
Movim: A social network on XMPP - Moyamo
https://movim.eu/en/how
======
erikb
The question with social networks are never technical. As you can see by
nearly all real life examples, the technology can suck, can exploit, can be
this or that engine/framework/language. What matters is who is in there. If
you build a social network based on a technology you will never achieve a
significant size, especially if you choose a chat platform that is less and
less often used.

Just make it work and then get influencers to use and talk about it. That's
how you win with a social network. Or if you care about reasonable income
without winning big scale then go the Hipchat way and integerate well with
some special usecase (like they integrate with all the other Atlassian
products and development tools).

~~~
SwellJoe
Is XMPP "less and less often used"? I just started using it seriously
relatively recently. It's quite nice and there are multiple excellent open
server implementations, and I've been thinking on ways to integrate it into
some of my own projects. I don't really follow trends in this area, so I don't
know what people are doing with it...I do know that Facebook and Google have
abandoned XMPP, but that's to be expected. They want to own their users, and
they have enough power to do so, regardless of the ethics of the question.

~~~
erikb
It's a technology that you need to be rather firm in to use it. There are many
tools, but often they are a little "hacky" to non programmers. That's why it
gets more and more replaced by the FB chats, Whatsapps, Skypes, and Snapchats
of this world. The same goes for email. Email will die a slow death. Maybe
even your children can still build a career out of email know-how. But it's
more and more replaced by other technologies. Just look at China were people
all didn't know the internet in its youth. The first contact to internet most
of the Mainland Chinese had was with mobile solutions like QQ (their ICQ
copycat). For them email is like a harder way to do the same thing that you
could do just as well with Wechat/QQ. So even the most serious of corps in
China have Wechat/QQ support and phone, but they might not even have an email
support. This will come to us, too. Just slower because people know email
already.

~~~
digi_owl
The crazy thing is that FB and Google used XMPP (Google still may, but had
disabled their servers from accepting outside traffic) earlier.

I used to have Pidgin running hooked up to Facebook so i could say a bit in
touch with family.

But with the economic downturn everyone has gone back to building silos, in an
attempt at maintaining profits/growth...

~~~
toyg
I don't think it was the downturn that did it. Companies look at successful
companies for hints on how to succeed. What has been the most successful
company on the planet for more than a decade? Apple.

Apple are not shy about "owning" their platform, and they aggressively
leverage their walled gardens. The market did not punish them; in fact, users
raved about their "refined" experience. Other companies took note and ran with
it.

~~~
erikb
That Apple thing might have been a reason. Another one might have been that if
you don't follow a standard it's easier to debug your code and add the
features management craves so much. I've seen that at work projects before
where the developers pretty much enforced removing standard interfaces to get
more freedom to resolve their tasks. It's a pity when not even developers see
the advantages of interoperability of their services, but it happens just as
often.

------
striking
Unfortunately the AGPL licensing basically guarantees no other social network
will be able to integrate with this one using the stock libraries. Which is a
shame.

It seems like a cool idea for a project, certainly, but it's more of a tech
demo than a social network because it doesn't have users yet.

I am trying it now, though. And I'll edit this post (or reply to it) with my
findings.

EDIT 1: Requires a password instead of public key auth. Will someone get it
right, ever?

EDIT 2: And as quickly as it began, it ends. There's no one for me to talk to,
really. There are some post lists (the Comics community is actually the
biggest, to which pr0n is second) and those are somewhat interesting (except
for the fact that all the comics are in French except for CommitStrip, which
is ordinarily in French but has an English translation).

The News tab is filled with Buzzfeed-esque articles, rather than being
prepopulated with something sensible like Slashdot or HN or Science News (know
your audience!).

Looking at most of the public profiles, if they've posted anything to their
feeds, it'll be something like "test" and it'll have been posted in April of
this year (so it's not worth sending them a contact request in all
likelihood).

EDIT 3: I made first contact with a user named "Jake", in a mailing thread.
And I got one message back from him. And that seems to be the end of that.

And the end of this.

I hope that a reader could see that I really, really tried to make it work,
short of inviting my friends to use it (we already have communication
platforms, I'm definitely not going to be able to convince them :)

Too bad.

EDIT 4: Jake and I are having a conversation in chat, actually. We can agree
that the design work is impeccable, and that a lot of the details behind the
network are charming. He notes, however, that these new platforms "don't put
enough effort into community engagement".

EDIT 5 (last): I had a genuinely human experience on a "distributed social
network". It's possible if you try hard enough, you just have to power through
all of the hurdles. With some algorithmic optimization I'm sure this project
could live to see mainstream use. If anyone else is up for a conversation
about this, I'm striking@movim.eu.

