[alecdbrooks]

gnusocial.de has a better pitch, at least for the Hacker News crowd. My translation:

>We are a community of microbloggers, distributed over a worldwide federation of independent GNU Social servers, also known as StatusNet. We're the right choice for users like you, to whom ethics and solidarity matter and who no longer want to use centralized commercial services.

A nice touch is that if you mouse over the word for federation ("Verbund"), it explains that you can communicate with gnusocial.de users through any GNU Social instance or even other implementations of the same protocol.

It looks like it's open-source, distributed Twitter. The references to a public timeline on gnusocial.de and other sites [0] make me think you can make some tweets private and others public, rather than the all-or-nothing approach Twitter takes.

[0]: https://gnu.io/social/try/

[notspanishflu]

You don't need to translate it, you can choose different languages (top right).

I want to highlight that your translation sounds more professional and less militant (radical?) that the current one I'm seeing in gnusocial.de

>We are a federation of microbloggers who care about ethics and solidarity and want to quit the centralised capitalist services.

"no longer want to use centralized commercial services" sounds better than "want to quit the centralised capitalist services".

Maybe is just me.

[alecdbrooks]

Thanks to you and aaron-lebo for pointing that out. I'm not sure how I missed that, as I distinctly remembering noticing the language selection in the corner.

I probably should have written something like "no longer want to participate in." "Use" is too passive, probably. That being said, "quit" feels distinctly stronger than how the German version.

[aaron-lebo]

The "official" translation on the English version of the site is:

> We are a federation of microbloggers who care about ethics and solidarity and want to quit the centralised capitalist services.

Which is a bit more political and perhaps radical.

Twitter allows private DMs. Are you sure gnusocial can do that? I'm not sure how you'd keep private data truly private over a federated network.

[shiggerino]

Agreed, they should definitely change that. Software freedom is the real goal here, not converting people from one economic system to another.

[notspanishflu]

You beat me by 3 min with the same comment.

I wonder why the German version is somewhat more professional than the majority of other versions.

[A_COMPUTER]

What do they have solidarity with?

[detaro]

Yeah, good introductions to the stuff for new people is something that many of these projects seem to lack. Same for pump.io, last time I looked into it it was no problem to find good documentation for protocols etc, but nearly nothing that would motivate me to USE it. If you want people to join a community, tell/show something about the community!