I'm very pleased to see this launch, but have one feature request - and I'm posting it here because it's a request I would make to anyone doing event software.
Please have open feeds in iCal format for your site, including one that lets people get all public data.
This will make the data on your website so much more reusable and useful.
And definetly iCal - it's so popular, and most personal calendars can even import it directly.
Yes, it's odd text format is a pain, but there are libraries in almost every language you can use.
Mobilizon has iCal export for a single event, but not for all public events on the site. (I did have a Mastodon chat with them about this but can't find their replies now)
Wow that's pretty ambitious, and pretty relevant for me right now. I build models, and so used to frequent forums to post to build threads detailing what I'd done with photos, sometimes a Word doc, video, and always some plain text.
Problem with the forums is that they're dated. It's easy enough to find old content because search is usually pretty ok. Who owns content is still not a solved thing though. A forum in Germany insists you upload your IP to their servers so that your photos don't disappear over time. Other forums let me host my hosts on my own web site with a link.
Facebook of course is godawful. Everybody is there, so everybody posts there. Unforunately you cannot find old stuff you know is there. Photos aren't annotated, comments aren't searcheable, stuff just disappears into a rabbit hole. Here today, gone tomorrow. Facebook's content is ephemeral, so it's groups are the worst possible forum replacement.
And from what I can tell (I can't start my own group to assess features) Mobilizon doesn't add anything to improve on what Facebook already does.
What's needed is an organic heirarchical taxonomy where you're persented with a top-level list of options. Say for instance manufacturers. You pick one, and are given a list of models. Pick one of those and you see all models in the repository for that make/model. Lastly (in my contrived example) you might choose your favourite model maker to further narrow that list, or a date, country or whatever.
This is not hard to build (modellers are pretty hardcore about what they build, and so would not hesitate to add the meta data needed to drive this), and I've been toying with a usable UI for it for some time. Maybe I should post up a proof of concept somewhere...
Just yesterday I was thinking about some sort of social network where every piece of content is required to link to at least one Wikidata item, OpenStreetMap node, etc. With the right tooling this would get you the "organic hierarchical taxonomy".
I thought it would be an interesting way to make sure the conversations are actually ABOUT something. And it would hopefully encourage contributions to those sorts of open data projects.
Arguably. Forums have been supplanted by Facebook groups. Mobilizon seeks to do the same to Facebook. I can't create a group so I cannot definitively say anything about it. You may very well be right.
Mobilizon is intended to put events on the activitypub protocol. In that sense, it's a replacement for a slice of Facebook. I wouldn't say it's a replacement for all of Facebook.
Yeah, I had the same reaction. Was that parent comment posted in the right thread? Mobilizon is about events and that comment seems to have nothing to do with the link.
Because it's unweidly. Too verbose. A post is often no more than a sentence or less with a photo.Each comment on an entry would have to be another blog post with it's own attached/linked media. Also tag clouds lack structure. It's difficult to search across blogs (which would delinieate users). You could shoehorn it in, but the blog solution is nothing close to ideal.
That looks amazing! From its look it seems a lot like it'd be a replacement for Meetup/Eventbrite, which is something I've been waiting for for a while.
Lots of advanced warning, lots of emails, lots of inperson reminders, etc.
For me, I ended up sending multiple emails and killing the group. (I'm not paying meetup "half price" for an essentially useless service. (Ok, the only thing it holds is membership data.. but they expect you to pay for zoom to hold your meetups [which those don't work])
I'm about 2 hours into setting up an Mobilizon instance for outdoor socially distant activities, but running into problems [1] and at the end of the day federation isn't important to me and I'd prefer the learning opportunity and flexibility of building my own [2].
Curious if any HNers in the PNW region might use such a service to pod up for outdoor socially distant activities (hiking, wilderness cleanup, kayaking, perhaps camping/backpacking/biking, etc). I moved here just pre-COVID, and quarantine, my introverted nature, lack of FB, and tendency to enjoy things that don't involve lots of people being around has left me without as much of a do-things-with group as I might like.
[1] I'm 2+ hours into provisioning/setup, and unfortunately the yarn install keeps hanging/crashing on the $5 digital ocean droplet I provisioned for this, and at the end of the day I'd prefer to have full knowledge and control over the stack. Additionally, for me federation isn't important, all I want is an open architecture that respects privacy.
