OpenDolphin: Contribute to a truly open social network
about.opendolphin.social
about.opendolphin.social
Some advice:
1. Very few people care about a "free and open-source social network built with and steered by the community". You can't build a social network for just those people. It'll feel empty, and they'll leave. You need to attract lots of people who don't care about that.
2. Get rid of your landing page. See #1 for the reason. When people land on your domain they should be prompted to sign up, or look around. That's what a social network is for, after all.
3. Focus on making it work. Get to a MVP. Quietly open it to the public. Call it a beta. Don't waste time on press releases.
4. If you can't make it work, make it look like it works. No one wants to join a social media site that isn't working. "Eh, I'll join in a few months" and they'll never come back again.
5. Stay true to your principles! But keep it classy! Remember when websites would have a little "fork me on github" button in the upper-right corner? That served as a subtle indication that the project was open. That's all you need to capture the group of people I mentioned in #1. Here: https://github.com/tholman/github-corners
Unfortunately some of the points you talked about assume that the MVP is available (which it is) and that someone should decide everything beforehand, reach a point where the product is good enough to be used by anyone and the project is basically bootstrapped.
This goes a bit against my idea of a community-steered project, because the decisions taken at the beginning might be wrong to the point that you'd have to re-build everything from scratch to correct them.
Do you have a suggestion here? It's also true that a community like HN doesn't like projects that aren't ready to be used (see some comments here).
I sadly think we'll end up having an MVP that wasn't built by the community and start asking for ideas / contributions at that point - which as stated before goes entirely against my initial ideas
"We are open for everything" rarely works to form a community. Why should people in est time in that? Maybe they do and then things go another way than many individually want.
You need a foundation to which people attach or not otherwise there are enough other projects to be involved where I know they match my interests.
This is just an idea though, it might be way more complicated than this and we'll need to think about this. Not only different people have different ideas, but also the same people might shift their ideas over time - we just have to be open to change over time and evolve as the community evolves.
This is obviously not the only reason, we really want to build something that is developed (not necessarily in terms of code) by the community, so that we finally have a solution that is usable, useful and overcomes the common pitfalls of decentralized social networks and the mainstream social media platforms.
[1]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/853#issuecomment...
> we really want to build something that is developed (not necessarily in terms of code) by the community
This doesn't mean anything really.
I also saw some Mastodon discussion further down, so I'd like to say the author should look into Pleroma/Akkoma, Misskey/Foundkey, and other fedi software if they haven't already (not to mention the various frontends made for them). Mastodon is basically the worst fediverse software and I wouldn't judge the whole fediverse based on it.
I'm not a huge fan of the name either at the moment, but that's the best I was able to come up with. I trust that out there there is someone more creative than me to find a better name that also avoids clashing with already existing software (like KDE's Dolphin as you pointed out).
Thanks for the tips on the other possible fediverse softwares - I knew some of them you mentioned but not all of them. I'll check them out too!
Since it is vapourware and you mention the goal of the community participating, please take a look another twitter-alternative as example of that, particularly on the nips: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips
That one is open at the protocol level with several implementations of clients and nodes on just about any relevant programming language.
Anyone can say they are "truly open", but also I feel like the massive amount of people needed to make a social media site work... don't care about that.
I don't really get Mastodon either fwiw, sounds like people want it to be twitter but it just isn't and never will be that. I think I'm just burnt out on social media in general.
I wish you good luck and prosperity! Hopefully others are more optimistic and helpful lol
Like I realized the other day that when certain news events hit, I have to go to twitter to find the info I need, because search engines don’t have the raw info of networks like twitter. But I strongly dislike that I have to go to twitter and cannot do this on mastodon. I would rather be searching on mastodon.
And on twitter I use quote tweets to provide updates to my own projects in new threads which reference old threads. This works great for readability and yet I can’t do it on mastodon without just sharing the link, which doesn’t render properly on many clients and has other issues.
I just want mastodon to have nice features that Twitter happens to have pioneered. I also want DMs to make sense and feel like DMs on mastodon. I’m afraid of confusing people when I DM them on mastodon so I always say “this is a DM by the way, that’s not always clear”.
Likewise, (early) Facebooks killer feature was that you could "stalk" people (I mean that in a non-creepy way, hope that ironic usage translates to English ;-)). You could look up and get into contact with people that you know from real life. Friends, Classmates, Friends of friends. It was a social telephone book. And I think it was a great aid especially if you were not extremely socially inclinded and extroverted, because it helped you interact more with people in your life. At some point, FB changed radically. Afterwards it was more about adding random acquaintances and getting stupid articles in your feed. The social USP went completely missing.
Same for a myriad of other smaller sites that have closed. Every site had their unique appeal, but nowadays many sites define themselves as what the are not.
How do I participate in the project?
Introduce yourself in this GitHub issue and/or join our Slack instance!
It would be cool to integrate Slack / GH with this system to avoid having duplicated content
Twitter once again remains to be unchallenged. No contest for the 200M+ daily users still sitting there.
- big ambitions
- a kitchen-sink list of features that don't have any particular philosophical bent other than "be good"
- a proposed audience of everyone
- insisting that it will be responsive to the community, unlike those other projects, but without any particular ideas about how governance will work better this time around
(there is approximately one single good centralized website with community governance and social aspects and it's Wikipedia. That's the only one. This would be the second.)
Sometimes wildly ambitious projects work out, to be fair, but still. It's familiar.
The question is to whom does that flow to and how does everyone else e.g. backers, contributors, public feel about that.
And if there are disagreements how are they dealt with or in most cases not dealt with.
Maybe the first thing I should start looking at is a voting / discussion platform, so that we have democratic ways of proceeding towards a goal.
In any case, the initial idea exposed in the "About" page and some other project pages is that we'll first pay for the infrastructure and then divide the money equally based on the contributions a project member did. We hope to be as transparent as possible and most probably the best way to handle the money situation (if we'll ever come to that) is to have a foundation behind - similar to Wikimedia
another project designed to attract attention and GH stars, with the minimum effort
At this point this project is nothing more than "I have a cool idea, now I just free need devs to implement it..."
Starting and getting to an MVP would make the life easier for everyone to contribute, but it would not be a product built by the community since the base was already decided by one person - which IMHO kinda misses the whole point of building it together
And if you don't want that to be an individual person you still need a stable and trustworthy team that decides on something something. But even that is already a compromise since it slows things down, by a lot.
Also what if "the community" has contradicting views? One wants a platform for long in-depth posts, and one wants a twitter clone or a tiktok clone or whetever... It just doens't work. You are just projecting your own vague ideas into what you assume the people to also want.
I'll personally not protect my own ideas, because I'm not the project owner - it's meant to be a community effort and I expect to see waay more than one person in the driver seat.