

Ask HN: Why are you supporting App.net over Status.net? - EwanToo

Status.net has been around for a few years now - it's an open source twitter clone, with federation and open protocols all baked in. So my question is simply, why are people choosing to support the closed source, centralised app.net over it?
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revorad
Because we need an aggregator. It's not like a blogging engine, where I can
just use Wordpress. A social network needs people.

A lot of people complain about the quality of HN going down. Why don't they
take the arc or reddit source code and run their own news site?

Because a social network without people isn't.

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EwanToo
True, but the main public status.net implementation so far (identi.ca) already
has users, and was surprisingly popular back when twitter was having all the
fail whale issues. Twitter would go down, and a minority of the people I
followed would start posting on identi.ca

~~~
revorad
Right, so why did it fizzle out? It takes a lot of energy and resources to
make something like this work. Dalton and his team clearly have enough to at
least kindle a small fire.

Github didn't invent git. But, it became the first really good aggregator of
git repos, which has turned it into a massive social network. There's nothing
stopping you and me from hosting our repos on our own servers and pushing and
pulling code from each other. That protocol is established. Github gives us an
easy way to connect with lots of other people like us, without having to
bother with hosting our own repos.

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andrewhillman
I think people decided to support it because they wanted to see what the team
will come up with. I believe the curiosity factor is the reason.

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thinkingisfun
I really, really want to implement OStatus in my CMS.

However, this page is a joke:

[http://ostatus.org/2010/10/04/how-ostatus-enable-your-
applic...](http://ostatus.org/2010/10/04/how-ostatus-enable-your-application)

And I couldn't find anything better, much less in-depth and comprehensive yet.
What a shame - the protocol exists and works, yet is mostly enjoyed by the few
people who, I dunno, hung out on mailing lists when it was created? Or am I
missing something? Where are the newbie guides for OStatus? Where is the
example mini-blogging-app, etc.? I cannot help others understand or use
something that is a book with seven seals to me.