[2] To keep things simple for myself and users, it wouldn't be federated, instead there would be a single domain I manage that hosts the events. The architecture would of course be open source, and my goal would be to make the entire project be available as some sort of { docker image / kubernetes cluster / DO App / heroku thing / something } such that anyone can easily launch their own instance without needing to dedicate 2+ hours to the process, and more importantly any user can find activities to join in on without needing to set up an account/provide email/etc.
Once the docker installation is documented, it should take considerably less time to self-host.
This is for `yarn build`, but perhaps it applies to `yarn install` as well: there's a note in the documentation that says compiling the front-end requires 2gb of RAM. You'll need to set it to use only 1gb RAM to accommodate the $5 droplet's specs via `NODE_BUILD_MEMORY=1024 yarn build`
As for the technology & stack, most of the code is from Pleroma, essentially a lightweight Elixir/Phoenix version of Mastodon, with Vue for the frontend. If there's any part of the architecture that's closed, the project would highly appreciate raising an issue, as it wishes to be a fully libre project.
Well, this could be because you are running out of memory, which results in the yarn build process getting killed. The simplest solution is to enable "swap" in your instance by using the following commands:
Strongly agree! I love everything framasoft is doing. It's mana for the internet.
It's also a great way to create a sense of perspective for how pro-social (or not) the frightful five are. You would never see Microsoft, or Apple, or Google etc bother to support open protocols or work to flush them out so that events, photos, tweeting, and all the major social activities are put on a foundation of open and interoperable protocols that anyone can use. They certainly could have moved in that direction if they wanted to, but they just haven't wanted to. And while I appreciate for framasoft for what they're doing at face value, on an entirely different level I appreciate the contrast between their projects and the projects of the F5.
"Mobilizon is designed so that you can follow the news of a group, but not of an individual : it is impossible to follow a single profile. In Mobilizon, profiles have no « wall », « thread » or « story » : only groups can publish posts. The goal is to get rid of the self-promotional reflexes where we stage our lives to be the person at the center of our followers. With Mobilizon, it is not the ego but the collective that counts."""
I understand the motivation but it leaves me with the strange sensation of exchanging one kind of centralization with another. It doesn't click with me.
Seeing that a significant portion of activists are "activists" for purely reasons feeding their own ego and self worth, I see this as a net win for weeding such people out. That said, if this does catch on, you can probably expect such people to start signing their content even if the system specifically doesn't support it.
As I understand, it's a forum. Some forums allow you to see posts made by certain user, just mobilizon doesn't. Like ycombinator is not your personal blog, but a group, to which you can contribute.
Looks like they self-host their source code too: https://framagit.org/framasoft/mobilizon/ It appears to be developed in some language called "Euphoria"?? That's such a strange choice and is going to seriously limit contributions from other developers.
Mobilizon is written in Elixir because it is based on Pleroma, a Mastodon-compatible/Mastodon-alternative server for the Fediverse. Elixir isn't one of the most popular langs out there, but it is far from being a "niche" language.
Okay that was a lot of words. Maybe I should explain for those less familiar:
Users on the Fediverse can interact without being aware of the fact that their servers are running completely different software. While Fediverse members such as Mastodon take inspiration from Twitter, others have different focuses: Peertube is YouTube inspired, Pixelfed is Instagram-inspired, and some like Pleroma are kinda doing their own thing imo.
I personally prefer Pleroma to Mastodon, as evidenced from my bio; it's lightweight, easier to set up, and has a great variety of first- and third-party front-ends (including a lightly-modified version of the Mastodon front-end and a Gopher-accessible one).
It appears that Mobilizon devs wanted to create a new Fediverse server with a different focus: something that warranted writing a back-end based on Pleroma instead of just creating a new Pleroma front-end. Basing off Pleroma was a good choice because unlike Mastodon, Pleroma is lightweight enough to run off a singe-board computer like a Raspberry Pi. Being written in Elixir definitely has a lot to do with this.
That's very interesting. Does it mean that any Fediverse account can interact with any Mobilizon instance ? Or is the Mobilizon-space split from the Fediverse-space
Interaction should be possible if the necessary APIs are implemented. Pleroma, Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfed, etc. can already all interact with each other very well; just a few minutes ago, I was able to comment [0] [1] on a Peertube video of a Downfall parody from my Pleroma account and have both show up in my timeline. Mobilizon should be no different; If you follow a Mobilizon user from your Pleroma/Mastodon/etc. account, their posts should appear in your timeline as if they were Pleroma/Mastodon/etc. posts.
