
GNU social and GNU FM - tvvocold
https://gnu.io/
======
alecdbrooks
gnusocial.de has a better pitch, at least for the Hacker News crowd. My
translation:

>We are a community of microbloggers, distributed over a worldwide federation
of independent GNU Social servers, also known as StatusNet. We're the right
choice for users like you, to whom ethics and solidarity matter and who no
longer want to use centralized commercial services.

A nice touch is that if you mouse over the word for federation ("Verbund"), it
explains that you can communicate with gnusocial.de users through any GNU
Social instance or even other implementations of the same protocol.

It looks like it's open-source, distributed Twitter. The references to a
public timeline on gnusocial.de and other sites [0] make me think you can make
some tweets private and others public, rather than the all-or-nothing approach
Twitter takes.

[0]: [https://gnu.io/social/try/](https://gnu.io/social/try/)

~~~
aaron-lebo
The "official" translation on the English version of the site is:

> We are a federation of microbloggers who care about ethics and solidarity
> and want to quit the centralised capitalist services.

Which is a bit more political and perhaps radical.

Twitter allows private DMs. Are you sure gnusocial can do that? I'm not sure
how you'd keep private data truly private over a federated network.

~~~
shiggerino
Agreed, they should definitely change that. Software freedom is the real goal
here, not converting people from one economic system to another.

------
gobengo
If you like this, you may also like

* [http://indiewebcamp.com/](http://indiewebcamp.com/) __There are biweekly meetups in SF and other cities[https://indiewebcamp.com/Homebrew_Website_Club](https://indiewebcamp.com/Homebrew_Website_Club)

* W3C Social WG - [https://www.w3.org/Social/WG](https://www.w3.org/Social/WG)

------
dmritard96
So much open source enthusiasm seems to come out of Europe...am I wrong on
this observation? Are there reasons behind this (distrust of the US, desire
for independence, etc)?

~~~
erkose
GNUSocial is based on Status Net which was made in Montreal, Canada
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/statusnet](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/statusnet)

~~~
yarrel
GNU Social and the awesome StatusNet shared a codebase, GNU Social is now
continuing its development.

It's an international project. The lead developers are in Europe, admins are
in North America, servers and users are all over.

~~~
erkose
There is no leadership, even when Evan was involved. There are enumerable
basic feature bugs that aren't addressed. The only real change has been a skin
that makes it look like twitter, which I find ironic, but then again, most of
the gnusocial users these days are twitter users.

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chris_wot
What exactly IS GNU Social?!?

~~~
ah-
From [https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-
social/tree/master](https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/tree/master):

 _GNU social is a free social networking platform. It helps people in a
community, company or group to exchange short status updates, do polls,
announce events, or other social activities (and you can add more!). Users can
choose which people to "follow" and receive only their friends' or colleagues'
status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter, Google+
or Facebook, but is much more awesome._

------
mastax
Chrome's giving me a Certificate Invalid Error on this site. Anyone else
having problems?

[Edit] Interestingly enough, desktop chrome has no problems but chrome on my
android phone complains that the certificate authority is invalid. I think
I've had problems like this in the past also.

~~~
yarrel
Thank you for reporting this. I'll (gnu.io admin) take a look.

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ilpianista
May I suggest Choqok as desktop client? It handles both GNU social and pump.io
(and twitter), and I'm working to implement missing features because it seems
we lack client here

~~~
listic
Is there another client that is not reliant on KDE? Also, I thought pump.io
_is_ GNU Social?

~~~
LukeShu
GNU social is a fork/continuation* of the StatusNet software (PHP, "OStatus"
protocol). pump.io is a similar piece of software (node.js, "Activity Streams"
protocol) written by the original StatusNet developers.

*It started life as a fork, but in June 2013 they merged and it became the continuation.

------
dethos
I'm thinking in setting up a gnu social server for personal use. Do you
recommend it? Does the federation work well or it has known issues?

~~~
yarrel
GNU social team member here, so I'm biased, but yes people have personal
instances (I ran one on a plug server several years ago -
[http://foocorp.net/projects/fooplug/](http://foocorp.net/projects/fooplug/)
). The federation works well, the only issues I've had are when people's
themes for their sites have got in the way.

------
reitanqild
And I'm still wondering what happened to pump.io and tent.

~~~
Sami_Lehtinen
See Cupcake: [https://cupcake.io/](https://cupcake.io/)

