

Ask HN: Any example of a community owned web service? (thinking of Twitter) - fedd

we know open source software, community driven standards like W3C and Unicode, etc. why not to make a Twitter clone so that everyone would be free to use it in any way? are there some examples of something similar? big members like FB, MS, Google would pay for hosting, bandwidth :)
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brackin
I was saying this! We should do this. Get lot's of twitter clients to
integrate this as an option so if twitter ever pushes developers further they
aren't dead and this service gets lot's of users.

Also I think the reason Identica sucks is because it doesn't think about
features or design. This has to do some things twitter doesn't but shouldn't
be over the top, it should be lean so that it's not like facebook and have a
great API.

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jasonmcalacanis
Answer: It's really expensive and complicated to run an at-scale, common
infrastructure project. If identi.ca got to scale it might cost $100-200k a
month for servers and bandwidth. That doesn't take into account building out
five to ten sysadmins and a customer support department.

Of course, Wikipedia has done it.... last I heard they had hundreds of servers
in four locations. That has to cost millions a year to service.

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AAinslie
There's OneSocialWeb <http://bit.ly/OneSocialWeb> with a great engineering
team (talented chaps like @eschnou) and backing of deep pocketed Vodafone.
Open sourced under an Apache 2 license.

Also there's the free open source distributed/federated www.ThinkUpApp.com
from Gina Trapani and Anil Dash which can probably be built out into something
along the lines of what you are thinking.

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ZeroGravitas
I think a Twitter inspired version of this already exists:

<http://identi.ca/doc/faq>

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brackin
It's not good enough and doesn't have very good marketing, sounds silly but
this'd need to look decent and be appealing to users.

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javery
We don't need an open source web service - we need an open protocol like smtp,
ftp, rss, etc.

