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Comment by mike-cardwell | Hacker News Reader

I just had a brief look at Mastodon, and it appears to have the same humongous flaw that Diaspora has. No events management.

What the hell? That is the main feature required in a social network, after the ability to see each others comments. People want to organise their lives using the graph that their social network provides.

Is anyone aware of a distributed or federated open source social network which provides event management functionality? I would love to hear about it if you have... Gallery functionality would come in handy too.

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I have events on my website https://jeena.net/events/ plain HTML marked up with h-event http://microformats.org/wiki/h-event and I can receive RSVPs with help of https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/

It was fairly easy to implement, the only problem is that not many of the people I know have software which lets them RSVP too, therefor I also connected it to Facebook.

Nice! what are you using for the Photos page on your site?

Basically the same, h-entry and u-photo with microformats and p-author to show that I made the photo.

Points for you for using established protocol/microformats. Very good!

If i understand what you mean by "event management", then yes there is: GNU social provides for such a feature out-of-the-box. The less-than-ideal news however is that - to my knowledge - it is rarely used by anyone. (I certainly don't use it.) But, if you have the time+inclination, try and set up your own GNU social instance and see if it works for you. Alternatively, look at some of the GNU social instances out there (see http://www.fediverse.org for list of some nodes), and try registering for an account and play around with the events feature.

Are all your friends and family on GNU Social? If not, I can understand why it isn't a good place to organise events.

Most peoples friends and family are on Facebook, so the events management feature is useful there.

I can't convince my friends and family to use a social network if they lose the ability to organise and be made aware of events as part of the move.

No doubt, you bring up a good point No, of course all my friends and family are not on GNU social...yet. My family does use my GNU social instance for communications (though we just plan things without using the events feature), but my wife in particular also additionally plans events via text. But I'm also making new friends by now using GNU social (and yes, some of my existing friends have also joined existing GNU social instances and mastodon). Maybe more will join (or maybe they won't), or maybe they will join a mastodon instance (which is compatible with GNU social instances)...or maybe not. So, you're right, GNU social (or even the compatible mastodon, or hubzilla, or friendica, or pump.io, etc.) could not be considered a panacea for your use-case. However, I would posit that this is a bit of a chicken-egg problem (as in I can't join something because my friends aren't on it, and my friends won't join until i do, etc.)...Recall years back when "the facebook" was the new kid on the block...and folks were asking something along the lines of "why would i want to join this thing called facebook if my friends/family are all on friendster/whatever-social-network-was-popular-back-then/etc.?" Obviously the choice is half yours, because you can do whatever YOU want, though you're also influenced by where your friends/family "live" online; i get that. But, here's a bit of a weird recommendation: why not set up your own GNU social or mastodon instance...and then use it for you and your friends specifically...?

> Recall years back when "the facebook" was the new kid on the block...and folks were asking something along the lines of "why would i want to join this thing called facebook if my friends/family are all on friendster/whatever-social-network-was-popular-back-then/etc.?"

And how did Facebook actually solve the chicken-egg problem you just referenced?

I'd love to get some citations for any of the federated social networking platforms-- Diaspora, Gnu Social, Mediagoblin, Mastodon, etc.-- that link to a carefully considered and workable plan for mass adoption that any of them carried out at any point in their history. For reference you can look at the Wikipedia entry for Facebook (hint: it involves universities and enormous amounts of money).

edit: remove redundant word

I haven't heard of `events management' as a core feature of social media and Mastodon gets alone just fine without it. I'm assuming that you're referring to facebook-style timelines for life events, etc.?

I'm talking about being able to create an event and invite people to it, and let them specify whether they are coming or not. This is the main feature my friends use in Facebook, other than posting comments.

Does Twitter have this? Honest question. If not, why are you complaining that Mastodon does not?

Twitter does not have this feature, the only platform I know of that has this is Facebook.

And Facebook is a platform oriented towards interacting with `meatspace' friends, while Mastodon is for microblogging. I feel that `event creation' would be a significant and unfortunate scope creep considering other platforms are better-equipped to handle it.

CalDav sort of has this stuff, and NextCloud has federation that makes this pretty nice to work with. Personally I hate the fact that 'social networks' don't actually export useful calendar information.

Diaspora issue: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1359

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