Movim – Federated, open-source alternative to Tumblr
nl.movim.eu
nl.movim.eu
> Movim is lightweight (only a few megabytes) and can be deployed on any server. We are providing a Docker image, a Debian package or a simple installation tutorial if you want to deploy it yourself.
I imagine a typical Tumblr user landing on this page and not getting a single word of the "easy to deploy" section. A lot of these distributed project suffer from this unfortunately. Developers not understanding what a typical user would look like.
Unless the user can click a button, enter a credit card and get an instance they are not going to use that service. And it has to look nice.
Movim is a free software project developed by benevolent, we are focusing on packages and way to deploy it easily more than trying to invest time into building server architectures. Building a SaaS platform could be done with a partner (and I'd personally be glad to work on something like that) for example but it's not the goal of the project by itself.
The past few months were focused on cleaning up the PHP dependencies, porting Movim on SQLite (next to MySQL and PostgreSQL) and adapting the project to prepare a nice package for the upcoming Debian stable.
Movim – Responsive web-based cross-platform XMPP client
That's your end user messaging?
I'm now more in GP's camp of "Developers not understanding what a typical user would look like."
Also your homepage is confusing: https://movim.eu/ I'm a developer, I read the article, and your homepage really contradicts my expectation that you provide Tumblr-like functionality.
Stable version
The Movim source code is not available in a packaged version for now, please follow the next paragraph.
[0] Both as in free beer and as in freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre#%22Free_be...
Of course you have to "do it for" the user. That's why you are the programmer and they are the user. If you're making something half-finished for other programmers to contribute to, that's very different from making a social network.
*[0] See the bit about "fanatics": https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
You are making an incorrect leap in logic. The commenter certainly didn't say that. Their statement is that ONLY patient people will get through a more technically challenging process. That is not the same as saying ALL patient people will get through the process which would be necessary for your conclusion.
My main objection here is that there are a lot of intelligent and polite people that are not developers and being left out in the cold. We need another option where users can rent out a server (from a multitude of providers) and install webapps as easily as installing phone apps. We are slowly getting there with Docker images but it's still very technical to do so.
EDIT: there is also https://sandstorm.io/ that tries to tackle this problem but isn't very popular yet
EDIT: I'm so excited about these projects I started making a "decentralized social network scorecard": https://gitlab.com/qqn/dctrl (still in its very early stages, but constructive tips and -- even better -- collaboration always welcome!)
This is a thing with most P2P app makers for some reason — they have a vastly skewed understanding of what a normal user is capable of doing. It's safe to say if your instructions include compiling things, your target audience is not the general public.
Heck, I have a P2P app, too (though not a Tumblr replacement: https://getaether.net), and I worry about having to download an app is too much of a barrier. Which it probably is, compared to what centralised alternatives offer.
I believe, and have used the auto installers many times with many different hosts to depoly a quick wordpress install.
It's easy to make a few step tutorial to show how to install / launch when using those tools.
Could be simple to set some sane defaults as well, like auto update daily, auto backup weekly.
Handing over the UX to an auto installer makes the ux easier in some ways, and could also get the necessary scripts, dependencies, DB setups, permissions and more auto handled by the other with experience,
and get the package pre-distributed onto thousands of shared hosting environments for easier discovery as well.
I'm not sure what is involved in getting softalicious to add your package into the mix, surely (hopefully) it's not too much work.
This way you can point basic web surfers to a list of hosting companies that auto deploy softalicious or whatever other auto installers in the backend automatically.
I'm pretty sure at least a dozen of the last 15 hosting accounts I setup came with at least one auto installer sometimes 2 or three. Almost all of the shared and vps hosting options that come with cpanel or plesk have had softalicious one click away in the main dashboard, with options to install scores of software packages.
I missed this functionality when I tried out DO and vultr. 2 out of 4 of the dedicated servers I paid for had softalicious installed, one offered it as a monthly cost add on, the fourth one said it's up to me to add on packages like that.
So most of the hosting I have done, and the kind of hosting that I recommend for most small clients, already comes with auto-installers setup.
So the tutorial for most poeple would be, if you are hosting with one these 100 web hosts and have a plan that includes softalicious, click the auto-install, scroll down to movim, briar, nextcloud, etc. Click install.
It will run it's magic and give you a web address to login and you are good to go.
This is one of the fastest ways to install a wordpress that auto backs up and updates.
(I know there are many horror stories about issues with wordpress having issues with autoinstallers doing code updates and not doing it the way a manual update may do things, but those are mostly long ago, and if there are a few backups already, then it's better for most people to get updates pushed compared to other alternatives in my experience).
So, most shared hosting setups our there have already installed the 'a main "thing"' - if your federated package is available via that thing, it's a couple clicks away.
In my specific case, my app actually isn't federated, it's truly peer to peer — I don't have this problem at all. It doesn't require any servers, just install it to your computer like you'd install a regular app, and it'll work its magic.
It's basically Usenet, but your local computer (and everyone else's) is a server, and they patch their content graph from each other as it updates.
When you install wordpress via softalicious these days (maybe not this way some years ago) - but with most installs there are backend options within the softalicious isntaller you can check off like "auto update wordpress core, other checkboxes to auto update plugins" - auto backup weekly, monthly, etc.
Wordpress also has options within it's backend that allow you to manually update core or plugins and themes, all seperately, grouped, or at regular intervals with plugins or other settings - so updating things is an option even if the auto-installer won't do it for you.
