Movim: A social network on XMPP

Movim: A social network on XMPP(movim.eu)

80 points by Moyamo 10 years ago | 35 comments

erikb 10 years ago |

The question with social networks are never technical. As you can see by nearly all real life examples, the technology can suck, can exploit, can be this or that engine/framework/language. What matters is who is in there. If you build a social network based on a technology you will never achieve a significant size, especially if you choose a chat platform that is less and less often used.

Just make it work and then get influencers to use and talk about it. That's how you win with a social network. Or if you care about reasonable income without winning big scale then go the Hipchat way and integerate well with some special usecase (like they integrate with all the other Atlassian products and development tools).

SwellJoe 10 years ago | |

Is XMPP "less and less often used"? I just started using it seriously relatively recently. It's quite nice and there are multiple excellent open server implementations, and I've been thinking on ways to integrate it into some of my own projects. I don't really follow trends in this area, so I don't know what people are doing with it...I do know that Facebook and Google have abandoned XMPP, but that's to be expected. They want to own their users, and they have enough power to do so, regardless of the ethics of the question.

erikb 10 years ago | | |

It's a technology that you need to be rather firm in to use it. There are many tools, but often they are a little "hacky" to non programmers. That's why it gets more and more replaced by the FB chats, Whatsapps, Skypes, and Snapchats of this world. The same goes for email. Email will die a slow death. Maybe even your children can still build a career out of email know-how. But it's more and more replaced by other technologies. Just look at China were people all didn't know the internet in its youth. The first contact to internet most of the Mainland Chinese had was with mobile solutions like QQ (their ICQ copycat). For them email is like a harder way to do the same thing that you could do just as well with Wechat/QQ. So even the most serious of corps in China have Wechat/QQ support and phone, but they might not even have an email support. This will come to us, too. Just slower because people know email already.

sethhochberg 10 years ago | | |

At my day job we recently migrated away from XMPP for our internal chat rooms and IM (all on Slack now). XMPP worked fine, but, its one less service for us to maintain ourselves and everybody using a more consistent client by default instead of the mix of Adium / Trillian / Pidgin / etc has been nice from a feature standpoint. I think many other companies are in the same boat, based on Slack and Hipchat and the other chat-as-a-service providers having huge growth.

striking 10 years ago |

Unfortunately the AGPL licensing basically guarantees no other social network will be able to integrate with this one using the stock libraries. Which is a shame.

It seems like a cool idea for a project, certainly, but it's more of a tech demo than a social network because it doesn't have users yet.

I am trying it now, though. And I'll edit this post (or reply to it) with my findings.

EDIT 1: Requires a password instead of public key auth. Will someone get it right, ever?

EDIT 2: And as quickly as it began, it ends. There's no one for me to talk to, really. There are some post lists (the Comics community is actually the biggest, to which pr0n is second) and those are somewhat interesting (except for the fact that all the comics are in French except for CommitStrip, which is ordinarily in French but has an English translation).

The News tab is filled with Buzzfeed-esque articles, rather than being prepopulated with something sensible like Slashdot or HN or Science News (know your audience!).

Looking at most of the public profiles, if they've posted anything to their feeds, it'll be something like "test" and it'll have been posted in April of this year (so it's not worth sending them a contact request in all likelihood).

EDIT 3: I made first contact with a user named "Jake", in a mailing thread. And I got one message back from him. And that seems to be the end of that.

And the end of this.

I hope that a reader could see that I really, really tried to make it work, short of inviting my friends to use it (we already have communication platforms, I'm definitely not going to be able to convince them :)

Too bad.

EDIT 4: Jake and I are having a conversation in chat, actually. We can agree that the design work is impeccable, and that a lot of the details behind the network are charming. He notes, however, that these new platforms "don't put enough effort into community engagement".

EDIT 5 (last): I had a genuinely human experience on a "distributed social network". It's possible if you try hard enough, you just have to power through all of the hurdles. With some algorithmic optimization I'm sure this project could live to see mainstream use. If anyone else is up for a conversation about this, I'm striking@movim.eu.

captainmuon 10 years ago |

Instead of the AGPL (which forces users of the code to share their modifications, like the GPL), I'd rather see a license that requires you to offer federation (but doesn't put any other restrictions on you).

With federation I mean that any other service which uses parts of this code should have to offer interoperability with this service. Like email, you can have your account on one server and still write to your friends on a different one.

I wouldn't put other restrictions on the code. I don't care much about having the code copyleft, because the thing that is hard and we need to protect here is not the code, but the social network.

Wouldn't it be great if we had a bunch of social networks (can be closed source as far as I'm concerned) competing to be the best "host" (most features, best UX, free/premium, ...), but all able to talk to each other?

edhelas 10 years ago | |

Hi, thanks for your feedback, I've created an issue on Github regarding the AGPL licence https://github.com/edhelas/movim/issues/43 :)

captainmuon 10 years ago | | |

Thanks for reading and considering me feedback :-), much appreciated.

And don't get me wrong, generally, I'm pro (A)GPL and copyleft. But for a social network kind of project one might have to think about tradeoffs to get the neccessary adoption.

reitanqild 10 years ago | | |

Thanks, much appreciated.

As much as I support every coders right to choose his license for his work created on his own time I think AGPL prevents a lot of good use cases.

fsiefken 10 years ago |

So if I understand correctly this network is distributed but not anonymous like for example Twister is. So I can see my feed in atom/rss and chat with all my contacts. This means it should be compatible with something like thunderbird or newsbeuter/mcabber. Almost exactly what we need! I cannot save my locality it seems. my movim id: fsiefken@lightwitch.org my movim feed: https://nl.movim.eu/?q=feed&f=fsiefken@lightwitch.org

Animats 10 years ago |

Somebody needs to figure out a way to get this, or Diaspora, or something, going. Setting up servers for the Ivy League schools, and pre-populating them with the student directories, would be a good start. Worked for Facebook.

The problem with scaling any social network is "asshole amplification", or how to design it so a few people can't ruin it for everybody. That's hard to do in a distributed system, especially if you're promoting anonymity. (Yes, IRC channel kick bots sort of worked.) I don't see how Movim addresses that.

fra 10 years ago |

Looks like a great app to port to Sanstorm.io!

OJFord 10 years ago |

It seems like the selling point here is supposed tight and seamless integration with a bunch of things that "millions of people" use for the last "several years".

But once you register and login (tough, because it doesn't tell you on registration what your "email address" is - it's the user you entered + '@movim.eu') .. now what? Where is that? How do I use the network without being on movim.eu?

It seems totally unclear how to do anything promised. Maybe it's in the Wiki, but, really..?

reitanqild 10 years ago |

Trying it out, -is there any hn groups there?

I am reiqildtan@movim.eu I think.

striking 10 years ago | |

I added you, I'm striking@movim.eu. Let's see what happens, I guess?

DrJokepu 10 years ago |

It's PostgreSQL (or simply Postgres), not PostGreSQL.

anonbanker 10 years ago |

This is fantastic. Signed up.