
OStatus: like Twitter, but open - chrismdp
http://chrismdp.com/2012/09/ostatus-like-twitter-but-open/
======
modernerd
WordPress(.org) is one of the few open source projects to have encouraged
large numbers of non-technical users to download, setup, and host their own
serverside software. I think the Ostatus "movement" could learn a lot from it.

A single OStatus-based PHP app, marketed well, and with an easy install path,
might make widespread adoption of OStatus more likely. It could even piggyback
on existing WordPress installations as a plugin. Then, anyone with a self-
hosted WordPress blog would be able to host their own status updates under a
fixed path appended to their existing blog, such as example.com/status/. It
also offers the potential for anyone with a WordPress blog to become a
_provider_ of status pages for people who didn't want to host their own
(because WordPress has an inbuilt user registration system), which could
create a distributed, portable network with no lock-in.

There are supposedly 60 million WordPress installations out there. These users
already understand the value of owning and hosting their own content. That's
an awful lot of potential to kickstart the uptake of a distributed social
network, and I'm not sure that anyone's thought to exploit this yet.

~~~
shazow
I suspect the necessity of the PHP path may be outdated.

Today, I imagine the lowest barrier to entry would be to build a one-button
install on one of the many PaaS's with free tiers. Heroku, DotCloud, maybe
even an Amazon micro EC2 instance.

~~~
dchuk
Maybe within the HN ecosystem, but there are 10s of millions of wordpress
installs running on the web. I would imagine only a very very small minority
of said installs has any idea what a PaaS is. Those types of people are
install wordpress on their $5/month hostgator accounts all day long because of
stuff like fantastico making it a one click process as well.

~~~
shazow
Maybe I was unclear but I'm not asking to educate people about PaaS.

I'm proposing a button like [Create OStatus server]. It goes and provisions
you a Heroku or DotCloud or Amazon account, creates an instance with
everything installed, you get a link. Done.

We can make it way easier than installing Wordpress. The account provisioning
part is tricky but all it takes is a good will partnership from one of the
many PaaS providers, in exchange they get to upsell the owner to beefier paid
servers.

------
evanprodromou
I'm one of the co-authors of the OStatus spec and the lead developer on
StatusNet (<http://status.net/>) and the ActivityPump
(<http://activitypump.org/>).

I think the secret weapon in the OStatus arsenal is that there are literally
hundreds of millions (literally HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS) of PubSubHubbub-enabled
feeds on the Web.

Blogger, YouTube, WordPress.com, Tumblr, and Posterous as well as StatusNet
and Diaspora* all provide PuSH-enabled feeds. That's a huge body of content to
follow in real time.

Another good part is that PubSubHubbub will help with SEO -- Google Search
bots subscribe to PuSH-enabled streams, which gets you indexed faster. Lots of
incentive is good for getting things done.

There is distinctly lower support for the other parts of the OStatus stack.
But I hope we'll see this stack continue to develop.

~~~
riffic
Evan, I think right now most people are getting distracted at how OStatus
would benefit the end-user that they fail to see how the protocol/service
stack benefits _organizations_.

------
axx
There is a hot discussion going on about Tent.io, a project with a very
similar and promising direction: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4572427>

They launched there first Alpha Status App that's build on top of the Tent.io
protocol: <https://tent.is/>

If you like to get more information about the Tent.io protocol, checkout:
<http://tent.io/>

~~~
chrismdp
Cool, thanks. Love that there are others trying to do similar things: we all
need to work together as much as possible.

------
ordinary
I would love for this to work, but "like X but open" is not enough. What you
need is "better than X _and_ open". I wish I knew how to do "better", but
unfortunately, I don't.

~~~
thristian
Status.net was 'better than Twitter _and_ open' for a while; as I understand
it, Status.net was grouping together threads of replies, and handling
@mentions in the body of a message (as opposed to only at the beginning) long
before Twitter did those things.

