Re: [Social-discuss] A Proposal for GNU Social?

[scorbett]

Hi Melvin,

    I like this idea in principle, but I'm having a hard time seeing how
it would work in execution. It seems to me that the "best of web"
team's work would end up being pretty pointless in the face of the
"next gen" team's part of the project. Also, most projects maintaining
branches in this manner are doing so to provide updates to an older
iteration that still has a wide user base. This is not the case here,
since we are starting a new project (mostly) from scratch. The "next
gen" team would either have to wait for the "best of web" team to
write their part of the project first so they would have something to
build off of, or they would have to start a wholly disjoint project.

    I do think that your recognition that some effort must be made to
balance the different motivations for the project. GNU Social must be
an attractive alternative to other social networking sites, or it will
not attract many users. However, GNU Social should also not have to be
modeled on the paradigm established by Facebook and Myspace.

    Given the activity on the list last week, there are clearly a lot of
people interested in this project's success. I propose that we now
focus our efforts on defining a clear high-level view of what GNU
Social should be, so that when LibrePlanet rolls around a more formal
specification can be written, so we can all get hacking!

    For all of those who presented ideas and similar projects last week,
how can we reconcile some of the disparate notions of what GNU Social
should be, in order to strike a balance between attractiveness,
freedom, and future-proofedness?

--sean corbett



> Having read through the previous thread, it seems that there are quite
> diverse motivations and wishes for this project.  On the one hand, some
> want
> to address that there's no GNU-like web 2.0 like social space, that's
> ready
> to join and use, and on the other, some want to build something next
> generation, something that is federated and web scale, that adheres to the
> FSF principles:  "free as in freedom" or perhaps "your profile, the way
> you
> want it".
>
> The issue with moving quickly is that you limit yourself to a particular
> model, and later on hit a brick wall.  But the disadvantage of building
> something freshly architected means you can wait quite a while before
> having
> something usable.
>
> I propose, why not take the best of both worlds.  Many successful projects
> maintain two branches:  an olde