Spent a decent number of hours over the weekend looking at the field of OSS and private Facebook and Twitter alternatives. Initially, the two that leaped out at me were Diaspora* and Mastodon.
I decided to take a shot at installing Diaspora, in spite of it’s messed up name, because it is pro-ported to be more Facebook like and less of a Twitter clone. Figuring any live software would have official images available, off to Docker Hub I went.
Much to my surprise, there were NO official images available and the one unofficial image I found that had publicly available build files was quite complicated. It involved setting up a Redis instance, a Postgres instance, an Nginx instance, finally the Diaspora instance. In spite of all the ancillary services required, I decided to give it a shot anyway.
After getting everything setup, including pointing a subdomain at it via nginx-proxy-manager, I brought the Diaspora instance up and then check the Docker log expecting to see startup stuffage and some kind of confirmation that everything was up and working. Unfortunately, what I did get what a whole bunch of error messages talking about processes dying. I poke around a bit and didn’t find ANYTHING useful that told me why the sh*t show of error message or what to do about them. This just reminded me of a long conversation at work I had with the “young player” engineers about a) logging your interfaces, and b) providing error messages that are USEFUL in resolving the issue.
After much monkeying around, I simply bailed on Diaspora. If they can’t even get a workable official Docker image out there, then I seriously doubt they’ll be the social network of the future.
Next I decided to check out Mastodon… this time I decided to actually create an account on an existing site and play around with it. It turns out to be exactly what I thought… basically a Twitter clone. Since I’ve never been a Twitter addict, I decided not to go down the Mastodon route. It’s possible I’ll circle back as they do seem to have several decent and actively evolving mobile clients for the platform; but, for now it’s off to the next option.
So… in poking around looking for a Mastodon instance to join, I hit on social.linuxlusers.com, which is powers by something called Friendica. It’s distributed social networking software written in PHP that has back-end connections to all the popular distributed social protocols. In other words, a Friendica instance can talk users on Mastodon sites, Diaspora sites, etc. This looked promising….
So, I again went out on Docker Hub and found that they do have decent materials/documentation and sample docker-compose.yml files to get an instance up and running fast, which is exactly what I did. Unfortunately, out of the box, Friendica is quite ugly and crude, reminding me of something written in the early 2000’s during the dot com craze and not updated since. Little things like no support for media drag and drop, raw html buttons, etc. I found a few themes to change around the look and feel, but none did much to help with the dated look. Overall, it’s quite obvious that the developers spent most of their time on the back-end interface development and little/no time on what the users see. Great for a “techie” site catering to guys use to spending all day writing code with vi, but a huge turn-off for anyone else. So it was off to the NEXT option…
Poking around I found a hyped option called Vero. It’s a centralized, not distributed, social network and it’s not OSS. However, it does have a fairly reasonable privacy policy and it states that it’s intent is to charge a monthly fee for the service once they gain critical mass. Rather than a turn-off, this seem like a very good idea to me. The only bummer from what I could see is that the entire platform is mobile only, e.g. Instagram when it first came out.
Not dissuaded I went ahead and downloaded the app onto my Samsung S7 Edge and kicked off the sign-up process. To my surprise, the process flat broke when entering my mobile phone number. I know the S7 Edge is a couple of years old, but it still probably ranks in the to 10 used Android phones out there. If these guys can’t get their sign-up working on the popular Samsung phone, it doesn’t bode well for how stable their app is. I went ahead and sent a note to their service department. We’ll see what type of response I get and how long it take. So, NEXT…
Where I’m at now is taking a look at the WordPress BuddyPress plugin and it’s associated ecosystem. I looked at BuddyPress a few years ago and it really wasn’t mature. I’ll plunk around with it for a bit, but I don’t really see it going anywhere since it doesn’t connect to the other social network protocols. Then again, it looks like it might have very strong Facebook and Instagram integration, so maybe there something workable.
Summary findings at this point… there’s a lot of promise relative to open source distributed social networking, but they need to a) have much better web interfaces, b) make it much simpler to setup and run instances, c) have rock solid mobile clients. At this time, none of the platforms check all the boxes. I think if WordPress/Buddy gets integration with the popular distributed social networking protocols, we’d really have something to work with. My guess though… by the time that happens Zuckerburg will see the handwriting on the wall and come out with a paid Facebook plan that has a reasonable privacy policy. Mean time, I’ll keep looking.
