Thousands of Spaniards Leave Twitter for GNU Social | Hacker News Reader

Thousands of Spaniards Leave Twitter for GNU Social

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305 pointslelf70 comments

Something is going on in Spain. You can track the Indignados movement through Occupy and now Podemos. We're seeing a parallel movement in technology there to what's going on in politics with the Podemos movement [0] - decentralised, grassroots, bottom-up. It's deeply exciting to track these digital and cultural trends together and imagine a new paradigm emerging in society.

We make an open source tool for distributed collaboration, and our userbase is now overwhelmingly in Spain. This emerged organically. It seems to be very fertile ground right now for distributed communication and democracy. I would advise anyone making software in this space to get a Spanish version out there and join the wave. I wonder about how it will spread to the rest of the Spanish-speaking world and join up with related tools and movements coming out of South America, like DemocracyOS.

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/spain-politics-via-re...

The «Podemos» movement is losing steam. Other political parties are still worried about them, but the breach they created in the bipartisan politics in Spain has been occupied quickly by other new (yet, more standard) political parties. In the last regional ("autonomic") elections «Podemos» got a good number of votes, but far less than expected, while other more traditional new political parties took a good bite in each election.

Things are changing, but not as dramatically as people expected. Let's see what happens in the general elections.

Last I checked, there was an even newer political movement gaining ground in Spain - Ciudadanos:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/11/podemos...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/13/ciudadanos-pode...

Ciudadanos (aka Ciutadans) it's not «new», it's 10 years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_(Spanish_political_pa...

Ciudadanos is just an offspring of the current ruling party (PP) that will probably die like the last offspring did (UPyD).

They want to retain power by creating new parties which (supposedly) repulse corruption.

The push for open source in Spain is often labelled as being about freedom.

Personally, I think it tends to be about money, especially in SMEs.

My friend uses an open source collaboration tool in his office of 20+ people, because even though everyone uses evernote personally, the plan with collaboration features is "too expensive". Might just be an anecdote, but I keep hearing lots of those.

Spain might be great for free software, but I would stay away from it in terms of starting an actual business.

Podemos' offer might be great for some people, but I don't think they will do much to change some of the deeper issues of the Spanish economy. I don't think I will be voting for them.

That's most probably a part of it, but it wouldn't explain why people migrate to GNU Social, because users don't need to pay for twitter.

>That's most probably a part of it, but it wouldn't explain why people migrate to GNU Social

Do they? I don't think the article is accurate to what's happening in any large degree. As another commenter puts it below:

>I call shenanigans. Spaniard here, the story is completely wrong. Most of the 6k registered users on Quitter Spain are inactive and it has nothing to do with Podemos and the indignados movement (they use Twitter actively along with Facebook). Even the user that started this "false migration" (@barbijaputa) is using Twitter and is inactive on Quitter

Cost is also associated with freedom, I don't see how you can think of it in any other way. The cost of software for startups is so significant that it can lead to bankruptcy.

This is my main gripe when people compare Gimp vs Photoshop, or Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice, or desktop Linux vs Windows - as that cost is not associated and placed in balance to what people actually need.

I also don't buy that "everyone uses evernote personally". If they do, then those people haven't evaluated their options.

Without the premium account, you have some pretty harsh limits, like a maximum of 60MB/month, or search that sucks, or no mobile app. And the premium version is what? Last time I checked it was $5 / month. Do you know what I also pay $5 per month? Google Apps, but that's only for the privilege of using GMail with my own domain, because otherwise Google Docs and 15 GB of Google Drive are free. And Office 365 is also in that range.

> The cost of software for startups is so significant that it can lead to bankruptcy.

What? Here's the software you listed:

Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Windows, Google Apps, Evernote. All of these added together comes to less than $3000 a year per employee (and I've generously padded pricing and then rounded up).

That's $250 a month per employee. I'd argue that if your startup cannot afford $250 a month per employee in software costs, then the startup is hiring too fast and cannot sustain the number of employees it has.

Maybe in the US, but in poorer countries things are a bit different. And let's not forget that money are scarce in startups unless you have some investors.

$3000/year is a lot of ramen.

My experience is that its open source or cracked in PYMEs here in Spain (small and medium businesses).

There is no money here compared to N.A. and parts of northern Europe.

Its complicated, different and has way less capital.

I don't think it's an anecdote. If you are funded $ 30M then you can buy "pro" plans to virtually everything. If not, you buy a VPS for $ 15/month and setup everything you need there.

