Ask HN: do you use App.net? It started good, and there were interesting people in the platform. Now it doesn't seem very active. Do you use it? |
Ask HN: do you use App.net? It started good, and there were interesting people in the platform. Now it doesn't seem very active. Do you use it? |
I guess the experiment failed, and free-to-play wins out.
I still support the service and its goals, and hope it will still be around the next time Twitter does something user-hostile so there's an alternative for people to consider.
even going to their about page (https://app.net/about/) doesn't really explain anything. there are no screen shots, only common buzzy worded language, no depth of explanation on benefits of using the product.
Helping me "get it" lands at the feet of App.net. But a mass of corporaty buzzwords isn't going to fix that. Someone else mentioned the mistake of directing users to the Alpha app. Yup, it's just a paid version of Twitter, I guess. And App.net did nothing to dissuade me of that idea. Nothing in their pitch, nothing in the API docs (that I saw) indicated to me that there was more to do than post short pieces of text. Telling me it's a "platform" is not useful. Pointing me to an API and saying "here, we have user storage!", "over here we have a picture API", now those kinds of things would be useful and would persuade me that it's not just paid Twitter.
But if you’ve heard of App.net at all, you probably equate it with a Twitter clone. It’s not.... “App.net is a social platform,” says the company’s founder and CEO Dalton Caldwell. “It’s your passport to a social network of great applications. I’m trying to get the idea across that you can bring your data with you from all these different applications.”
www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/08/the-great-app-net-mistake/
I have not been back.
Honestly, who cares about an API that lets you post, or read messages if there's nobody on the other side that will read your messages? it doesn't matter if I can make 1 billion calls a day.
There's some neat Dropbox-like apps that make use of the API, but I don't know enough people who use App.net to give the social features an edge over Dropbox's ubiquity.
Heck, even services backed by a web giant like Google are not immune either, they can always decide to shut it down like they did with many of their services.
If I'm motivated to move away from existing social networks for any reason, it's because they are centralized...
The fact that app.net is/was pay-to-play doesn't eliminate the issues of free-to-play at all: it still has the same issues (and moreover: less virality) but now I'm paying for them.
As far as liking third party clients goes, that's the sort of thing I'm getting at when I say that App.net doesn't solve what I see as the root problem with Twitter. Not liking third-party clients is just a symptom of centralization, and App.net just happens to solve this one symptom without addressing the root problem.
Why is centralization a fundamental problem?
Centralization is a problem because it gives a single entity total control. That's why Twitter was able to screw with third-party clients in the first place, and why it mattered that they did it. Take e-mail as a counterexample: Google, for example, couldn't really screw with third-party e-mail clients, and even if they did, people who want to use third-party clients can just switch to a provider that isn't stupid.
App.net retains all of this control. They merely promise not to abuse it. I'd much rather not have to trust anyone's promises. Even if they remain completely honest, their idea of abuse may not match my own.