

A Facebook without walls: Appleseed opens to the public. - michaelchisari

Hello, HN!<p>Appleseed is an open source distributed social networking framework I've been developing for the past few years, and I've been making rapid progress in the past few months.<p>I'm giving out invites to the test site, and I wanted to personally ask HN users to check out this work in progress and if you could give me feedback or suggestions, that would be fantastic.<p>Post your email here, or send an email to invite@appleseedproject.org if you don't want it to be public, and I'll send you an invite.  Once you sign up, you'll get 5 invites of your own.<p>Project's Website: http://opensource.appleseedproject.org<p>Github: http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed<p>Twitter Announcement: http://twitter.com/appleseedproj/status/29017132391<p>Thanks again for being a great community, and feel free to ask any questions and I'll do my best to respond.
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whimsy
I'm a little amused that the release of a Diaspora alpha demo rocketed up on
HN in a matter of minutes, while Appleseed, which has been cast as one of many
superior alternatives to Diaspora, is languishing after nine hours.

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bhoung
The appeal of Diaspora was its story (university students raising money to
build a version of facebook which would not raise privacy concerns) not its
technical superiority. It also explains the amount of media coverage Diaspora
received. Having just watched the social network, I came to the conclusion
that the only reason that movie was made was the law suits surrounding the
creation of that company. There's no appeal making a movie about two or three
guys working harmoniously together to build something useful.

~~~
jamesteow
Even so, my perception of HN was intelligent developers/business owners who
care more about the quality of the product than the hype surrounding it.

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luu
Are there plans to allow people to import from gmail and/or facebook? I like
the idea but, frankly, I'm way too lazy to invite people I know by actually
typing out their email addresses, and there's not much to do when I'm the only
person I know on the service.

Is there a bug tracker up? I only looked at the project site for a couple of
minutes, but I couldn't find one.

When I click on news I get "The page you requested could not be found". That's
followed by a link labeled "Home page" that doesn't go anywhere (it points to
http:), and a link labeled "Previous page" that doesn't actually take me to
the previous page.

Good luck! I hope this gains some traction.

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michaelchisari
_Are there plans to allow people to import from gmail and/or facebook?_

Yes, planned features are on our roadmap, available here:

<http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/roadmap/>

 _Is there a bug tracker up?_

Yes, it's a lighthouse bug tracker, although emailing
feedback@appleseedproject.org also works.

<http://appleseedproj.lighthouseapp.com/>

 _When I click on news I get "The page you requested could not be found"._

We'll be making some rapid changes to appleseedproject.org in the next few
days, so you'll see newsfeeds showing up as the top priority feature.

 _Good luck! I hope this gains some traction._

Thanks!

~~~
michaelchisari
_We'll be making some rapid changes to appleseedproject.org in the next few
days, so you'll see newsfeeds showing up as the top priority feature._

Newsfeeds are now live on the beta site.

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jdp23
Thanks for the invite, and good idea reaching out to the community. I'll send
email, looking forward to checking it out!

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mjgoins
My question: Is the test site served via HTTPS?

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michaelchisari
Currently, no, although HTTPS support is being worked on. I'm in the process
of moving hosts soon, and will be getting an SSL cert, but for now, be careful
surfing on public wifi, of course.

And as with any beta software, this is for testing purposes, not for
production use.

