
Fediverse – Federated social networks running on free open software - jaywink
https://fediverse.party
======
kovek
Some people are confused about what this is.

On this page you see examples of websites you can host yourself. I'll use
Mastodon as an example since I've used it. I know about hubzilla slightly but
have not used it.

Mastodon is a platform you can run on your own server. That server you're
running is called an instance. You can also register on an instance someone
else is running.

Think of a single Mastodon instance as a clone of Twitter. One nice thing is:
Your server, your rules.

Then, you can also allow your Mastodon instance and its users and their posts
to be discoverable by other instances.

I think it's said to be federated because no one entity controls the content
that is being shared. the information is passed around from instance to
instance by rules that are defined on a per-instance basis.

~~~
amelius
Can I assume that these services (e.g. Mastodon and hubzilla) can talk to each
other?

~~~
marknadal
I don't think Diaspora* and Mastodon will, just to clarify what other people
are saying. But Mastodon <-> Mastodon should (and maybe even ones based off
the same protocol).

Also note that email is federated, yet the majority of users have congregated
around Gmail.

I predict that the same thing will happen with Mastodon, and that is not the
type of future we should have.

Instead, I urge everybody to use P2P/decentralized networking, where even
though there might be strong/reliable federated hosts, YOU fundamentally
control your identity and it does NOT belong to a federated host.

With latest WebCrypto, this is perfectly possible now:
[http://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-
wit...](http://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-
with-e2e-encryption-f90505b2ff8) !

~~~
SiempreViernes
I think the majority of users have several emails, and Gmail rules purely on
interface convenience. Its more advanced features (like google maps knowing
what hotel you've booked) are mostly creepy, and its storage allowance is not
a standout.

~~~
a_t48
I remember Gmail's storage being amazing when it came out...

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egypturnash
This doesn’t really tell me anything about each network. There’s just a
paragraph of free association about them as a physical place, usually with a
bunch of misspellings. Presumably you’ve read through the info of each
network; synopsize them and tell us what existing corporate site each one is
most trying to work like?

All the clever positioning breaks down on the iPad mini I’m sitting in bed
reading this on. I just get two columns of circular images, with captions
nearer to the next image than the one they’re supposed to be for. It seems to
work properly if I turn to landscape but...

You’re missing Secure Scuttlebutt. And the decentralized video sharing network
whose name I can’t remember.

~~~
gnodar
> And the decentralized video sharing network whose name I can’t remember.

Most decentralized video sharing services I've seen are built on blockchain
which this site explicitly denounces in regards to social media. The only
federated video sharing alternative I'm aware of is PeerTube:
[https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube](https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube)

~~~
rcMgD2BwE72F
This is splendid.

Here's a list of instances that you can try:
[https://instances.peertu.be/instances](https://instances.peertu.be/instances)

I wonder if

\- two peers who streams in different resolution (say 360 and 1080p) can share
data through P2P to lighten the load for the main instance.

\- if it will be possible to associate a magnet link (for instance, taken from
TPB) with a hosted video to allow for peers to leech from the network.

------
yborg
The main determinant of the stickiness of a social network is the network
size, and having to click each icon to find this out is stupid when there are
oceans of space that could present this information on the main page.

That said, this is a sad commentary on open source social networks. The
largest would appear to be Mastodon at ~1M 'accounts'. Facebook is what, ~2
billion active? if you want to believe their numbers.

~~~
aquova
I expect Mastodon's numbers to sharply increase over the next few months, and
I wouldn't be surprised if this month was by far their sharpest increase in
users. The 'big' social medias have had over a decade head start, and by being
centralized are more user-friendly. I've known about Mastodon for a while, but
always wrote it off as "that weird Twitter clone". I've recently decided to
try it again and turned my opinion around about it.

------
swiley
Mastodon is pretty underrated, I tried it a couple years ago and was
unimpressed. I just tried it again today after all of the news about facebook
and feel very differently.

Now they have a nice web UI (nicer than most IMO, which I didn't think they'd
be able to pull off with it being federated) and some really nice desktop
clients (I really like madonctl with ansi colors enabled, I just added it to
my .fvwmrc.)

~~~
fastball
I like Mastodon as well but I really wish it was more than just twitteresque
content. I want to be able to have photo albums and such on there as well.

~~~
webmaven
For that, check out MediaGoblin (also implementing ActivityPub for
interoperability): [https://mediagoblin.org/](https://mediagoblin.org/)

~~~
crowbahr
Now where is the reddit alternative?

~~~
SSLy
It's called Usenet.

~~~
crowbahr
Look Usenet is nice and all but it's not a forum system and it's definitely
not a reddit substitute.