Of course, they were kind of obvious additions and Twitter does them too now.
Status.net also had a very handy, very slick XMPP interface, perfect for those
of us who don't like to play "where's the setting" on a website. Unfortunately
that got taken down with the upgrade to Status.net 1.0, and hasn't yet
returned.

~~~
MMN-o
There are many other StatusNet sites out there that support the XMPP
interface. Or you can start your own.

I personally run <https://freesocial.org/> which is based on the StatusNet
software.

------
donpdonp
A distributed message bus seems to be the most promising model. It'll be
better than 'twitter but open' through the variety of messages being passed
(see the sidebar of the UI mockup below). I believe the messages being spoken
will come from activitystrea.ms, but the bus itself has yet to be determined.

There is some interesting work along these lines from the founder of StatusNet
going on in <https://github.com/evanp/activitypump>

A UI mockup of a client that would read from the 'pump' is here:
<http://statusnetdev.net/inbox.html>

------
elimisteve
I really appreciate what StatusNet is doing, but I've found that it's just not
useful enough to... use. It's Twitter but more free and with far fewer users.
That's rather different from Diaspora and Tent.io's visions.

FYI: Today, Tent.is -- the first implementation of Tent.io, a protocol for
fully decentralized social networking -- went from 0 users to 2000. In a day.

...And since it's free, I bet it'll grow MUCH faster than App.net which, after
TONS of media coverage and endorsements from the likes of not just Scobleizer,
but The Washington Post and even fucking CNN(!), got just ~12,000 people to
sign up by the deadline.

Specific sites aside, I'm glad that people are actively creating alternatives
to the centralized, corporatized, developer-unfriendly services that currently
dominate the landscape.

~~~
saraid216
To make moystard's point more clearly–and with a chart!–,
<http://xkcd.com/605/>

~~~
elimisteve
Tent's success is far from certain, of course. Sounds like you're convinced
that just because something might not happen, it almost certainly will not.
Also a fallacy.

~~~
saraid216
That is some pretty amazing putting-words-in-my-mouth. I mean, if we're going
to call out fallacies.

------
jackreichert
WordPress already has the complete infrastructure and adoption needed for a
social network. The only missing key is interconnecting them, why the need for
a separate platform? app? It's all in place. Only a plugin is needed.

Anyone with the plugin would be able to connect their network into anyone else
with the plugin. I would imagine it could be done with openid and xmlrpc.

~~~
calvin
WordPress has BuddyPress (<http://buddypress.org/>) for social networking. I
don't believe it allows interconnecting with other installations.

~~~
jackreichert
true. it's a shame.

------
premchai21
I have a large chunk of friends and acquaintances who now conduct their
ongoing visible conversations with each other almost entirely on Twitter, many
of whom have started becoming impossible to reach by other means.

They _also_ have visible half-conversations with a similar number of other
people whose tweets are “protected” so that only “confirmed followers” can
read them. I don't see OStatus doing anything with the latter, and I don't
think those people are going to move to public streams, and if they don't
move, the other people interspersed with them won't move because it'll become
impossible to talk to them. This is more or less the same reason I still
reluctantly keep a LiveJournal: the open-Web facilities for “but only show it
to these people” are severely lacking (and I haven't found a good way of doing
anything about this yet).

There's also the issue of social networks including things that are _de facto_
currency-like: “number of followers” on Twitter is an obvious one. In a
distributed network these usually can be faked, or at least are that way on
the UI side since it's hard to generate a UI for that that doesn't drive the
user's security-related cognitive load through the roof. (Or reveal more
information about subscriptions than people prefer, but that's a shakier
reason since some existing networks already reveal that graph.)

Is there any push for OStatus or other distributed social network approaches
to handle these use cases? I haven't been able to find any, and OStatus seems
to think the restricted stream case is explicitly out of scope.

~~~
sakopov
I'm not commenting on whether OStatus will ever have these features. I'd like
to just point out that what you're describing is absolutely disturbing. I'm
talking about the part where you said that these people cannot be reached the
other way and conduct all of their conversations on Twitter.