There was a time some years ago when the WP people said auti-instllers srewed up updates and there were some real issues (like file permissions wrong) - but I have not seen any of those kinds of issues in years.
I like the way your app sounds - especially if it can run on phones and tablets in a similar way. I hope things like this become easier to add to routers.
The more easier to install things the better, so long as security patches are default easy too.
One way we could make this work is to have some sort of simple protocol with oauth support so that someone can just spin up a container with one click.
This way you could have DNS setup and the container running within just a few minutes.
The only UI that the typical person needs to understand is the credit card and browser URL or else it's not going to take over the world.
Email is federated. It was designed to accommodate many hosting providers, all of which could interoperate and communicate. But it really isn't expected that every user will run their own server. The same goes for HTTP/HTML.
Gnutella and TOX are P2P. They were designed such that every client is a server, and there are typically no centralized servers apart from the clients.
There is value in both types of systems.
> Running this docker-compose file will build a stack comprising an nginx container, a PHP container (where Movim itself resides) and a PostgreSQL container. This setup assumes that you already have an XMPP server such as ejabberd or Prosody running somewhere else.
Even then, you would still need to setup DNS (and potentially certificates if not LE).
All we need if we want a free alternative to ANY social network is being back on nntp. Of course we can add features to it, we can start to shake heads and think seeing the role of IT today it it's time to buy serious mail solution, perhaps a VPS and a domain name, perhaps create a small home-server that mirror public/semipublic personal stuff from the VPS to us so we can easily jump from a vendor to another without change anything from our mail address to our datas.
IT is not only a game anymore, it start to be a serious thing even for casual people, better know a bit of it and be prepared.
A website typically run on a dedicated server, not mirrored elsewhere, under the complete control of it's owner, and hosting. So while no one really "own" usenet different subjects own, can censor, destroy etc a website and their reader can't really do much about that.
We have of course other types of site, ZeroNet is a nice example, but they suffer many problem, they are far less available and known compared to usenet and their "ownership" is still partially in singe subject hands.
A simple practical example: what happen to your HN post if HN disappear? How can you or us "posters" united can do in that case? Vs what happen if a newsserver disappear?
Individual websites: the sole owner of the domain name determines all servers that can serve content, thus all behavior, which is pretty conclusively non-federated.
I haven't found one that fits the bill.
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Unknown errorYou might have gotten a chance at a user. Good luck to you.
It's one thing to be JavaScript-rendered only. It's another to be impolite to users who happen to constrain JavaScript privileges of yet-untrusted sites. This seems especially relevant since you are attempting to convince an audience to adopt a federated opensource platform. The Venn diagram of people who understand the value of federated platforms has greater than average overlap with those who restrict JavaScript execution in their web browser.
I recommend revising the <noscript> tag to say something like "Please enable JavaScript to read this content. We use JavaScript for the following ... [a brief summary] and we do not use any third-party hosted script." (Incidentally bravo on not using third-party scripts!)
<noscript>
<style type="text/css">main {display: none;}</style>
<ul class="list" style="color: white;">
<li>
<p class="center">You donve Javascript enabled. Good luck with that.</p>
</li>
</ul>
</noscript>
This is, frankly, a rude message to send to someone with a more secure setup. It's off-putting and after I confirmed it to be true, felt the same way.
You didn't build a website with the ability to display without Javascript. Good luck with that.
Which thousands of developers (blindly?) copied: https://www.google.com/search?q="You+don’t+have+Javascript+e...
I'm not sure that's better than being an original sentence, though.
This is just a group of devs looking to pad their resume, not build something for everyone to use. (not that there is anything wrong with that)
It seems like an unnecessary complication to me.
Or just RSS would work as well.
I do like it though!
There needs to be a way to create sub accounts.
Finding content seems to be broken. Typing a search only seems to search for usernames.
Needs a one-click reblog.
There is no "advanced" UI like on Tumblr where you can pick a theme or customize the current theme graphically but we can imagine something like that in the future (or a website where people could create custom CSS file and link them with their account).
The HTML code of the pages is kept as simple as possible to make it easy to select the elements that you want to customize.
To me diaspora ruined every other free social network. How am I supposed to find someone to follow on a new social network? Tags (read interests) are a great idea, lets have more of that please.
So I'm looking at Movin, I see no iOS app. No Android App (Google PlayStore link is dead). I see DOL.
With federated services, the problem is more difficult. For one, if a centralized service can't clamp down on cp to Apple's standards (as unrealistic and inconsistently applied as they may be), what chance does a decentralized system have, where individual instance operators have to collaborate to keep their own instances clean and not federate with poorly-janitored instances?
It also increases the barrier to running an instance. Dealing with cp is not fun and having to manage that on top of usual mod/maintenance tasks has the potential to escalate running an instance from reasonable hobby to hellish timesink. If running instances is too hard, your federated system is probably DOA.
Of course, if a federated system were created with strategies for dealing with cp and other cannot-host content in mind, that would be a genuine improvement over existing designs that'd be worthy of discussion.
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That said, if they aren't actually hosting any of the content they probably won't run into the same problem Tumblr did. They will be able to pin the blame on third party servers. The app store still has a Tor client for example, because the Tor project doesn't host any user editable content. It's when someone loads a CP image from movim.eu that they get in trouble.