Re: [Social-discuss] Some Thoughts

[scorbett]

Hi Henry,

> Most people aren't concerned about privacy, and most
> people aren't concerned about how free their software is. Of course, there
> are those who *do* care about these things, and this tool *would* certainly
> be attractive to them, but this tool will not be very successful both in
> sense of popularity and in the sense of the protection of others' privacy
> if it is not also *better* than nonfree, privacy-threatening services like
> Facebook.

I agree that GNU Social will have to be enough of a better experience to
draw users away from services like Facebook. However, I think that trying
to totally outdo other sites and to garner a huge user base can't be the
number one priority of the project. Users should be aware of the freedom
of the new social network. The same problem appears in the many users
using free operating systems who do not understand or are unaware of the
ethical tenets that allowed them to run it in the first place.

Thanks for the thoughts; a lot of them are in line with some of the tenets
of the project. You (and anybody else with fresh ideas!) should definitely
reflect your ideas on the wiki page here:
http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social/Ideas

--sean corbett