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Look, MikeeUSA:

I don't like systemd. I even go to some lengths to have a Debian running without. But every time I see your dirty drivel, I feel the urge of embracing systemd [1] [2] [3], just to avoid being associated with you.

One could get the impression that you are a pro-systemd false-flag operation except... I think you're just an idiot. One way or the other, I won't give up my stance just because of you.

[1] https://twitter.com/zacchiro/s...
[2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2015/...
[3] https://identi.ca/cwebber/note...

1. What sites are out there that implement OStatus? I know of

http://rstat.us/
http://identi.ca/
http://status.net/

To start with, every site running StatusNet implements it. Here are a few lists of independent StatusNet sites:

• List of Independent StatusNet Instances
• List of Federated Users
• Another list of StatusNet sites, organised topically, also with links to some other lists

There's also an OStatus plug-in for WordPress, a set of OStatus-bridge apps for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

And there are plenty of other sites/platforms that support enough parts of the OStatus stack to be useful (like PuSH, which is the part that allows you to `follow' people on other sites); e.g.: even if your blog-platform doesn't support PuSH, you can run it through FeedBurner and that will make it PuSH-enabled (which is how I get notices from mimiandeunice.com in my StatusNet timeline, for example).

There are probably others that I haven't listed or that I don't know about; when I find new OStatus-related things, I bookmark them on my OStatus-compatible microblog.

2. What good and complete tutorials are there for implementing OSTatus? The ones I tried broke my brain. I want less theory and words, at least initially, and more (pseudo) code. Let's start simple: What do I need to do to make my CMS "folllowable" from the three sites above, for example?

Start with `How to OStatus-enable Your Application'.

1. What sites are out there that implement OStatus? I know of

http://rstat.us/
http://identi.ca/
http://status.net/

2. What good and complete tutorials are there for implementing OSTatus? The ones I tried broke my brain. I want less theory and words, at least initially, and more (pseudo) code. Let's start simple: What do I need to do to make my CMS "folllowable" from the three sites above, for example? Too much theory makes me impatient, I need something simple that works and which I can enhance/refactor. So far, I'm stumped. Help? Any other ideas?

One thing is sure, Twitter has never been anything but shit, same for facebook, and app.net is just another dead end, too. So let's skip to the non-bullshit part, even though it's tedious and scary (certainly for me ^^), and get to the actual protocols that are not just a waste of time...

Why shouldn't [blogging or forum software of choice] support OStatus? Why should you not be able to "follow" posters, threads, categories or tags -- ? And if OStatus isn't good enough for that, what is, or how can we make it? I say "we", though I'm a shitty coder, but you get the idea.

Some do interoperate; my instance of StatusNet sent and received messages from Identi.ca just fine.

The problem is that no one is there, and thsoe who were, left. Compare:

http://identi.ca/timbl with https://twitter.com/timberners_lee

i think [diaspora's] data model gives advantage to the node owners, which patch their nodes to store everything they can get

There's no way around that--once you give your information to someone, they have it. Either you trust them with it, or you don't. If you don't trust someone to keep your secrets, don't tell them; i.e.: keep your secrets to yourself--run your own node.

maybe BuddyCloud?

How about StatusNet? It's what runs identi.ca, all of the various status.net sites, all of the sites collected in this guy's list, and a whole bunch of sites probably not in that list. I've got several different StatusNet sites I run, for example.

identi.ca has been around for years if you want an alternative to Twitter, no need to to hope or wait for it to start.

They were destroyed by a former WikiLeaks employee who left with them, then destroyed the key. Yes, somehow there wasn't a backup of the documents or key (or at least one of the two).

I'm not sure how much we can trust Domscheit-Berg and OpenLeaks. Check their News page (latest 26 Jan 2011, SSL cert expired months ago), Identi.ca (5 months ago), Blog (29 Jan 2011, quote: "Right now we are working on extending our infrastructure and setting it up for testing with our alpha users group. The 1.430 Euro we received as donations in December and January will help us to do so. We will spend this money to help cover infrastructure costs e.g. SSL certificates").

Also Thompson-Reuters isn't a terrific source when it comes to 'piracy'/'hacking' stories so here's an alternative to the rawstory.com link:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/daniel-domscheit-berg/

Finally, Identica can pick up some steam!

(The geeks' version of Twitter, if you don't already know.)

Anybody know if identi.ca has retweets? (Re-identica's?)

Identica is Linux to Twitter's Windows, by the way.

I can back up the claim that the CLI is making a huge come back. I run a feed on twitter and identi.ca called @climagic that is becoming very popular. I think that people are trying to find ways to do the things that they need to do in GUIs and when it can't be done, they find that it is easier to access and manipulate your data using Unix command line tools in very efficient ways. Does that mean that its great for everything? No of course not, I'll admit that I use the GUI for many things too, in fact, I do graphical work in Blender and Inkscape and listen to music in Pandora and do my browsing in Firefox because it works well for me, but in many places, I can get my work done using the CLI and still wow people with iPhones and Androids in 2011.

