Group:GNU Social

The GNU social logo, based on 'GNU party' by Etienne Suvasa.

The idea

GNU social, true to the Unix-philosophy of small programs to do a small job, will be a decentralized social network that you can install on your own server.¹

What if you could authorize your server to reveal as much, or as little information about you to other sites, as you wish... one time, one day, or forever?

By default, we think it'll ship with a plugin to offer functionality that looks like the current popular social network sites, but plugins for other free software applications are expected.

True to GNU itself, social is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, and we ask that plugin creators do the same.

Why we must create GNU social

Why are we making GNU social? well, like many of us, we've used several different social sites over the years. From orkut, to friendster, to myspace and now facebook. Yet, when a new site appears, and everyone flocks to use it, your contacts are left behind, as well as a significant amount of your private and personal information.

Social networks should be evolving, they should allow you to control what you put into them, and you should be able to keep control of your own data, including running the same software that GNU social uses, on your own website.

The web itself is already somewhat social in this regard. emerging standards like FoAF already handle some of the basics for a better way to control your contacts, and GNU social can add some fun features of its own.

GNU social is being created, from scratch, in php for maximum portability.¹

PHP runs on virtually any web hosting provider we can think of.¹

We¹ recommend suhosin for added security.

Pre-emptive responses to potential questions

Why are you using PHP? Ruby/Python/Perl/A GUI in Visual Basic would be better!

Better for who? Look at the success of phpBB and Wordpress — PHP is pretty much everywhere, and while maybe your favourite language is more elegant, PHP is largely ubiquitous.

But you'll never beat Facebook, so why bother?

Maybe everyone in the world won't use this, but not everyone uses Facebook either. Privacy is important, and lots of people value their privacy as well as their freedom to ensure the software they're using isn't doing things they don't want.

Future of GNU Social (May 28th 2010)

Due to maturity of the codebase, myself and the other contributors have decided to build GNU social alongside StatusNet, and additionally, we recommend OStatus as the basis for the distributed social networking protocol we intend to champion.

This is not a fork of StatusNet.

This is a wonderful opportunity for all of us, and I would urge anyone who wants to get involved to go ahead, grab the code and join the social@gnu list where the bulk of the discussion around this next step will be happening. This list will remain for other free social discussions, as well as meta discussion from social@gnu.

• Code: http://gitorious.org/+socialites

• List: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/social

Why not use existing free software social networking code?

We want to be able to ensure that the FSF (the copyright holder) can make the right decisions to protect this code for years to come. If you're interested in assigning copyright on your existing code, under the AGPLv3 (and later versions), please do get in touch.

What about regular-users?

There's no reason this cannot be easy to use and why setting up an account should be any harder than setting up a Facebook account.

It should be our goal, in fact.

Get involved!

• Contribute to brainstorming or the similar projects on this wiki
• Join the list: http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/social-discuss
• IRC chat: #social on freenode
• Microblogging: http://identi.ca/group/daisychain
• Get the code: bzr branch http://bzr.savannah.nongnu.org/r/social/trunk

Annotations

¹) It is still in open discussion on the mailing list, if it makes sense to have this technology server-based or rather, for reasons of privacy, based on the user's computer. The current consensus seems to be, that there is a need for something quick that will federate existing server-based social community servers, yet at the same time we should maintain a long-term look on how to provide peer-to-peer privacy. See also the overview.

Discussions of interest

• From this nettime thread here a critical intervention on centralised architectures