~~~
premchai21
Well, let me clarify just in case: the “impossible” is an exaggeration, since
they will _eventually_ respond to things like email, but it's not enough to
keep up. Many of the socially-important multicast messages only occur on
Twitter. I've been meaning to subscribe to them with a local aggregator, since
for those whose tweets are publicly visible that should be sufficient, but
while my existing RSS links still work, I can't find any way to acquire new
ones, so right now I'm reduced to manual polling.

~~~
grayc
Have you tried:
[http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_n...](http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name={USERNAME})

from [http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/06/23/how-to-find-the-
rss...](http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/06/23/how-to-find-the-rss-feed-for-
any-twitter-user/)

~~~
premchai21
I had not! That appears to work for now, though I'm not convinced it will
continue working if Twitter continues going the way they are. For some reason
that didn't appear in my search; thank you.

------
telent
Does anyone know of "friend discovery" services using OStatus? Most
proprietary social networks have that "let me riffle through your addressbook"
thing, which I imagine the privacy-conscious would eschew (I certainly do),
but e.g. my Twitter "following" list is publically available, so it shouldn't
be hard to go through that and find people I'm following who are also on an
ostatus-compatible service somewhere

------
vindicated
As a developer, I would love to see this get more traction. I really would.

It's really painful working with Twitter now. Twitter's display 'requirements'
and other aspects of the API are super restrictive after their latest update.

However, the sad truth is that the population of Twitter users isn't going to
be shifting anywhere else anytime soon. Most users hardly care about the
'openness' of the platform. I imagine the best way for a competitor to succeed
would be by allowing users to cross post statuses to Twitter.. but Twitter API
restrictions would kick in there too!

~~~
bradwestness
I agree, I don't see how implementing the same thing as Twitter but with
missing features (like posting via SMS) is supposed to draw away Joe
Everyuser.

The reason Twitter is popular is because there's a large active community of
users and they do a good job of enabling you to discover and follow people
you're likely to be interested in. It doesn't really matter how "open" it is,
any more than it matters if Facebook or Tumblr are open.

WordPress works with a distributed "install it yourself" model because people
use it to power their websites and they want configurability and
extensibility. With social networks like Twitter, they want community and
baked in support with devices and other services.

------
rmccue
I think the big problem with distributed systems is how to address people.
"@abc" is getting more and more synonymous with "abc" as a Twitter username,
and App.net uses the same style. This already leads to confusion when they
don't match (e.g. Marco Arment is @marcoarment on Twitter and @marco on
App.net); I have no idea how you fix this for decentralising.

"@example.com/abc" is one (not particularly nice) way of doing it, but I'm
struggling to think of any way that would work nicely.

~~~
chrismdp
OStatus uses "@chrismdp@rstat.us nice post!" style-messages.

This kind of works. Ideally I'd like to drop the leading @ but I guess that'll
be hard to do.

~~~
mherdeg
Gotta go with bang paths.

@chrismdp!{twitter,rstat.us,app.net}.

~~~
emillon
That would feel like inventing UUCP again.

------
bozho
I see a problem with OStatus that, it seems, is also seen by others - it may
not be user-friendly. When a deployment that uses OStatus shuts down/fails,
that's it - the users are gone. And that seems like a dealbreaker.

I've shared my thoughts on distributed social networks here
<http://web.bozho.net/?p=235>

~~~
DanWaterworth
The same problem exists with email, but it seems to have done fairly well
despite that.

~~~
bozho
very well then, what are we waiting for - let's have a fully distributed
social network :)

------
donpdonp
IndieWebCamp.com is another movement towards open and federated social
networking.

------
samikc
This looks interesting.

We built ScoopSpot[1] to make microblog better, one of the core proposition
was to allow the application developers work with the statuses more openly.
However, it didn't caught attention of the people. One interesting aspect of
ScoopSpot was to allow user follow a tag or topic.

The possibility of application built on what users' interests are limitless
(at least that's what I think). I will look into the protocol of OStatus to
see how can we make our API's open. [1]<https://www.scoopspot.com>

------
AVTizzle
What ever happened to app.net? I keep waiting to see it resurface in comments
related to Twitter, but it never does. Not a mention of it in any of these
comments either.