This is much more a european-centric movement akin to Siriza in Greece than it is a spanish speaking thing. Southern Europe got hit hard by the recession and southern states were semi-forced into adopting austerity policies by the european union. The success or failure of the new greek governement will probably have a large influence in the fate of Podemos in the next election. In the end, it's about reconfiguring the coalition that governs europe more than it is about anything else. Europe is a quasi federal state where the Senate (i.e. the European Council, representing state governements) has the bulk of the power.

I happened to work on some of the decentralised computing and networking projects in Barcelona. Guifi.net is the largest community network at the moment that among others lets users share and publish their content including internet access [1]. Last year I worked in Clommunity [2], an effort to build the first large scale community cloud. Guifi.net users can just install the Clommunity distro [3] on top of and use its service discovery and decentralised cloud management tools to contribute and benefit from marginal resources. I think it's a cool idea that we will keep revisiting in the long future...

[1] http://guifi.net/ [2] http://clommunity-project.eu/ [3] http://cloudy.community/

I call shenanigans. Spaniard here, the story is completely wrong.

Most of the 6k registered users on Quitter Spain are inactive and it has nothing to do with Podemos and the indignados movement (they use Twitter actively along with Facebook). Even the user that started this "false migration" (@barbijaputa) is using Twitter and is inactive on Quitter.

They are backup accounts, which will explode in usage if access to centralized social media is blocked, or down for scheduled maintenance while some kind of political emergency[1] is happening in Spain.

[1]http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/06/16/us-iran-election-t...

are you really comparing spain to iran? That seems a bit far fetched.

Even the star of this story (Barbijaputa) was suspended from twitter by the company, not by any part of the spanish government (plausibly because of misapplied ToS enforcement, not because of censorship).

> They are backup accounts, which will explode in usage if access to centralized social media is blocked

So pretty much ... never? There is no way a country in the EU will be allowed to block social media.

Spain has recently reintroduced some legislation that would've made Franco proud. That said, I doubt they'll block twitter. They'll monitor it, of course -- and they'll probably use radio jamming against demonstrations.

Free, distributed (mesh-net) solutions will only help there, if they can somehow get around the jamming (relatively easy if only cell phone networks are jammed, not sure how likely it is that bluetooth/wlan will/can be jammed as well).

It seems the title is a bit hyped.

"Quitter Spain now has 6,667 users"... apparently, from the reading, all users came from the followers from a Twitter user that has 167,000 followers. I'll let everyone do the math.

I'd really like to see the tweets in question, because I tend to see a lot of two-faced individuals using the "freedom of speech" argument to personally attack and harass others. There is a bunch of accusations in the post, but no mention of the specific tweets that caused "Thousands of Spaniards leave Twitter". The fact that no part of the "conversation" is published, makes me a bit worried about the article's integrity.

This tweet, but you can't see the image:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HdDO5m...

The user filed a complaint with Twitter that the tweet contained private information about him. He also mentioned that the person retweeted him and he started getting a bunch of death threats from the person's followers (I think, my Spanish sucks.) The complaining person, a conservative, was tweeting about a protest demanding public treatment for hepatitis C, saying that a large portion of people with hepatitis get it from intravenous drug use. this made some people mad and they apparently went after him. Someone correct me if I got any of this wrong.

> The user filed a complaint with Twitter that the tweet contained private information about him.

Well, if that is the case, I don't see nothing wrong with the ban. Everyone has a right to privacy, regardless of their political views, so Twitter's decision to temporary suspension is certainly the right one.

The picture is gone, so it's difficult to say what was in it. Some people file retaliatory complaints to get people taken offline. The attacked guy seems like kind of a jerk, but at the same time, the suspended user seemed perfectly willing to user their followers to mob people with insults and threats.

Thousands? More like dozens. And I bet they will return to Twitter very soon when they realize they can't do their job effectively on a social network that's completely empty.

> The growth was so explosive that the some of the existing GNU social nodes were unable to handle the traffic

This would be a lot more impressive with actual numbers. Without numbers, it just feels like the numbers went from 100 to 200 and the network is so underpowered and badly implemented that it just collapsed.

Remember: always be suspicious of people who cite growth numbers instead of absolute ones, they are hiding the fact that these absolute numbers are bad, otherwise, they would be using them.

Edit: looks like it already happened. The only account named in this puff piece tweeted just three hours ago:

https://twitter.com/barbijaputa

and he's pretty much inactive on Quitter.

You had me at "federated"!

