Movim: A social network on XMPP | Hacker News Reader

Movim: A social network on XMPP

movim.eu

80 pointsMoyamo35 comments

The question with social networks are never technical. As you can see by nearly all real life examples, the technology can suck, can exploit, can be this or that engine/framework/language. What matters is who is in there. If you build a social network based on a technology you will never achieve a significant size, especially if you choose a chat platform that is less and less often used.

Just make it work and then get influencers to use and talk about it. That's how you win with a social network. Or if you care about reasonable income without winning big scale then go the Hipchat way and integerate well with some special usecase (like they integrate with all the other Atlassian products and development tools).

Is XMPP "less and less often used"? I just started using it seriously relatively recently. It's quite nice and there are multiple excellent open server implementations, and I've been thinking on ways to integrate it into some of my own projects. I don't really follow trends in this area, so I don't know what people are doing with it...I do know that Facebook and Google have abandoned XMPP, but that's to be expected. They want to own their users, and they have enough power to do so, regardless of the ethics of the question.

At my day job we recently migrated away from XMPP for our internal chat rooms and IM (all on Slack now). XMPP worked fine, but, its one less service for us to maintain ourselves and everybody using a more consistent client by default instead of the mix of Adium / Trillian / Pidgin / etc has been nice from a feature standpoint. I think many other companies are in the same boat, based on Slack and Hipchat and the other chat-as-a-service providers having huge growth.

Hipchat uses XMPP so you answered the parent's question perfectly. Slack, I believe, created a custom protocol.

It's a technology that you need to be rather firm in to use it. There are many tools, but often they are a little "hacky" to non programmers. That's why it gets more and more replaced by the FB chats, Whatsapps, Skypes, and Snapchats of this world. The same goes for email. Email will die a slow death. Maybe even your children can still build a career out of email know-how. But it's more and more replaced by other technologies. Just look at China were people all didn't know the internet in its youth. The first contact to internet most of the Mainland Chinese had was with mobile solutions like QQ (their ICQ copycat). For them email is like a harder way to do the same thing that you could do just as well with Wechat/QQ. So even the most serious of corps in China have Wechat/QQ support and phone, but they might not even have an email support. This will come to us, too. Just slower because people know email already.

The crazy thing is that FB and Google used XMPP (Google still may, but had disabled their servers from accepting outside traffic) earlier.

I used to have Pidgin running hooked up to Facebook so i could say a bit in touch with family.

But with the economic downturn everyone has gone back to building silos, in an attempt at maintaining profits/growth...

I don't think it was the downturn that did it. Companies look at successful companies for hints on how to succeed. What has been the most successful company on the planet for more than a decade? Apple.

Apple are not shy about "owning" their platform, and they aggressively leverage their walled gardens. The market did not punish them; in fact, users raved about their "refined" experience. Other companies took note and ran with it.

That Apple thing might have been a reason. Another one might have been that if you don't follow a standard it's easier to debug your code and add the features management craves so much. I've seen that at work projects before where the developers pretty much enforced removing standard interfaces to get more freedom to resolve their tasks. It's a pity when not even developers see the advantages of interoperability of their services, but it happens just as often.

Unfortunately the AGPL licensing basically guarantees no other social network will be able to integrate with this one using the stock libraries. Which is a shame.

It seems like a cool idea for a project, certainly, but it's more of a tech demo than a social network because it doesn't have users yet.

I am trying it now, though. And I'll edit this post (or reply to it) with my findings.

EDIT 1: Requires a password instead of public key auth. Will someone get it right, ever?

EDIT 2: And as quickly as it began, it ends. There's no one for me to talk to, really. There are some post lists (the Comics community is actually the biggest, to which pr0n is second) and those are somewhat interesting (except for the fact that all the comics are in French except for CommitStrip, which is ordinarily in French but has an English translation).

The News tab is filled with Buzzfeed-esque articles, rather than being prepopulated with something sensible like Slashdot or HN or Science News (know your audience!).

Looking at most of the public profiles, if they've posted anything to their feeds, it'll be something like "test" and it'll have been posted in April of this year (so it's not worth sending them a contact request in all likelihood).

EDIT 3: I made first contact with a user named "Jake", in a mailing thread. And I got one message back from him. And that seems to be the end of that.

And the end of this.

I hope that a reader could see that I really, really tried to make it work, short of inviting my friends to use it (we already have communication platforms, I'm definitely not going to be able to convince them :)

Too bad.

EDIT 4: Jake and I are having a conversation in chat, actually. We can agree that the design work is impeccable, and that a lot of the details behind the network are charming. He notes, however, that these new platforms "don't put enough effort into community engagement".

EDIT 5 (last): I had a genuinely human experience on a "distributed social network". It's possible if you try hard enough, you just have to power through all of the hurdles. With some algorithmic optimization I'm sure this project could live to see mainstream use. If anyone else is up for a conversation about this, I'm striking@movim.eu.

The AGPL is a feature, not a bug.

I did not call it a bug, and I'm not disagreeing with its use. I made an observation about it.