~~~
davexunit
The AGPL is a feature, not a bug.

~~~
striking
I did not call it a bug, and I'm not disagreeing with its use. I made an
observation about it.

Why do you believe this, though? Would a BSD/MIT/X11 (even LGPL) license not
be more appropriate?

~~~
davexunit
Lax licenses, and even the regular GPL, do not legally entitle users of a web
application to the corresponding source code. The AGPL does with its copyleft-
over-network "Affero" clause. If you don't think copyleft is important, or
think that it's OK to permit proprietary derivative works, then the AGPL will
seem like a poor license choice. I am extremely pro-copyleft, especially for
applications (vs. libraries), and think the AGPL is great and fits a very
important legal use-case.

~~~
striking
What if the license were just an entitlement to your personal data? That you
could take it back and share it only according to your terms rather than those
of the server operators?

I think the AGPL works very well for applications that employ it. I simply
think that perhaps this one shouldn't. Instead of threatening to legally
bludgeon non-free versions, it should just work better or have more value than
a non-free version.

~~~
davexunit
>Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions

That's a real sneaky way to describe copyright infringement.

~~~
JesperRavn
I agree. While I'm _not_ very pro copy-left in general, I think for a social
network it makes more sense. If there are concerns about privacy, and the
solution is open source, then why leave the door open to a proprietary version
that would completely defeat the purpose of this software? It's especially
ridiculous to refer to enforcing the AGPL as "legally bludgeoning" someone,
since the proprietary code derived from this would presumably like to "legally
bludgeon" anyone who distributed or modified their source code.

------
captainmuon
Instead of the AGPL (which forces users of the code to share their
modifications, like the GPL), I'd rather see a license that requires you to
offer federation (but doesn't put any other restrictions on you).

With federation I mean that any other service which uses parts of this code
should have to offer interoperability with this service. Like email, you can
have your account on one server and still write to your friends on a different
one.

I wouldn't put other restrictions on the code. I don't care much about having
the code copyleft, because the thing that is hard and we need to protect here
is not the code, but the social network.

Wouldn't it be great if we had a bunch of social networks (can be closed
source as far as I'm concerned) competing to be the best "host" (most
features, best UX, free/premium, ...), but all able to talk to each other?

~~~
edhelas
Hi, thanks for your feedback, I've created an issue on Github regarding the
AGPL licence
[https://github.com/edhelas/movim/issues/43](https://github.com/edhelas/movim/issues/43)
:)

~~~
captainmuon
Thanks for reading and considering me feedback :-), much appreciated.

And don't get me wrong, generally, I'm pro (A)GPL and copyleft. But for a
social network kind of project one might have to think about tradeoffs to get
the neccessary adoption.

------
fsiefken
So if I understand correctly this network is distributed but not anonymous
like for example Twister is. So I can see my feed in atom/rss and chat with
all my contacts. This means it should be compatible with something like
thunderbird or newsbeuter/mcabber. Almost exactly what we need! I cannot save
my locality it seems. my movim id: fsiefken@lightwitch.org my movim feed:
[https://nl.movim.eu/?q=feed&f=fsiefken@lightwitch.org](https://nl.movim.eu/?q=feed&f=fsiefken@lightwitch.org)

------
Animats
Somebody needs to figure out a way to get this, or Diaspora, or something,
going. Setting up servers for the Ivy League schools, and pre-populating them
with the student directories, would be a good start. Worked for Facebook.

The problem with scaling any social network is "asshole amplification", or how
to design it so a few people can't ruin it for everybody. That's hard to do in
a distributed system, especially if you're promoting anonymity. (Yes, IRC
channel kick bots sort of worked.) I don't see how Movim addresses that.

------
fra
Looks like a great app to port to Sanstorm.io!

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OJFord
It seems like the selling point here is supposed tight and seamless
integration with a bunch of things that "millions of people" use for the last
"several years".

But once you register and login (tough, because it doesn't tell you on
registration what your "email address" is - it's the user you entered +
'@movim.eu') .. now what? Where is that? How do I use the network without
being on movim.eu?

It seems totally unclear how to do anything promised. Maybe it's in the Wiki,
but, really..?

------
reitanqild
Trying it out, -is there any hn groups there?

I am reiqildtan@movim.eu I think.

~~~
striking
I added you, I'm striking@movim.eu. Let's see what happens, I guess?

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DrJokepu
It's PostgreSQL (or simply Postgres), not PostGreSQL.

------
anonbanker
This is fantastic. Signed up.

