[striking]

Unfortunately the AGPL licensing basically guarantees no other social network will be able to integrate with this one using the stock libraries. Which is a shame.

It seems like a cool idea for a project, certainly, but it's more of a tech demo than a social network because it doesn't have users yet.

I am trying it now, though. And I'll edit this post (or reply to it) with my findings.

EDIT 1: Requires a password instead of public key auth. Will someone get it right, ever?

EDIT 2: And as quickly as it began, it ends. There's no one for me to talk to, really. There are some post lists (the Comics community is actually the biggest, to which pr0n is second) and those are somewhat interesting (except for the fact that all the comics are in French except for CommitStrip, which is ordinarily in French but has an English translation).

The News tab is filled with Buzzfeed-esque articles, rather than being prepopulated with something sensible like Slashdot or HN or Science News (know your audience!).

Looking at most of the public profiles, if they've posted anything to their feeds, it'll be something like "test" and it'll have been posted in April of this year (so it's not worth sending them a contact request in all likelihood).

EDIT 3: I made first contact with a user named "Jake", in a mailing thread. And I got one message back from him. And that seems to be the end of that.

And the end of this.

I hope that a reader could see that I really, really tried to make it work, short of inviting my friends to use it (we already have communication platforms, I'm definitely not going to be able to convince them :)

Too bad.

EDIT 4: Jake and I are having a conversation in chat, actually. We can agree that the design work is impeccable, and that a lot of the details behind the network are charming. He notes, however, that these new platforms "don't put enough effort into community engagement".

EDIT 5 (last): I had a genuinely human experience on a "distributed social network". It's possible if you try hard enough, you just have to power through all of the hurdles. With some algorithmic optimization I'm sure this project could live to see mainstream use. If anyone else is up for a conversation about this, I'm [e-mail].

[MadcapJake]

Hey! I'm 'Jake'! Not sure why it won't use the nickname field I entered. I'm [e-mail] (they need to add this to the profile or config or something, I had to go back to check my email to remember where I signed up)

[davexunit]

The AGPL is a feature, not a bug.

[striking]

I did not call it a bug, and I'm not disagreeing with its use. I made an observation about it.

Why do you believe this, though? Would a BSD/MIT/X11 (even LGPL) license not be more appropriate?

[davexunit]

Lax licenses, and even the regular GPL, do not legally entitle users of a web application to the corresponding source code. The AGPL does with its copyleft-over-network "Affero" clause. If you don't think copyleft is important, or think that it's OK to permit proprietary derivative works, then the AGPL will seem like a poor license choice. I am extremely pro-copyleft, especially for applications (vs. libraries), and think the AGPL is great and fits a very important legal use-case.

[striking]

What if the license were just an entitlement to your personal data? That you could take it back and share it only according to your terms rather than those of the server operators?

I think the AGPL works very well for applications that employ it. I simply think that perhaps this one shouldn't. Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions, it should just work better or have more value than a non-free version.

[davexunit]

>Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions

That's a real sneaky way to describe copyright infringement.

[JesperRavn]

I agree. While I'm not very pro copy-left in general, I think for a social network it makes more sense. If there are concerns about privacy, and the solution is open source, then why leave the door open to a proprietary version that would completely defeat the purpose of this software? It's especially ridiculous to refer to enforcing the AGPL as "legally bludgeoning" someone, since the proprietary code derived from this would presumably like to "legally bludgeon" anyone who distributed or modified their source code.

[simoncion]

Not infrequently, one's data is less than useful without the software that manipulates it.

[reitanqild]

The AGPL makes code less usable than MIT, BSD, LGPL and even GPL:

Anything you can do with a piece of AGPL code you can also do with the same piece of MIT code. The opposite is not true.

The reason GPL works so well on Linux is because it doesn't affect licensing of the software that runs on top of Linux or connnects to it. AGPL works around.

[davexunit]

The whole point of the AGPL is to ensure that derivative works give users the exact same rights that they were intended to have. It doesn't make the code less usable unless you'd like to make a proprietary derived work.

[reitanqild]

I know that. What I say is that it seems to me AGPL stifles code reuse more than it powers it.

The alternative to AGPL software isn't necessarily no software or only non-free software but often code with much simpler licenses.

[tacone]

The AGPL choice puts them in the very same field of play of the (now dead?) status.net/identi.ca.

Was it a good choice? I'd say not.

[Moyamo]

status.net isn't dead. It turned into GNU Social which is alive and well. https://gnu.io/

[belorn]

you mean like how myspace was AGPL.