The "inter" "net" started as a federation of networks, then servers using published protocols.

It's been said a thousand times before, but poeple use to make fun of proprietary "emails", yet don't hesitate to use twitter, hangout etc...

xmpp is one of the saddest example, there were a lot of servers to chose from (or run your own), it was not a bad protocol, yet the big IM providers just abandonned it (google!) or never federated (facebook!).

I'm going to give this a try!

> It's been said a thousand times before, but poeple use to make fun of proprietary "emails", yet don't hesitate to use twitter, hangout etc...

The problem is that back in those days you basically had the choice between old school unixy internet power, and dumbed-down crippleware designed for joe sixpack who had never seen a computer before (ie. AOL). It was definitely worth the pain of learning to configure client apps for email, news, irc because that's where all the interesting online activity was happening anyway.

But since then two things happened: the majority of people in developed countries got online and became familiar with it, and the new generation of walled gardens was created on top of the internet rather than as a bizarro parallel universe.

The result is that things like Twitter succeed because A) that's where all the people are and B) they can leverage that to create a UX that is unattainable to distributed protocols.

This is not in the spirit of the creators of the internet, but their creation is no longer governed by the counter-cultural geek ideals of the late 60s either. The sad truth is the internet is market-driven now, and no amount of principled reasoning will put the cat back in the bag. The pendulum may swing back in the future due to political and cultural events, but mark my words, no federated Twitter replacement is going to gain any traction any time soon.

My prediction is that a few years from now, the big email providers' spam systems will have made sending email from smaller independent servers sufficiently unreliable that few people will want to do it anymore. At that point federated email will be a minority concern and everybody will get migrated to email 2.0, a new and improved system with no smelly sub-billion dollar participants allowed. Nobody will care or notice except a few out of touch nerds from the past.

I would like to give some context.

As a Spaniard I don't know what this article talks about. I didn't know about Quitter.es and I consider myself someone informed. Even more, the Twitter user that originated the "revolution" (@Barbijaputa... translated as @Beard-Bitch, no comment) is no longer using Quitter.es anymore from what I can read.

edit: fix typo.

FWIW, @barbijaputa is a contraction for "Barbie hija puta", which would be literally translated as "Barbie, daughter of a whore", although it's best understood as "Barbie the bastard". See her profile pic:

https://twitter.com/barbijaputa

"Bastard Barbie" or "Evil Barbie".

This is cool - I like reading about these sorts of open platforms having success. It always reminds me of a thought I've had bopping around in the back of my head for awhile: do we really need to develop new technology to emulate what social networks have become? It seems to me that the core of social networks are: (a) a profile/posts/wall that is a glorified RSS feed, (b) a home/feed/stream that is a glorified (and proprietary) RSS reader, and (c) a (proprietary) messaging system that could be filled by email or XMPP. (in fact, your facebook messenger IS an email account[0].)

So do we really need new technologies like GNU Social/Twister to accomplish this, or can we just repackage the above tools to look like facebook/twitter/g+/ello, and have decentralized social platforms. The biggest hurdle I can imagine is non technical users not knowing what in the hell to do with an XML page when trying to follow a person, so I'd propose that a new link type similar to <a href=emailto:address> be established -- perhaps something like <a href=follow:myfeed.xml> -- which would open the feed in the follower's default RSS reader. And I could sort my feed into circles/groups, which are really just folders in a feed. I think this could be prettied up to look the same as and be just about as easy as twitter, with no new technologies needed. A service could host each of these components, and thus look just like a full social network as we've come to know them.

The fact that it's so often referred to as "microblogging" makes me wonder why this sort of set up isn't discussed more often (unless I'm missing it). It would also then be trivial to host your own, because really all you'd be doing is hosting a blog, and using an RSS reader. It seems so obvious to me that I feel like I might be overlooking something.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/help/224049364288051

There are two pieces missing from what you describe: one is ease of deployment, and within that I can lump operating costs. This is the less difficult problem to overcome.

The second, much more important problem: discovery. This is the only user-focused service Twitter actually provides (the ability to find the accounts you want to follow). The 'network effects' people love to throw out as excuses for using shitty services like Facebook is not as big a deal as people around here pretend. Email works just fine and there's no 'network effect' preventing me from running my own mail server. Discovery is so important that just about everyone reading this post would rather have a lock on discovery (and the accordant ad revenue) than promote any kind of federated system. Discovery is search, and search is hard, and searching across a federated service is damn-near impossible, which is why there's no email whitepages any more. Much simpler (and more profitable) to hash everyone's email addresses, or let them pick a cute username -- whatever, so long as you hold the keys and can sell ad space on the results pages.

