Just make it work and then get influencers to use and talk about it. That's how you win with a social network. Or if you care about reasonable income without winning big scale then go the Hipchat way and integerate well with some special usecase (like they integrate with all the other Atlassian products and development tools).
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 striking@movim.eu.
Why do you believe this, though? Would a BSD/MIT/X11 (even LGPL) license not be more appropriate?
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.
Was it a good choice? I'd say not.
With federation I mean that any other service which uses parts of this code should have to offer interoperability with this service. Like email, you can have your account on one server and still write to your friends on a different one.
I wouldn't put other restrictions on the code. I don't care much about having the code copyleft, because the thing that is hard and we need to protect here is not the code, but the social network.
Wouldn't it be great if we had a bunch of social networks (can be closed source as far as I'm concerned) competing to be the best "host" (most features, best UX, free/premium, ...), but all able to talk to each other?
And don't get me wrong, generally, I'm pro (A)GPL and copyleft. But for a social network kind of project one might have to think about tradeoffs to get the neccessary adoption.
As much as I support every coders right to choose his license for his work created on his own time I think AGPL prevents a lot of good use cases.
The problem with scaling any social network is "asshole amplification", or how to design it so a few people can't ruin it for everybody. That's hard to do in a distributed system, especially if you're promoting anonymity. (Yes, IRC channel kick bots sort of worked.) I don't see how Movim addresses that.
But once you register and login (tough, because it doesn't tell you on registration what your "email address" is - it's the user you entered + '@movim.eu') .. now what? Where is that? How do I use the network without being on movim.eu?
It seems totally unclear how to do anything promised. Maybe it's in the Wiki, but, really..?
I am reiqildtan@movim.eu I think.
