Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

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Not aiming at a Twitter competitor at all. If we wanted that, we’d be done in like 3-6 months.

What we built is a GENERAL PURPOSE OPEN SOURCE SOCIAL APP PLATFORM.

Like Wordpress but for collaboration.

The goal is total reusability. You release an app for your community and install some plugins for various functionality. Then you throw some “tools” on “pages”. Apply styles. And you’re done. Your app works on the web on every device, can be released in app stores, integrates with notifications, contacts, etc. out of the box.

What sort of “tools” can you have in your apps? Well here is just a sample:

  Chatroom
  Chess game
  Collaborative documents
  Blogging
  Group rides
  Events and checkins

“Streams” is our we handle data. Out of the box every stream supports:

  Role based access control integrated with contacts
  Invites
  Realtime updates
  Offline notifications
  Relations and indexing

We integrate with every browser and OS vendor for Payments and Notifications.

And more. We provide a standard interface for people to basically collaborate with one another, and do it across domains too. Meanwhile developers can add new types of “streams” and “tools” for app developers and also startups can package and sell various apps to communities. Everyone can re-use code. Did you see the video?

While I have no specific affinity for ActivityPub as a protocol, I do like a lot of the software being built on it and enjoy being able to follow people on them from my Mastodon account.

No one's investing or expecting a return on a million dollars in investment with it. It's already a W3C standard. One popular piece of software (which you dismissed) supports it. Other promising attempts like Plume (blogging), Pixelfed (image sharing), and Aardwolf (Facebook-like) are in development. They're already revenue neutral (or better) from the Patreons and Liberapays that provide their funding.

From that perspective, your thing is just another closed-off ecosystem that doesn't talk to any other. Open source is not sufficient when we're talking about social media software. My new social graph is growing, and it's not dependent on someone expecting an ROI.

I understand you started this project before ActivityPub was a thing, and before anyone took federated social media seriously. But that's the hazard with starting early: sometimes something comes along and forces you to change how you think.

You missed the boat, and you don't realize it because you're busy building a yacht that holds smaller yachts. It's a nice yacht, but I like the growing network of party barges I'm on.

You can like it, but I know that protocols are driven by large commercial projects, not the other way around.

oAuth was pioneered by Twitter and took off BECAUSE they had clout. I have seen FOAF, Personas and tons of other things fall by the wayside without adoption.

You and I are talking about completely different things. I don't care about numbers or prospective adoption of a private company's protocol and platform. I'm talking about what I can do now. What I'm already using it for. What's on the horizon. What's not going to happen. It's popular enough for my needs. It's funded. It's in active development.

No matter how popular your protocol gets, it's still your protocol. I have no interest in it. I can go back to Twitter if I want to have my social connections locked into someone else's platform.

I have been burned by enough companies that play up open source and development ecosystems, then close up when it's no longer convenient. Your own example of Twitter was built on developers making tools for it. Who makes apps for Twitter now but marketing companies? Virtually no one.

Twitter has centralized servers.

Wordpress is used by 1/3 of all websites in the world.

Our thing is like Wordpress not Twitter.

So while it doesn’t currently support the latest protocol du jour (XMPP? FriendFeed? FOAF? ActivityPub? PubSubHubbub? Scuttlebutt?) it actually WORKS and people can use it to actually build apps today that are on par with what they get in Facebook.

Like I said if all we wanted was to have a microblog we would be done very soon. As it is that is 1% of the functionality you need for realtime collaboration, offline notifications etc.

You're not trying to understand me. You keep repeating irrelevant or misinformed points.

You go make your thing. I'll keep enjoying the platform I'm on.

So you just commented to say you enjoy the platform you’re on, and therefore WE missed the boat and no one needs our platform?

I guess I don’t understand your point ultimately. Just because YOU like something specific for your needs doesn’t mean there isn’t a large opportunity for something that addresses a totally different need.

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