Nothing like what you're describing is possible any more. There are no more federated open standards; the IETF is merely propped up to rubberstamp whatever Google or Microsoft wants to do next.

Well, it's the same reason have both chose to write our comments here instead of self-hosting it on our blogs, I suppose.

I would like to add the spam problem to your explanation. A distributed system needs a distributed solution for spam, which is much harder.

But we also need to add a little complexity to the description. There is a difference between decentralized and distributed systems, with email the former and usenet or irc the latter.

Both discoverability and search are trivial with distributed systems, but also offers the possibility of competing networks. It is interesting to note that the open protocols actually faired worse in those cases, as it lends itself to competititon, and a someone with access to deep pockets can leverage that against you.

I'm not an expert, but doesn't Diaspora roughly offer these services? Even the search mentioned below seems to work reasonably (although maybe they're cheating somehow and it's still a little bit centralised -- again, i'm not clued up).

There are several ideas on how to simulate social network experience with classical w3c tech. Linkeddata group (one with Tim Berners-Lee) work on SoLiD - "for developers who plan to build social linked data servers and applications". As you said, there is plenty of ways to make online social experience with original WWW methods, and it'll be distributed, and ad free, you just need to make a "pretty wrapper" for common folks.

If more developers acknowledged possibilities of semantic web (or "Linked Data" approach as it been re-branded) not just for reducing entropy of the web, but also to provide solid services for ordinary users, it wouldn't be so hard to develop critical mass to be widely used.

[0] https://github.com/linkeddata/SoLiD

Email was a success because it predated the commercial providers. AOL started out with a closed email network, but eventually they added support for SMTP on the server side because it was in their best interest to join the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, subsequent federated systems (IM / microblogging) have largely failed because they were too late to the game. Big companies had already established a foothold with proprietary solutions before the open federated protocols existed. Unlike email, open IM/etc systems were never big enough to make them worth tapping into.

The reason the big services don't federate is political, not technical. Speaking as a developer, this is incredibly frustrating because it means no matter how awesome your new open protocol/service/platform is, the game is unwinnable.

Long ago, the FCC tried to force AOL to open up AIM to outsiders, by forbidding them to add videoconferencing capability until they complied. Did they open up their network? Of course not. Instead they waited years and years until the FCC dropped the issue.

Google was the first to do something right by supporting XMPP. I can only imagine this was due to the good will of the developers at the time. What's astounding is that none of the other big companies tried to federate with them. In the old days, you sometimes saw explicit partnerships between companies that allowed federation (like when MSN and Yahoo became compatible). Of course these no doubt involved meetings and contracts to put in place. And then there was Google, with port 5269 just plain open to the world. No contracts needed, yet nobody was compelled enough to take advantage of it.

All we needed was one of the other big services to federate and cause a domino effect, incentivizing the rest to join. I always had my hopes on Yahoo. They were in last place, but with enough incentive to join Google and enough size to create a formidable network in aggregate. To whoever was in charge of Yahoo messenger in 2006: Thanks for blowing our one chance at IM standardization. The opportunity is gone now. These days, there are so many proprietary IM systems that it's easy to lose count.

Reflecting on all of this, I think the only way we're ever going to get out of this mess is if the big companies start doing what's right. Like when Google did the right thing 9 years ago, except we need more than one big company doing it at the same time. If you're at Facebook, Twitter, etc, and you're reading this message: we're depending on you.

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

This was the first thing that popped into my head, but it felt gratuitously negative despite being a reference to a joke.

That makes me wonder if I'm interpreting the guidelines correctly

To me the previous comment sounded gratuitously hilarious, in a positive sense. Not mean, just poking fun.

This reply may not have appeared at first as constructive but it actually revealed salient information about the article. It brought attention to the fact that the movement is relatively small. You also succeeded to do that with humor -- no easy feat.

Good for them. Twitter and Facebook are no longer "social" networks, they are "advertising" networks. I think that's the trajectory of every publicly-traded "social" network: to eventually become an advertising network, driven by the never-ending demand of increasing revenues and profits.

Sounds like any social company that has an IPO.

Kind of begs the question... can any new social network exist and be successful without devolving into that?

I think it is possible to make some profit doing so. What would wrong is demanding that profits always increase. As a side note, Twitter really isn't all that bad IMO.

