Ask HN: do you use App.net? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: do you use App.net?

32 pointssarhus47 comments

It started good, and there were interesting people in the platform. Now it doesn't seem very active. Do you use it?

I always hear talk about "if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer". App.net was designed to solve that: you pay for it, so there's no ads, no privacy intrusions, and no worries about who is selling you to whom.

I guess the experiment failed, and free-to-play wins out.

A lot of the SAAS offering usually say something like "for just the price of a coffee a day you can get our service" but If I was to pay for every services I use daily I would need a third job.

if server fail or service down.you pay peanut get monkey. cheap service quite dangerous unless depend on big investor.

epic poem

Maybe a haiku?

The reality is that paid services are not immune to be shut down, for example after an acqui-hire. See Astrid, Sparrow and many others.

Heck, even services backed by a web giant like Google are not immune either, they can always decide to shut it down like they did with many of their services.

I think it's hard to get people to pay money for something they might not even use. I get the impression that people create twitter accounts on a whim, because if you don't use it then you've lost nothing. If you do use it to the point where you might be willing to pay then you're already locked into the free service.

I cross-post my Twitter posts to App.net with IFTTT. I'd like to use it more, but I'm not satisfied with any of the desktop clients, and most people I want to follow are still active on Twitter, meaning I need to follow both.

I still support the service and its goals, and hope it will still be around the next time Twitter does something user-hostile so there's an alternative for people to consider.

There's a lot of quite good ones. Cauldron[1] works on Mac OS X, Linux and PC. There's also a list of apps available here[2].

[1]: https://cauldron-app.herokuapp.com/

[2]: https://directory.app.net/

i never really understood what they were trying to do.

even going to their about page (https://app.net/about/) doesn't really explain anything. there are no screen shots, only common buzzy worded language, no depth of explanation on benefits of using the product.

agreed... i'm not sure if it's a consumer product (like twitter) or for developers... the .net throws me off...

No but thanks for reminding me that I need to go cancel the subscription I have with them. I think it was a neat idea that just shows how difficult it is to overcome the inertia of the established social networks.

I don't use it anymore. I jumped on it when App.net switch to its current incarnation from <whatever it was they used to do, I forget>. Paid the $50 for the developer key. Looks over the docs, posted a thing or two, then never used it. From a development standpoint I guess I never really got it. After looking at the other apps out there for inspiration, which were all Twitter clones, I guess no one else "got it", either.

Helping me "get it" lands at the feet of App.net. But a mass of corporaty buzzwords isn't going to fix that. Someone else mentioned the mistake of directing users to the Alpha app. Yup, it's just a paid version of Twitter, I guess. And App.net did nothing to dissuade me of that idea. Nothing in their pitch, nothing in the API docs (that I saw) indicated to me that there was more to do than post short pieces of text. Telling me it's a "platform" is not useful. Pointing me to an API and saying "here, we have user storage!", "over here we have a picture API", now those kinds of things would be useful and would persuade me that it's not just paid Twitter.

I never understood the point, personally. App.net was created to fix the problems with Twitter. But to me, the root problem with Twitter is that it's centralized, and App.net doesn't even try to solve that.

App.net is not a twitter substitute, and I think it was a huge mistake for them to direct new users to the "Alpha" app which is a twitter clone.

But if you’ve heard of App.net at all, you probably equate it with a Twitter clone. It’s not.... “App.net is a social platform,” says the company’s founder and CEO Dalton Caldwell. “It’s your passport to a social network of great applications. I’m trying to get the idea across that you can bring your data with you from all these different applications.”

www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/08/the-great-app-net-mistake/

I get that it's a "passport to a social network of great applications". But, as far as I can tell, that social network is still centralized, no? Am I missing something?

Yeah, it's centralized. It's a storage space with a nice API for putting contacts, conversations, photos, etc. Edit: it also has a nice big "export data" button that will dump all of your data from all app.net applications you use.

Yeah, and that's a big problem.

If I'm motivated to move away from existing social networks for any reason, it's because they are centralized...

The fact that app.net is/was pay-to-play doesn't eliminate the issues of free-to-play at all: it still has the same issues (and moreover: less virality) but now I'm paying for them.

People keep saying that, and yet I have no idea what else it does. "Your passport to a social network of great applications" is meaningless corpbabble.

