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

Posted Feb 26, 2019 2:17 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept by anselm
Parent article: Yaghmour: gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept

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