Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept [LWN.net]

Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

Posted Feb 20, 2019 20:22 UTC (Wed) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (7 responses)

I actually disagree. I use Facebook, G+ and Twitter, and each one I use for different reasons. G+ was my "technical" social network. "Facebook" is my "ordinary people" social network. And twitter is my "here's what's happening now" network.

The part I disagree with is the "all of your friends". This wouldn't be something I want all my friends to be on. This would be more something I would like to be a more technical network, where I would want to save all the posts and what was discussed, on my personal harddrives.

Thus, if you get a few people to start posting things that others would like to have access to, then it can be a success, without having "all your friends" being on it. And it being decentralized and open source, it would work with 10 people using it, or 10,000,000 people using it.

Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

Posted Feb 20, 2019 23:03 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (3 responses)

I agree with roc: Facebook, G+, and Twitter each already have a critical mass of users to be successful.

These have flourished, in spite of the existence of the others, because of the specialization you mention. Whether Gitgeist finds its niche market and succeeds remains to be seen, but then again the article stresses that it's a proof-of-concept social network.

Quite frankly I'm impressed with how well git can be abused this way. ;-)

Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

Posted Feb 24, 2019 19:34 UTC (Sun) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link] (2 responses)

pr1268, even google admits that G+ is a total failure, and is shutting it down in April, a process hastened by yet another bug that could leak private user data "...the company reiterated that Google+ had low usage and acknowledged there are significant challenges with "maintaining a successful product."

So apparently the users here don't use g+ much. Even I, as a non user, knew it was shutting down since I had an account that I never used, and they emailed this notice out a month or two ago.

Sadly, there is a certain winner take all in these platforms, despite brave efforts to create more free alternatives.

I find the notion that git has to do everything kind of sad, but I guess there will always be people out there who think tacking on more use cases a tool is not designed for is a positive. Those are probably the same people who think using git to download a file is more sensible than using wget or curl...

Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

Posted Feb 26, 2019 12:31 UTC (Tue) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (1 responses)

> I guess there will always be people out there who think tacking on more use cases a tool is not designed for is a positive.

Sounds terribly like web browsers of today. Not sure that replacing web apps with git apps would be such a bad thing. :)

Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

Posted Feb 26, 2019 13:30 UTC (Tue) by jani (subscriber, #74547) [Link]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument

Which I like to paraphrase as, "If all you have is Excel, everything looks like a spreadsheet."

Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

Posted Feb 20, 2019 23:21 UTC (Wed) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (2 responses)

It's a fair point that a social network can be successful without being competitive with the really big ones.

Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

Posted Feb 21, 2019 16:25 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (1 responses)

> It's a fair point that a social network can be successful without being competitive with the really big ones.

Isn't it a general thing with entering a market that it makes sense to find an underserved niche which is not very interesting to the incumbent players?

Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

Posted Feb 21, 2019 19:45 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

Yes, but social networks are special because the value to users is almost determined by the other users using the network --- they're almost entirely about network effects. This makes bootstrapping particularly difficult.

Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

Posted Feb 20, 2019 21:05 UTC (Wed) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]

Once upon the time all our friends where using ICQ and Geocities. "All my friends are on X" never stopped people trying out new things and eventually moving over.

Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

Posted Feb 24, 2019 7:13 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (5 responses)

The main thing a social network needs is to enable social interaction, not to play mindless spreadsheet optimisation games with a body count as the target.

A lot of other web software also needs to back away from that race to the bottom.

Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

Posted Feb 25, 2019 12:29 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (4 responses)

The problem is that in this area (as in many), the mediocre-but-easily-available is the enemy of the good-but-a-hassle-to-access. Right now everybody and their dog either has a Facebook account, or is two minutes of filling in a web form and checking some boxes away from one – and chances are that almost everyone they know is already on the service. What are a few pesky privacy scandals compared to that kind of convenience?

You could make available the greatest social network ever – free, stuffed with useful and convenient features, privacy-conscious to a fault, etc. – but require people to go out of their way just a little bit to get access to it (especially when it's not obvious they'll have anyone to network with once they're there) and they're not going to be interested.

Right now, if you want to be the next Facebook, or even a noticeable blip on the radar in the general area of Facebook, you have to be significantly and obviously better than Facebook for people to even take a second look – and since, privacy issues aside, Facebook is actually pretty good at what it does these days, that's not a trivial bar to clear.

Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

Posted Feb 26, 2019 2:17 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (2 responses)

ou could make available the greatest social network ever – free, stuffed with useful and convenient features, privacy-conscious to a fault, etc. – but require people to go out of their way just a little bit to get access to it (especially when it's not obvious they'll have anyone to network with once they're there) and they're not going to be interested.

I think you're wrong about this. Inconvenience lowers the number of people potentially interested, but it doesn't make the project completely untenable. What it needs is a core group of users who understand the advantages and are interested in socializing with each other. If you have those two things, you can have a social network that is capable of surviving. It may not thrive, but so long as the users can support the network by themselves, it doesn't need to be able to beat Facebook to survive.

It seems to me that what it really needs is a use case that can bring in enough user/developers to get it off the ground, and that the most likely use case is a replacement for email lists as a way for developers to communicate with each other. Developers who already use git will have a lower activation energy to get involved, since they already have key enabling technology handy. And as articles here on LWN keep pointing out, there are serious ongoing problems with email lists as a way of handling development. So what it really needs is a customizable back-end that lets it substitute for LKML as a development discussion platform, and it has both an application and a group of interested users together.

Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

Posted Feb 26, 2019 7:16 UTC (Tue) by karim (subscriber, #114) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks for sharing this. I hadn't looked at it from this angle. Food for thought.

Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

Posted Feb 26, 2019 9:34 UTC (Tue) by jani (subscriber, #74547) [Link]

Also food for thought from a decade ago:

> 5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.
>
> Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you
> can't expect to hit that right away. Initially you have to choose
> between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users,
> or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take
> the first. It's easier to expand userwise than
> satisfactionwise. And perhaps more importantly, it's harder to
> lie to yourself. If you think you're 85% of the way to a great
> product, how do you know it's not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it's easy
> to know how many users you have.

http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html

Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

Posted Feb 27, 2019 9:15 UTC (Wed) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

What it needs is not to be better - it needs to be different in a meaningful way. Instagram and Snapchat are not direct competitors of Facebook and this is why they became wildly popular, IMO. You do *not* want to build a better Facebook; that niche is already occupied. But this is of course if you intend to build for the general public. There may still be a niche for people who would never associate themselves with a privacy disaster like fb. But it seems to be a small niche.

The real solution, of course, is federation. But good luck getting the big players to open their silos.