Luckily there are alternatives like http://identi.ca/ . Great joy for developers (lots of api access), and it's distributed, so they cant pull stunts like the ones twitter has been doing lately. Also, it can sync with twitter so you only have to type all your microblogs just once.

Diaspora, despite the rocky start, seems to be the most active project working on this. I hope it thrives.

*cough* Appleseed, StatusNet/Identica (which is an official StatusNet instance on the bleeding edge, popular among open-source types like myself).

Not to forget that StatusNet is one of the many social networks that supports the OStatus protocol, a way to follow people on different networks and websites.

Time has apparently named Mark Zuckerberg the "Person of the Year". You know who else was once a Time "Person of the Year"? Hitler, in 1938.

http://identi.ca/notice/60474367

This is probably a good time to mention the Linuxy, freeish, openish alternative to Twitter:

http://identi.ca/

And if you don't like Identi.ca, create your own microblogging system with StatusNet:

http://status.net/

Google does have stupid geniuses too

To understand why it failed you must understand what is wave : groupware

Nat was in town, and he stopped by to say hi and chat, and he said, "So we've got this big pile of code we're going to release, and we're going to build an open source wave/groupware system! It's going to be awesome!"

And I said, "Jesus Mother of Fuck, what are you thinking! Do not strap the 'Groupware' albatross around your neck! That's what killed Netscape, are you insane?" He looked at me like I'd just kicked his puppy.

read more on jwz
http://jwz.livejournal.com/444651.html and more http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

and it was written in an "enterprise language" like cobol err Java and in gwt , they practically
murdered java script with that crap and the format for transfering wave data :xml documents
hint it looks more like exchange system and if you wonder why it failed? think sharepoint
and it was addopted by eterprise type systems like : novel , sap and that was the target i think
people who receive messages into a big inbox and where they should reply to support messages for example

i will install pygowave http://pygowave.net/ at my work place http://reea.net/
and i think it will make a a good platform for collaboration : think one big #irc channel where documents and messages can be shared (but from browser) , if i think well maybe skype is better on that

ps: reinventing the mail system is a bad idea when you already have ....gmail (that sucks too but for that i will write another episode) and it was a bad idea that i was alone in my wave
i was expecting something like facebook with hundreds of friends and invites and lot's of spam from the apps but it was just an empty enterprise exchange type system

funny shnitz this is what google wave https://wave.google.com/wave/?pli=1 told me today in my inbox
https://wave.google.com/wave/?pli=1
What do you want to master? I want an Free as in freedom wave
something like http://identi.ca/ alternative for propietary twitter system
in fact you can contact me on the pygowave , it's open it's free and you don't need an invite
you just join the system
mariuz@pygowave.net

I believe Sir is speaking of StatusNet and identi.ca.

I don' use twitter in any way, but I think I saw it's usefulness during the protests in Iran.

Imagine Twitter with Free code and a non-profit, donations based model. Surely humankind could set that up, everyone paying what they can. It should work, IMO. I'd pay some :s, just as soon as I can muster any income and a bank account. I expect the finances being open and any monetary need (for hosting or whatever) addressed swiftly by the haves of the community.

Incidentally, half the work has all ready been done: http://identi.ca/ and http://status.net/

There already is. It's called StatusNet, and one seemingly popular (meaning, the one I know if) implementation is Identi.ca.

As Goethe once said: Sorry for writing this long letter, I didn't have time for a shorter one.

What about Identica as an alternative to Twitter. The wiki lists some interesting features.

If you want the free-software alternative to Twitter, check out identi.ca. It is similar to Twitter, but explicitly designed to make sure you can control your own destiny. From their FAQ:

The goal here is autonomy -- you deserve the right to manage your own on-line presence. If you don't like how Identi.ca works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).

Sadly, it continues the meme of inventing new jargon for "update". Just as a Twitter update is a "tweet", an ident.ca update is a "dent". :-/

steveha

If you want the free-software alternative to Twitter, check out identi.ca. It is similar to Twitter, but explicitly designed to make sure you can control your own destiny. From their FAQ:

The goal here is autonomy -- you deserve the right to manage your own on-line presence. If you don't like how Identi.ca works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).

Sadly, it continues the meme of inventing new jargon for "update". Just as a Twitter update is a "tweet", an ident.ca update is a "dent". :-/

steveha

StatusNet is a neat platform that runs Identica, a twitter alternative. It's free as in freedom (GNU AGPL), and it has pretty much every feature twitter has and more. You can view conversations people have instead of searching for hours for who-responded-to-what-and-how-many-people-were-involved. You can customize the theme and upload files, too! There's lots of other optional features you can use as well, and it has a similar API to twitter, so lots of applications already support it. Try it out and see if it works for you; you can even chose where it's hosted!