App.net is a platform for writing social apps that all share the same social network. Try browsing the app directory https://directory.app.net/apps/web-clients/ or the API http://developers.app.net/ whichever answers your curiosity better.

So it's Twitter+Dropbox? Still not seeing what's so interesting or different.

Yeah, except twitter doesn't like 3rd party clients, and Dropbox doesn't know about your twitter network.

Right, but a third-party app that talks to both Twitter and Dropbox can integrate them both easily enough.

As far as liking third party clients goes, that's the sort of thing I'm getting at when I say that App.net doesn't solve what I see as the root problem with Twitter. Not liking third-party clients is just a symptom of centralization, and App.net just happens to solve this one symptom without addressing the root problem.

Any twitter follower you want to collaborate with would have to make a new Dropbox account, and that account wouldn't have access to any data that she already stored in a different application. So even if you made an app to bridge all these services, it would still be a huge pain.

Why is centralization a fundamental problem?

People could use their existing DB accounts, I'm sure.

Centralization is a problem because it gives a single entity total control. That's why Twitter was able to screw with third-party clients in the first place, and why it mattered that they did it. Take e-mail as a counterexample: Google, for example, couldn't really screw with third-party e-mail clients, and even if they did, people who want to use third-party clients can just switch to a provider that isn't stupid.

App.net retains all of this control. They merely promise not to abuse it. I'd much rather not have to trust anyone's promises. Even if they remain completely honest, their idea of abuse may not match my own.

Uh... not everyone who has a twitter account also has a Dropbox account. But everyone who has an app.net account has a Patter account, and an ADN File Manager account, etc.

Sure, but I'd wager that the set of people with both Twitter and DB accounts is vastly larger than the set of people with App.net accounts.

I'm amazed Google haven't made this play yet. Between Drive which has a promising API and Google+ it seems like it could work amazingly. Sure it'd be centralised on Google, but that's no worse than app.net to me.

I've got an account but since I mostly use Twitter for bots etc., App.net loses out. Although there was some new stuff recently (metadata? PUBSUB? I forget) which made me think it was time to have another look at it.

Signed up for an account when they started offering free, didn't really understand the benefit because no one was there.

I have not been back.

Looking at all the responses posted so far, and it's pretty clear: App.net is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist (or it's a poorly executed solution to a painful problem)

Honestly, who cares about an API that lets you post, or read messages if there's nobody on the other side that will read your messages? it doesn't matter if I can make 1 billion calls a day.

I've been thinking about this recently, as like others in this thread I too have't used it in a while, but I think it's less indicative of the quality of the premise behind App.net (pay = no ads + privacy) than how little I notice Twitter ads and consequently how little they alienate me onto another platform.

Same. Twitter ads never bother me. They always appear to be mildly relevant and I barely notice them

App.net Broadcasts is pretty cool, using it on my Android: http://blog.app.net/2013/11/21/announcing-app-net-broadcast/

Used it and loved it when it was the mobile app landing page service, paid the $50 for the new reincarnation during the backing phase -- never used it since. Wish I got my money back, actually.

I used to, but don't anymore. It's like Google Plus, it's just spam on there (it seems like). Or it's just a bunch of tweets pushed to it, which defeats the purpose.

The Global feed is depressing. It's almost entirely spam. Not like "hey, check out this article I wrote" kind of spam, but more "cheap nike shoes gucci purses prada http://example.com".

There's some neat Dropbox-like apps that make use of the API, but I don't know enough people who use App.net to give the social features an edge over Dropbox's ubiquity.

I use it for Broadcast -- I have Broadcast set to send me a news story if it reaches 500 points on HN, and a few other sites that I like a lot that don't update frequently.

Tried it for a few days but I haven't used it since. The appeal of twitter isn't the concept anymore it's the fact that everyone else is using it

I never heard of it till this news came out.

I used to use it, when it was a service for mobile app landing pages. The twitter-replacement I've never tried.

No. Looked at it a year ago, didn't feel like signing up.

Not really, no. It's been ages since I've logged in.

tried it once, but did not like it, since everybody is on twitter anyway

Not really anymore.

I never really got what app.net is. Is there someone subscribed? Can you explain more?

Seems to be like Pinterest, without the pin. I don't get it, either.

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