It _is_ decentralized though, which is great.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Look Usenet is nice and all but it's not a forum system

That's exactly what Usenet is, and Usenet with 1990-era terminal clients was
superior in most respects to most current web-based forum systems.

~~~
webmaven
Heck, 1996-era GUI clients are also superior in most respects.

Jon Udell wrote an excellent book in 1999 on building collaborative systems
with NNTP servers, web technologies, etc.:

[https://archive.org/details/practicalinterne00udel](https://archive.org/details/practicalinterne00udel)

------
CharlesW
I don't understand what this site does. It appears to be a list of federated
social networks (if a very "heavy" and overdone one, but cool), but on the
"Fediverse" page (which I guess is the "About" page?) there's a buried and
unlinked "Join Fediverse!" call to action with no details about what that
might mean. Can anyone provide insight about who this is for and what
problem(s) it's supposed to solve?

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evv
Seems to be missing SSB/Patchwork. Technically it is not federated because you
can use it without servers at all, but I think the most practical case is to
use "pub" servers, which act as federated hubs.

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agentultra
I'm curious what the differentiation is between some of these projects.
"Written in Rust" or "Written in Go" don't really tell me anything as a user.

This is a really cool idea. I never really understood what "the social web"
was really about in the mid-aughts. The Internet was always a social tool
before Facebook and Flickr and all that happened. It's nice to see it come
back around to being distributed again. I hope protocols take over again.

------
srikz
Sandstorm[1] has not been in news lately ever since they decided to stop their
for-profit offerings. But it seems like a good base layer for people to host
these apps.

[1]: [https://www.sandstorm.io](https://www.sandstorm.io)

------
amelius
How much safer is my data on these networks compared to Facebook? E.g. is my
friends list safe from people outside my network? And also from people running
federated servers?

~~~
vermilingua
So long as you trust your server’s admin, your data should be safe from them
and non-federated servers. However once your server is linked to another, the
whole map of connected servers can see your outward-facing info. If you are
DMing users outside your network, you can also consider those messages non-
private, as your server, the destination server, and possibly intermediatry
servers will have seen it.

Services like this would do well to integrate the Signal protocol, although I
don’t know how well it scales with federated servers, I can’t recall any
actual tests of that functionality yet.

~~~
robotmay
Ah interesting coincidence; I've just started experimenting with building a
social network using the Signal protocol. Not made much progress so far, but I
think it's a sensible avenue to explore.

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confounded
It’s a HN meme, but please don’t mess with scrolling! Even with JS off it
still seems to happen.

Regardless, I enjoyed the summaries. One suggestion would be screenshots.

------
DpdC
Vague information. too complicated for the average facebook user. this is
positive zero.

The average Facebook user needs a visible face to trust. Here there is nothing
like it.

Tell Elon Musk. That would be a blow.

If you really want to win at Facebook, you need to play. with your owns
weapons: advertising and people.

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bovermyer
I like this. It's non-obvious what it is at first, but it invites you to click
on things and explore.

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ohtwenty
Neat to see it all together!

I'd heard of most of these projects, but there's some I hadn't heard about so
I'll be sure to check them out.

One issue I've got is that there's no real rhyme or reason to the layout, or
why they're put where they are.

------
jonathankoren
Off topic complaining about the website:

What’s up with scrolling on that site? I’m on iOS safari, and when I click
through to one of the pages (say Mastsdon) and do a quick “throw scroll” (you
know, when you move your thumb quickly across the page and lift up and the
page keeps scrolling by inertia), the page stops immediately after my thumb
leaves. (See any HN page for a working counter example.)

Why does this happen? Why is someone overriding scroll events? Why not just
leave stuff alone and allow a consistent experience? Why? Why? Why?

------
johnchristopher
Every time I see a Facebook, privacy or a social network topic on HN and then
read about alternatives such as tent.io, mastodon and others I ask myself why
the open source world is so bent on reproducing it. Half of those topics dwell
on privacy issues (might be fixable), half deals with the effects on the mind
and on society. That won't be solved by the open-source software stack.

~~~
s73v3r_
Well, people clearly like this kind of social network thing. It makes sense
that the open source community would try to replicate the experience without
the tracking.

------
Shoothe
Movim [0] is also a federated social service.

[0]: [https://movim.eu/](https://movim.eu/)

------
qwerty456127
Aren't all of these a way too complex? All I want of a "social network" is to
create a page to express my personality efficiently (by presenting whoever
interested some pictures, music and quotes I like, publishing some thoughts of
mine perhaps) and let them leave me a message (not to talk, just to leave a
message, I will contact them by the contacts they may provide (e.g.
WhatsApp/Telegram/email) if and when I want). Nothing else. The page is to be
easy to find for everybody and free for me to have (requiring no maintenance
nor a hosting subscription). What options match this the best?

There are Reddit and HN for crowd discussions, there are WhatsApp and Telegram
to chat with friends, there is Twitter (with relaxed message length limit,
finally!) to post your updates if you want and to contact people publicly. All
we actually need "a facebook" for is to present ourselves.

~~~
EGreg
About.me. Wordpress. The World Wide Web.

However, if you want something that actually promotes social, it is NOT
posting stuff about what happened in the past. What you read, saw, some news
article about what happened. And then enlessly waste time contributing
comments about it.

No, it's this:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI)

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zrb05293
They forgot about micro.blog

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bhhaskin
Nice! I just started hosting a GNU social instance for myself. Like it so far.

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bringtheaction
Only one of them MIT licensed. All of the others GPL or AGPL. Need more MIT
licensed alternatives. Preferably written in Python ^^

~~~
jessaustin
It's good that developers are starting to think seriously about who they want
their work to benefit.

~~~
amelius
We need a license that excludes use by user data harvesting companies, such as
Google and Facebook. Even if not legally enforceable, it could make a
difference, by clearly dividing between good and bad.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
Many of those companies, including Google, allow GPL and LGPL and absolutely
avoid AGPL because it applies to network services.

Now you know.

