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.

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 site, 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.

A year ago, while we were building libre.fm, Matt Lee was already thinking about this problem — 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

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

We recommend suhosin for added security.

Get involved!

• Get the code: bzr branch http://bzr.savannah.nongnu.org/r/social/trunk
• Join the list: http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/social-discuss
• Microblogging: http://identi.ca/group/daisychain
• IRC chat: #social on freenode (yes, it redirects to #libre.fm)

Ideas

You can add your own ideas about GNU social.