Re: [Social-discuss] "GNU social" sucks.

[Adam Moore]

On 2015-01-11 03:59, Mikael Nordfeldth wrote:

> Honestly, I doubt developers hesitate to patch things because of the
> project's name. I agree end users might care what their service is
> called. But then again, we have _many_ users who don't use "GNU
> social" but use "Quitter" instead (still fully interoperable).

Oh, I'm sure you're right; developers probably couldn't care less what 
the software was named.  It could just as well be named Cthulu's Third 
Nipple, or Tantric Rectifier, or whatever.  But where users and the 
media (you can never forget the media) are concerned, naming is 
important.

Right now, the gnu.io website greets visitors with the following 
message:

"GNU social is the largest decentralized social network on the web."

...Is it?

My understanding is that GNU social is a piece of software which 
implements the OStatus protocol stack, and it is inter-operable with any 
other software which also implements OStatus, such as rstat.us, which is 
not built atop the StatusNet codebase. If "GNU social" is "the largest 
decentralized social network on the web", and rstat.us can participate 
in that network, then is rstat.us part of GNU social? I mean, we know 
this is a source of confusion for new users; if you watched the public 
timeline on quitter.se after they had that huge influx of disgruntled 
Twitter users a couple of months ago, you saw a lot of 
notices/conversations from people who didn't know what the difference 
between Quitter, GNU social, StatusNet, &c., was.

"Herds" might not float your boat, but there *is* a branding/terminology 
problem. GNU social is certainly the predominant OStatus implementation 
right now, but we don't call the World Wide Web "Apache" simply because 
it's the predominant HTTP server, do we? The World Wide Web is the name 
of the HTTP network, USENET is the name of the NNTP network, email 
(delightfully generic) is the name of the SMTP network, and so-on.  Is 
GNU social the name of the OStatus network?

"Fediverse" is what people on the network tend to call, it, although I 
think that name sucks, too.  How, exactly, are GNU social/OStatus 
instances any more "federated" than any other network of servers which 
use the same protocols?  Is there a charter that I forgot to sign when I 
started running my home instance?  Is there some legislative assembly 
that I've been absent from?

So, I'm going to retract my original proposal that GNU social should 
change its name.  You're right: devs don't care what the software's 
called, and users are going to be using instances that are not 
necessarily branded as GNU social servers.  But, I do think it's 
important that some kind of consensus is arrived at for the name of the 
network, and that the verbiage on GNU social sites be changed to reflect 
the relationship between GNU social and the network which it 
facilitates.

"GNU social is a HORD server; the HORD is the largest decentralized 
social media network on the web."

Or something like that.  I just made-up HORD.  (H)ordes of (O)Status 
(R)elay (D)aemons.  There's my suggestion for the network name.  I know, 
I know -- y'all are thinking, "man, how does he come up with all of 
these amazing ideas?".  I eat a lot of vegetables.  That must be it.

--
Adam Moore/LÆMEUR (@SDF) <address@hidden>
WWW: http://laemeur.sdf.org
HORD: https://wm.sdf.org/gs/laemeur