What gives? End of the hype?

------
jpswade
How does this differ from status.net (which powers identi.ca)?

~~~
danbee
OStatus is the protocol behind status.net and identi.ca.

------
juliendsv-mbm
Long time ago we did this service to check if your site / email follows the
ostatus specifications : <http://www.madebymonsieur.com/ostatus_discovery/>
Test it with you website or email adress, exemple enter
<http://identi.ca/glynmoody> in the form enjoy!

------
davedx
How does this compare to tent.io?

~~~
EwanToo
From what I've seen, the tent protocol (and service) is more complex than
OStatus, and capable of a lot more. To me, tent.io is more like a distributed
tumblr than twitter.

------
anjc
Slightly off topic, but i've only just seen these Twitter API usage changes
now, how are they going to enforce these new display requirements? It's surely
not feasible to manually check the display of tweets in all apps?

~~~
fpgeek
I think general expectation is that as Twitter turns up the heat on developers
there eventually won't be any apps to worry about.

~~~
anjc
But surely Twitter still want to be paid by developers who rely on their data

------
programminggeek
Ok, um, this is not going to work. Half of the magic of Twitter is that it's a
single service, so you can subscribe to anyone, pull anyones feed into yours,
retweet, share, all that junk.

People use twitter because other people use twitter.

An open service doesn't solve that, it just makes things more complicated and
worse.

Wordpress works because it's not a network platform, it's a publishing one.
Wordpress is inherently not a social network, it's a CMS. Sure, there are
social bits, but it works well as an installable thing because you don't have
to deal with issues like connecting or discovering other blogs. You can just
install it, write content, and hit publish and boom, you're publishing on your
own site on the net.

The only people who see a problem with Twitter right now are devs, not users.

All the "open twitter" projects are going to turn out the way of Diaspora, not
Wordpress.

------
hodder
Does the userbase of Twitter really care about how open the platform is?

~~~
riffic
nope, but I can guarantee you that organizations do.

You're a government agency (lets say, state of california), and you have
hundreds of departments and thousands of messages:

Would you rather register a twitter username for each department? Or would you
install a StatusNet instance for each organization and let them maintain
control?

------
baby
Everytime I read about diaspora and see where it is today I feel sad...

------
chrismdp
Would love to know what HNers think we can do to push this forward.

~~~
patrickaljord
Is it fully compatible with status.net already?

Edit: I tried to post from my status.net client choqok and it failed with
"Creating the new post failed. The result data could not be parsed.". Is the
api url <https://rstat.us/api> ?

~~~
EwanToo
It's meant to work, for example see here
<https://github.com/hotsh/rstat.us/issues/387>

------
thesp0nge
Guys I'd like to share another bootstrapped Italian startup in the
microblogging panorama: www.meemi.com

Full Disclosure: I know the creator, not by person but on the Net

------
DiabloD3
So why doesn't this guy just use status.net, the software behind identi.ca;
identi.ca IS the premier FOSS microblogging site, after all.

------
denzil_correa
Have you considered changing the background and/or the color of the text?
Reading was very unpleasant to the eye.

Edit - Personal preference

~~~
chrismdp
I'm quite attached to my colour scheme :) but other feedback welcome!

~~~
moystard
I also like the color scheme. Might be a good idea in the future to allow
every user to have his own color scheme, profile theme a la Twitter.

------
cutie
Better name needed.

------
markmm
It annoys me that folks with a poverty of imagination are creating clones of
existing apps that have already solved the problem. Another Twitter but open
or Facebook with proper privacy..etc. Fail!.

~~~
zizee
This is more a protocol than an app. In the early days of computer networking
lots of companies had their own proprietary email systems that couldn't talk
to each other. Then an open email protocol was created and email became so
much more than an interdepartmental communications tool.

This is much the same. Who knows the types of exciting tools it might spawn?

 _existing apps that have already solved the problem_

Obviously Twitter doesn't solve it for everyone, otherwise you wouldn't see
these sort of efforts.

