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Re: [Social-discuss] "GNU social" sucks.
From: |
Adam Moore |
Subject: |
Re: [Social-discuss] "GNU social" sucks. |
Date: |
Sun, 18 Jan 2015 11:24:04 -0800 |
User-agent: |
Roundcube Webmail/1.0.1 |
On 2015-01-11 03:59, Mikael Nordfeldth wrote:
Honestly, I doubt developers hesitate to patch things because of the
project's name. I agree end users might care what their service is
called. But then again, we have _many_ users who don't use "GNU
social" but use "Quitter" instead (still fully interoperable).
Oh, I'm sure you're right; developers probably couldn't care less what
the software was named. It could just as well be named Cthulu's Third
Nipple, or Tantric Rectifier, or whatever. But where users and the
media (you can never forget the media) are concerned, naming is
important.
Right now, the gnu.io website greets visitors with the following
message:
"GNU social is the largest decentralized social network on the web."
...Is it?
My understanding is that GNU social is a piece of software which
implements the OStatus protocol stack, and it is inter-operable with any
other software which also implements OStatus, such as rstat.us, which is
not built atop the StatusNet codebase. If "GNU social" is "the largest
decentralized social network on the web", and rstat.us can participate
in that network, then is rstat.us part of GNU social? I mean, we know
this is a source of confusion for new users; if you watched the public
timeline on quitter.se after they had that huge influx of disgruntled
Twitter users a couple of months ago, you saw a lot of
notices/conversations from people who didn't know what the difference
between Quitter, GNU social, StatusNet, &c., was.
"Herds" might not float your boat, but there *is* a branding/terminology
problem. GNU social is certainly the predominant OStatus implementation
right now, but we don't call the World Wide Web "Apache" simply because
it's the predominant HTTP server, do we? The World Wide Web is the name
of the HTTP network, USENET is the name of the NNTP network, email
(delightfully generic) is the name of the SMTP network, and so-on. Is
GNU social the name of the OStatus network?
"Fediverse" is what people on the network tend to call, it, although I
think that name sucks, too. How, exactly, are GNU social/OStatus
instances any more "federated" than any other network of servers which
use the same protocols? Is there a charter that I forgot to sign when I
started running my home instance? Is there some legislative assembly
that I've been absent from?
So, I'm going to retract my original proposal that GNU social should
change its name. You're right: devs don't care what the software's
called, and users are going to be using instances that are not
necessarily branded as GNU social servers. But, I do think it's
important that some kind of consensus is arrived at for the name of the
network, and that the verbiage on GNU social sites be changed to reflect
the relationship between GNU social and the network which it
facilitates.
"GNU social is a HORD server; the HORD is the largest decentralized
social media network on the web."
Or something like that. I just made-up HORD. (H)ordes of (O)Status
(R)elay (D)aemons. There's my suggestion for the network name. I know,
I know -- y'all are thinking, "man, how does he come up with all of
these amazing ideas?". I eat a lot of vegetables. That must be it.
--
Adam Moore/LÆMEUR (@SDF) <address@hidden>
WWW: http://laemeur.sdf.org
HORD: https://wm.sdf.org/gs/laemeur
Re: [Social-discuss] "GNU social" sucks., Bob Jonkman, 2015/01/11