Why do you believe this, though? Would a BSD/MIT/X11 (even LGPL) license not be more appropriate?

Lax licenses, and even the regular GPL, do not legally entitle users of a web application to the corresponding source code. The AGPL does with its copyleft-over-network "Affero" clause. If you don't think copyleft is important, or think that it's OK to permit proprietary derivative works, then the AGPL will seem like a poor license choice. I am extremely pro-copyleft, especially for applications (vs. libraries), and think the AGPL is great and fits a very important legal use-case.

What if the license were just an entitlement to your personal data? That you could take it back and share it only according to your terms rather than those of the server operators?

I think the AGPL works very well for applications that employ it. I simply think that perhaps this one shouldn't. Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions, it should just work better or have more value than a non-free version.

Not infrequently, one's data is less than useful without the software that manipulates it.

>Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions

That's a real sneaky way to describe copyright infringement.

I agree. While I'm not very pro copy-left in general, I think for a social network it makes more sense. If there are concerns about privacy, and the solution is open source, then why leave the door open to a proprietary version that would completely defeat the purpose of this software? It's especially ridiculous to refer to enforcing the AGPL as "legally bludgeoning" someone, since the proprietary code derived from this would presumably like to "legally bludgeon" anyone who distributed or modified their source code.

The AGPL makes code less usable than MIT, BSD, LGPL and even GPL:

Anything you can do with a piece of AGPL code you can also do with the same piece of MIT code. The opposite is not true.

The reason GPL works so well on Linux is because it doesn't affect licensing of the software that runs on top of Linux or connnects to it. AGPL works around.

The whole point of the AGPL is to ensure that derivative works give users the exact same rights that they were intended to have. It doesn't make the code less usable unless you'd like to make a proprietary derived work.

I know that. What I say is that it seems to me AGPL stifles code reuse more than it powers it.

The alternative to AGPL software isn't necessarily no software or only non-free software but often code with much simpler licenses.

The AGPL choice puts them in the very same field of play of the (now dead?) status.net/identi.ca.

Was it a good choice? I'd say not.

status.net isn't dead. It turned into GNU Social which is alive and well. https://gnu.io/

you mean like how myspace was AGPL.

Hey! I'm 'Jake'! Not sure why it won't use the nickname field I entered. I'm MadcapJake@lightwitch.org (they need to add this to the profile or config or something, I had to go back to check my email to remember where I signed up)

Instead of the AGPL (which forces users of the code to share their modifications, like the GPL), I'd rather see a license that requires you to offer federation (but doesn't put any other restrictions on you).

With federation I mean that any other service which uses parts of this code should have to offer interoperability with this service. Like email, you can have your account on one server and still write to your friends on a different one.

I wouldn't put other restrictions on the code. I don't care much about having the code copyleft, because the thing that is hard and we need to protect here is not the code, but the social network.

Wouldn't it be great if we had a bunch of social networks (can be closed source as far as I'm concerned) competing to be the best "host" (most features, best UX, free/premium, ...), but all able to talk to each other?

Hi, thanks for your feedback, I've created an issue on Github regarding the AGPL licence https://github.com/edhelas/movim/issues/43 :)

Thanks, much appreciated.

As much as I support every coders right to choose his license for his work created on his own time I think AGPL prevents a lot of good use cases.

Thanks for reading and considering me feedback :-), much appreciated.

And don't get me wrong, generally, I'm pro (A)GPL and copyleft. But for a social network kind of project one might have to think about tradeoffs to get the neccessary adoption.

So if I understand correctly this network is distributed but not anonymous like for example Twister is. So I can see my feed in atom/rss and chat with all my contacts. This means it should be compatible with something like thunderbird or newsbeuter/mcabber. Almost exactly what we need! I cannot save my locality it seems. my movim id: fsiefken@lightwitch.org my movim feed: https://nl.movim.eu/?q=feed&f=fsiefken@lightwitch.org

Somebody needs to figure out a way to get this, or Diaspora, or something, going. Setting up servers for the Ivy League schools, and pre-populating them with the student directories, would be a good start. Worked for Facebook.

The problem with scaling any social network is "asshole amplification", or how to design it so a few people can't ruin it for everybody. That's hard to do in a distributed system, especially if you're promoting anonymity. (Yes, IRC channel kick bots sort of worked.) I don't see how Movim addresses that.

Looks like a great app to port to Sanstorm.io!

It seems like the selling point here is supposed tight and seamless integration with a bunch of things that "millions of people" use for the last "several years".

But once you register and login (tough, because it doesn't tell you on registration what your "email address" is - it's the user you entered + '@movim.eu') .. now what? Where is that? How do I use the network without being on movim.eu?

It seems totally unclear how to do anything promised. Maybe it's in the Wiki, but, really..?

Trying it out, -is there any hn groups there?

I am reiqildtan@movim.eu I think.

I added you, I'm striking@movim.eu. Let's see what happens, I guess?

It's PostgreSQL (or simply Postgres), not PostGreSQL.

This is fantastic. Signed up.

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