, most of the gnusocial users these days are twitter users.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
>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/