Show HN: Pinry, a self-hosted Pinterest | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Pinry, a self-hosted Pinterest

getpinry.com

140 pointskklimonda41 comments

I suggest making the 'Demo' button more prominent! It's tiny and low contrast (white on light green).

Both 'View the code' and 'Download' are bigger. People could ostensibly want to view the code before seeing it but I can't imagine many would want to download without demoing first.

You are correct and I have adjusted accordingly, you can see the results immediately: http://getpinry.com/

Thanks, I had the same issue. Some other suggestions:

1. Perhaps try shortening the copy. The large buttons could just read:

Code (Github) | Demo

Either increase the text size or also shorten the copy on the smaller buttons to fix the resulting size offset:

Download (62kb) | BitBucket | Issues

2. Your "Follow @getpinry" is overlapping the "Tweet" button.

3. I find the grey borders superfluous and a bit heavy-handed. I think you could just remove them, replace them with shadows, or lighten them and tint them a bit blue so that they don't stand out so much.

Looks great, btw. Have been looking for a platform on which to share inspiration with co-workers inside corporate intranet.

Yep, these are all issues and it's just a starting place, I don't plan on the current design to stay the same very long. Just wanted to get this released. I'll keep your comments in mind for when I update it later.

Why the change from a BSD style license to the AGPL? While it looks like a neat project, and I'd use something like this for my personal use; but that particular license means I won't touch it with a 10ft pole.

The older BSD version -- https://github.com/overshard/pinry/tree/26f9c76988b8cc5b0ee5... -- looks like something I might play around with though.

What's wrong with AGPL?

It's a license that requires any changes you make to the code be made available to the public as well as all code that connects to it in related services.

It is a license that touts "ultimate freedom" but the reality is that it removes your freedom to make changes that you would like to keep private.

No it doesn't. It gives the right to any users of your service to get a copy of the source code under the same license. Has nothing to do with "code be made available to the public".

unclear, the license says "interacting with", so even getting a not authorized response technically entitles you to a copy of the source code...

It does both.

'Users' and 'public' are being blurred in this thread.

Does AGPL have any notion of boundary between AGPL and non-AGPL software components? Something like a lesser/library GPL seems more fair: the 'LAGPL' components people use is open sourced to them, so the I/O network flaw of the [L]GPL is fixed, but the other parts of the product have their own license.

A regular GPL with a constraint on number-of-users seems fine for protecting the openness of a product intended for personal (non-hosting-provider) use, and pinry can license a commercial version for hosting providers.

I don't believe that's a correct interpretation of the AGPL. It's intent is to extend the idea of "User right to run" the software to services (like eg a web server or a web app) -- in other words -- say you make a webmail system, release it under the AGPL. Users of your webmail system would then be entitled to the source, just as users of a GPLed mail program would be entitled to the source (under the GPL).

The basic idea is to avoid someone taking something like a web server, heavily build on it, and set up a big service running it -- but not providing the modifications back to the users of the service (and eg: leaving them "out in the cold" if the service shuts down). Or in this case -- if you fork pinry, that's fine -- but your users are entitled to the source and your modifications (note your users not everyone).

I think it's a perfectly valid licence, and appropriate for stuff like this, where you could take pinry, set it up as a service, slap some ads on it, and make money off of the value created by pinry's authors. Nothing wrong with that. But if you find and fix bugs, those fixes have to be contributed back to at least your users (which then again are free to redistribute them under the AGPL, making it likely that they find their way back to the original project).

Ack, thanks for the catch. I cannot abide AGPL/GPLv3 because it renders accommodation a little too hairy.

Thanks for identifying the fork point as well.

If you are interested in using this for your own project look at the previous version at https://github.com/overshard/pinry, which has more friendly licensing terms (BSD, vs AGPL).

Very nice. Kind of scary the power of open source and how quickly competitors can spring up these days

Why is this surprising. It's not exactly difficult to build something very like Pinterest.

Most things aren't hard if you're only working at the scale of a single server.

Running the actual Pinterest, with millions of users, would be pretty hard. (At least for those with no prior experience of working at scale.)

