Re: [Social-discuss] GNU-social features

[Adam Moore]

Melvin Carvalho <address@hidden> writes:
>
> Not sure I agree with this.  GNU Social was an attempt for GNU to make
> a "social" system, NOT a "microblogging" system.  When it started Matt
> Lee sat down with Tim Berners-Lee and designed a great system.  The
> main problem with realizing that dream was lack of resources.
>
> I chatted with Matt at the start and we wanted to make a generic
> social layer for GNU that would fit into libre fm, gnu social and
> other things.  We just didnt have the man power.  There was talk about
> basing gnu social on elgg, but when status.net wasnt wanted anymore
> and the owners moved on, the donation of code swung the path.  This
> was mainly due to a small dev team finding it too attractive to reuse
> rather than start from scratch.
>
> Reusing comes with its own problems.  Status net was abandoned for a
> reason.  And the problems it had then, more or less, still remain,
> mainly scalability.  OStatus is one of the big problems.  It was
> lobbied for by web 2.0 folks that are good at shouting loudest and
> drowning out others (like Tim Beners-Lee, who is still going).  Even
> the creators are moving to activity streams 2.0. 
>
> So while lots of the above may be completely accurate *given the
> current context*, it's important to note that's a function of the
> history, not necessarily the philosophy.  The philosophy has changed
> before and could again.

Thanks for the additional information, Melvin.  I tried to paint a
picture of the way things currently are, but wasn't really qualified to
say how things were (or still are) meant to be.

It's worth restating for Mr. Miltenburg, or whomever else migh come
looking, that there *is* a (more-or-less) functional general-purpose
social-media engine in the belly of the GNU social software.  All kinds
of applications for sharing any type of media or activity could be built
with it, and this is what makes it interesting.  However, the current
environment is very microblogging-oriented.