I don't know, but I'd like to be on the team that tries to build it. I'd like to also try something decentralized but perhaps with small user run servers popping in and out of existence hosting niche content, and larger corporate servers in the mix distributing monetized content. I dare to dream.

Well StatusNet exists, and has not devolved into anything.

What you want is to somehow have the tremendous amount of money to force people onto your platform (ie, what Google did with G+, but failed) without the profit motive to eventually turn the service into advertising media. Which basically means you want someone or some people with a lot of money to just throw it at userbase.

StatusNet is not "popular" for the same reason a lot of the FSF movements efforts are not popular - there is no advertising. Firefox and VLC are probably the most popular end user facing free software projects and they only exist in their current form because of word of mouth. They did have some substantial advertising efforts throughout the years, more than desktop Linux or other free software like Mumble ever has, and it takes that and just organic growth of userbase to become popular.

And even then, they were popular due to features, not freedom, though a lot of the features came from the freedom, and they were superior to their competition often because of contributions from the community.

Point is, you won't have a for profit social network get popular any other way, because your monetization options are limited when you are making it for profit, and you can only pump the absurd amount of advertising money into it to get a userbase by being for profit. The other alternative is StatusNet.

Firefox and VLC are popular because they had a superior UX compared to the proprietary competition. Firefox had plugins,tabs,and had more web features than IE. VLC,well, you don't need to care about installing codec A or B with VLC to read video files, it just works.

A opensource solution or free software, in order to win,must not only be free, but beat the competition in terms of user experience,ease of use,design...

Anybody knows what happened/is happening to tent.io? (I just google it and found a github repo updated as late as 15 days ago but no blog or timeline.)

I had not heard of GNU Social before. Apparently it's the continuation of StatusNet, picked up by GNU after identi.ca stopped developing it?

That's exactly right. status.net switched to a new engine, pump.io, which was supposed to be more api and mobile friendly and easier to maintain. But work on that is moving really, really slow, I don't see any activity on their github for 10 months now. Really disappointing because pump.io is cool.

pump.io has lots of servers active and seems to have many users.

It does, but it's not nearly done if it's going to hope to compete with Twitter and Facebook, which I think it could do someday. For instance I would really like to see better embedding code for images, videos, etc. and a better default theme. One of the most exciting things about pump.io was that it used oauth to integrate with a couple web games (openfarmgame) so the game could put updates on your feed. Ton of potential.

I may sound like I'm complaining, but it's really just because I think it's so great. I don't feel entitled to EvanP's time, it looks like he's busy with a startup so I don't blame him at all.

Late but still want to add: looks like premium kickstarter idea to me if someone had time and skills

Yeah, looks like pump.io development is just Evan by himself, and he's nowadays busy with other projects.

Thousands of my fellow spaniards signed on Quitter for the first time, missed they political arch-enemies from the enemy front and went back to Twitter.

Literally thousands!

Seriously though, it's good news for the FOSS world, and for privacy- and individuality-minded folks. Baby steps.

It would be great is someone with some neat design skills could help them make their homepage be less bootstrappy! Especially since, you know... bootstrap comes from twitter :P

I think eventually we will see something like GNU social or GNU communicator or some type of app that runs peer-to-peer rather than requiring you to set up a server to do things along the lines of Tweeting.

Projects like that already exist, they just aren't really popular yet.

I think we should promote content-centric/named-data p2p networking protocols.

Twister is an example.

Gilgamesh is also similar, but works directly between Android devices over Bluetooth (not Internet).

https://github.com/n8fr8/gilgamesh

Pipe dream. Decentralised networks sound well on paper, but you must be able to somehow stop abusive users, spammers, etc; you must be able to pay your bills (servers, employees, ...), etc

I joined a few months ago. It's not terribly active, but a lot of the active users are FOSS people, which makes for a very high signal to noise ratio. It's the only network nowadays where I don't just autopost from the blog and completely ignore it otherwise.

I don't understand the SnR concept here where you can follow who you want only.

That's fascinating. How's it working out technically? How well does GNU Social scale, and how does it deal with spam? Those are the two big problems such a system faces once it gets users.

This probably isn't a movement. But my gut tells me somebody is going to create a truly open and free network. And once it's established it will feel like it was inevitable.

My gut tells me that people are going to continue to flock towards less open and free networks, and we will wonder why we ever expected it to be any different.

There seems to be an SSL issue with Vinilox.

I got Chrome's "Your connection is not private" warning page when I clicked it.

That’s because they use a certificate from Cacert, whose root certificate is not included in the major browsers.

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