Just a public service announcement: Please respect trademarks and avoid naming things tied to others peoples' branding work. I know it's usually an homage, but there's no reason to do it and it does bend trademark law (if not break it) sometimes.

Its up to Pinterest to try to enforce their trademark if they think they are too similar, which is unclear. The word pin alone is not enforceable, so Pinry likely ok.

Just a public service announcement: trademark holders can't seize the centuries-old common English language for their private use.

Don't misunderstand this as an endorsement of jerky trademark enforcement.

My point was that they did the work to associate "pin" with this concept in the public mind. Of course they don't own the word. That's just stupid. When people do these homages or clones, they are gaining traction and influence by riding on the work they did. Enforcement? Who cares... it's just unoriginal, cheap and lazy to trade on the name.

UI looks clean and fast. Just curious, do you have any revenue model on this?

There is none, in the future we do have plans to have hosted instances of Pinry so those who don't know how to setup their own server can purchase easy one-click hosting through us. We plan to do hosting as close to cost as possible/not looking to get rich off this.

Thank you so so much. So many people have built their businesses and lives on open source, I don't know what the internet would be today without free software.

Consider licensing copies of pinry to hosting companies, so users can get one hosting service with all their apps, instead of maintaining so many services with separate billing, etc.

How do you see the issue of possible copyright infringement when self-hosting pinterest clone? Normally, if you republish copyrighted photo (even smaller version), you might get accused of stealing it - you are basically posting a resized version of a photo, which might not be fair use.

Pinterest can get around this by claiming that it was the user who pinned the photo, not them, and they also allow websites to opt-out from pinning (and some websites like National Geographic actually do that). But if you self-host, you are responsible for what is posted...

I am asking because, if I could legally run a website where I would publish smaller version of any photo I find on the Internet, then well, there's a great monetization potential there. But I don't think it would be so easy.

Apparently pinterest does it via <meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" />

You could honor a 'content="nopin"'. It's be interesting if that became a standard (similar to nofollow or robots.txt).

[1] https://help.pinterest.com/entries/21063792-How-to-prevent-p...

Ok, let's say I will honor nopin. But isn't the legality still in question, since it is not user-submitted content? Or can I be safe when the pins will be "small enough"?

Well that's sort of the point of Pinry. We don't have to deal with it, it's up to the individual who hosts their own Pinry. We don't maintain that user's servers or have anything to do with it. If you want a completely private Pinry you can and then no one will ever question copyrighted photos because no one but you will see it.

If someone has a copyright complaint with a public Pinry it will need to be directed at that individual because we really have no control over it and even if we did honor something like a nopin tag it's open source, it'll just get removed if someone wants to post copyrighted material.

Yes, I understand that you are not responsible for that, and can't deal with it. I am just pondering whether it is possible to legally run Pinry-powered website, when I myself will be the only user and will want to pin also copyrighted content.

And if not, what do you think would be a typical usecase, i.e. who would want to run Pinry-powered website?

Personally I have a Pinry board that I host privately amongst my company, we all post images/inspiration for sites/ui we find around the web and it's all password protected. Copyrighted content isn't an issue cause only 4 of us ever see it.

But this is the same question you should have for a Blog I'd think, if you host copyrighted content on a blog then you'll have the same issues if it's a public blog.

If you are the only user, it is technically impossible for you do violate copyright, because you aren't publishing anything to anyone, you are just consuming content provided to you.

If you are permitted to download, you are permitted to move the dowoaded file around for yourself.

"...if I could legally run a website where I would publish smaller version of any photo I find on the Internet..."

Doesn't Google/Bing do this with their image search?

Well, they actually copy and host almost the entire internet, without permission. But maybe that's another story.

They will respect requests to not index an image, if their fair use is challenged.

On Pinterest, while they have a safe harbor according to the DMCA, the user can be sued by the copyright holder, just like here.

In practice, I suspect most copyright holders will send a DMCA takedown anyway, either to you or to the company hosting the site, if you're on a VPS or PaaS service.

Nice, but lose the font. The footer's contrast is a bit low. I also find the fixed background image on the landing page to be confusing, since the rest of the page does not use any parallax effects.

Very nice to see something like this built on Django!

Pinterest itself is built on Django as well.

agpl? People still think using that is a good idea?

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