It's all moot anyhow: the Software Freedom Law Center never replied to my
  request about the software patent thing. I suppose they still might; it's
  only been a few days, but for some reason, I fully expect to never hear from
  them.

Other people have covered other points, so I'm just going to talk about the SFLC. It sounds like you haven't communicated with them before, so please cut them some slack. Just yesterday Bradley Kuhn dented:

FLOSS ppls: !sflc is a charity w/ limited resources. It can take up to a week for us to answer general contact email. Pls give us a break!

they claimed that it never was released under the LGPL. They tried some silly technicality where they said it was only released under the LGPL under some other terms. The LGPL itself clearly says any added terms can be removed, but they insisted it couldn't.

As you point out, the LGPL 2.1 (to pick an older version of the LGPL) states:

You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.

Wikipedia's blurb on the licensing problem states:

the authors claimed Ext was available under an LGPL license as long as you "plan to use Ext in a personal, educational or non-profit manner" or "in an open source project that precludes using non-open source software" or "are using Ext in a commercial application that is not a software development library or toolkit".

Obviously, not everyone believes that this stance is legally defensible. As you state,

I strongly believe they are wrong about the "never being under LGPL" thing, but we weren't going to be wasting time dealing with lawyers and fighting them.

Next time, toss the question over to the Software Freedom Law Center. Even if you personally don't want to go forward with the issue, I feel like the SFLC is great at trying to resolve questions like this so that developers can just write code and leave the legal issues for the lawyers. They're really gung-ho about dealing with license violators and are dedicated to helping clear up licensing issues.

Dude, I am so going to Tweet thi....
I am so going to Dent this!

http://identi.ca/ seems to be a centralized service too, which can be easily blocked. What's point someone switching from twitter here?

Indeed twitter's centralised service is what makes it such a problem.
Personally I use http://identi.ca/

It's based on laconica, is free software and is federated. eg. http://army.twit.tv/

I'm at http://identi.ca/tdobson and this downtime is not causing me any problems! :)

Indeed twitter's centralised service is what makes it such a problem.
Personally I use http://identi.ca/

It's based on laconica, is free software and is federated. eg. http://army.twit.tv/

I'm at http://identi.ca/tdobson and this downtime is not causing me any problems! :)

If we are talking about replacing tomboy with gnote, we need to have some data migration that is more automatic that 'open terminal, cp .tomboy .gnote'.

Your wish is granted: See the Gnote developer's blog.

Keep in mind that gnote is very, very young. It's come a long way in a short time. I don't think we have too long to wait before it hits feature parity with Tomboy.

And this is exactly why I recently switched to http://identi.ca/ which is a FOSS/public domain version of twitter that an increasing number of geeks are switching to. Twitter is *so* five minutes ago.

Debian is welcoming students once again this year. I was a 2008 GSoC student at Debian and am returning this year to admin the GSoC program at Debian. I had a very exciting experience, participating in meetups with a lot of Debian developers all over Europe and I recommend you to apply at Debian to share this experience.

We have a huge range of project possibilities, from our famous packaging system (.deb ftw) to debian-specific developer tools and infrastructure (want to work on our multi-arch distributed build farm ?) or hardware support (because Debian runs everywhere, from tiny ARM devices to country-wide computing grids). We have you all covered.

Remember that Debian and its derivatives are the largest group of Linux distributions in the world. That's a huge community you'll be working with, and I should say, an amazing concentration of talent.

If you are interested, visit: http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc, join us on IRC on: #debian-soc on irc.debian.org or follow us on twitter of identi.ca (DebianGSoC).

Also, see our mailing-list announcement for more pratical information.

There is already an OSS platform for this, its called laconica, there is a public deployment on http://identi.ca/

I doubt most people know what IP addresses are, much less a web host.

Now, if someone wanted to make something like http://identi.ca/ (the code: http://laconi.ca/), it might be slightly better.

There's been an open-source, federated alternative to Twitter for some time.

http://identi.ca/
http://laconi.ca/trac/

Why would I want to use yet another Google service that might be discontinued at any time?

Especially with the open source laconica powering http://identi.ca/ and Google's Jaiku going Open Source. I think they'll exist, but yeah, I guess it costs money to run servers! People paid for LJ accounts though, didn't they?

Sure there were alternatives, but they were all either patent-encumbered, or hard to deploy, or too complex to easily develop for.

Or they came too late or didn't survive the competitor's marketing onslaught. Remember the power of inertia.

Speaking of Twitter, there are alternatives, and there are better architectures