[Social-discuss] Every social network site is a snowflake

[elijah]

Ted Smith <address@hidden> wrote:

> Even within the anarchist community, the AGPL'd app Crabgrass at 
> we.riseup.net hasn't been widely used, and it was created 
> specifically to be a facebook replacement for social justice 
> activism. We need to succeed.

Blaise Alleyne <address@hidden> wrote:

> I'd hazard a guess that one of the reasons we.riseup.net hasn't been 
> widely used, without knowing anything about it, is that it's 
> described as a "facebook replacement social justice activism." One of
> the reasons for Facebook's success is that it's a general purpose 
> site. A niche social networking site is naturally going to to have a
> very hard time competing...

As the principle author of crabgrass [1], I can clear up a few
misconceptions:

(1) From the beginning, crabgrass was designed to be a rejection of the
facebook model of social networking. We focus on tools for activists to
collaborate and organize.

(2) There are many sites running crabgrass, including some very large
NGOs, and the one we run, we.riseup.net, has 35k pages on and has been
doubling every six months (almost all private). For the thousands of
activists who use crabgrass regularly, it is very successful. We have no
more aspirations than that.

I wholeheartedly applaud the impulse to start something new from scratch
(especially the AGPL requirement). The fundamental problem is that no
two social networks sites are alike--each one encodes certain ideas
about how it wants you to interact by making some things easy to
accomplish and some things difficult.

This is why we started crabgrass: we wanted to make some things easy
which are hard to do with existing web applications. We are also
security geeks and are creeped out by the way social networking sites
use surveillance as their primary business model.

In particular, crabgrass does something that no one else does: it allows
any page (wiki, image, poll, gallery, etc) to be shared by any
combination of groups and individuals with different levels of access.
These permissions are respected in all the searches and queries, so that
you can do a fulltext search of the entire universe of all the pages
with a particular tag that you have access to (directly or indirectly
through groups, committees, and networks) and that your friend also has
access to. We don't use SQL for this, because it would require an
impossible number of joins.

This is one example of the way technological choices are predicated on
your conception of social interaction, either implicitly or explicitly.

-elijah

[1] http://crabgrass.riseup.net