This looks fantastic and I like the focus! I am not sure if it's so great to have the getting-started info spread out over multiple site - joinmobilizon.org and mobilizon.org - though
I think this type of "someone in the group runs an instance" type deal will become more and more frequent.
Each family/community will have a "tech guy" or two who manages this type of thing, maybe on an offline device, and everyone chips in a couple satoshi per year for the hardware and network.
If you store your data in something easy like text files, you can even have several redundant devices, all for the price of a couple raspberry pis.
Imagine a raspberry pi with a terabyte of storage attached. Certainly that's enough for a "Familybook" of your closest people.
This is the type of device I am developing for today. I'm writing the simplest HTML possible, always no-JS friendly, using the most common interfaces supported by the most common web servers, and completely portable with just a zip file of text files. :)
People dislike Facebook and other centralized platforms not because they're centralized per-se, but because the user experience is terrible (due to mismatched incentives - these platforms make money off ads, so their only objective is to make you engage with the ads as much as possible).
The solution is a platform that doesn't have these mismatched incentives (either paid for, ran by donations, etc) but that otherwise has the user experience of the mainsteam platforms.
This reads like a tech demo where the tech and decentralization is the selling point, but the truth is, the masses don't know/care about that and rightfully so. The same applies to Mastodon and similar projects.
I don't think the point is to replace Facebook&Co though. It is specifically a tool developped for political activists. Everybody can use it of course, it is free software. Given that context the decentralization feature is most definitively a crucial feature.
And even more broadly, the whole point of Framasoft is to offer tools to use the internet in a decentralized way. This is not limited to this particular tool, they have many other project. All offering an inferior user experience than the existing solutions by the usual FAANG giants of course but again the point is decentralization and freedom.
Exactly this. From one viewpoint, https://pad.riseup.net/ is just a worse version of Google Docs, and most people will never use it. From another, it's a vital service for preserving the anonymity and security of activists, and comparisons to Google Docs are moot.
In other words, these tools quite effectively solve the pain of a small but clearly-defined group of people - turns out this approach is useful beyond the startup world!
> The solution is a platform that doesn't have these mismatched incentives (either paid for, ran by donations, etc) but that otherwise has the user experience of the mainsteam platforms.
The argument by people in favor of this stuff is that federated technologies best avoid and resist those mismatched incentives, because any centralized gatekeeper, not matter how benevolently founded, always has the temptation to ignore it's charter and become a rentier.
Think about the recent .org debacle, or even the Mondragon Corporation employing non-member labor.
> The solution is a platform that doesn't have these mismatched incentives (either paid for, ran by donations, etc) but that otherwise has the user experience of the mainsteam platforms.
Isn't it kind of inevitable that those incentives manifest themselves? A company can run a centralized platform, do a good job of it, then get bought out for millions(if not billions) by a large corporation and redesigned to maximize ad revenue and the egos of those looking for greater job titles. This isn't exactly unheard of. Decentralization would supposedly section this kind of thing off if it even happens at all.
You're right that the average person doesn't care about decentralization, let alone understand it. That's fine. Before Facebook, people used forums supported by vBulletin, and those were effectively "decentralized" in the sense that they weren't all owned by the same entity. The only difference was that there wasn't sharing of data between 2 or more web forums, like there could be with something that supports ActivityPub or the like.
It seems Mobilizon invested a great deal in the usability of this tool.
(Not specifically the visual design, but the ease of use and the matching of user needs).
I've seen projects advertising decentralization as the main selling point. Mobilizon seems to also push strong on the user experience, and I'm glad they do.
One of the main things keeping me on Facebook is fear of missing out on events. This gives people who are not on Facebook a chance to stay in the loop.
> People dislike Facebook and other centralized platforms not because they're centralized per-se, but because the user experience is terrible
I'm not sure I agree here. My anecdote is that the experience of Facebook events is superb. People are prompted to fill in pretty good basic information, can discuss arrangements on the "wall", and I'm reminded about my attendance before the event multiple times. The invites also come into a place where I already spend a fair bit of time. I don't know anyone who makes events outside of Facebook within my circle of friends.
> This reads like a tech demo where the tech and decentralization is the selling point, but the truth is, the masses don't know/care about that and rightfully so. The same applies to Mastodon and similar projects.
I agree with this. Until the mainstream narrative realises that giving away all of our personal info is a faux pas, engaging with platforms like this is limited to activists and those who have an incentive for privacy.
> We do not want to reproduce the toxicity of Facebook. Surveillance capitalism uses the mechanisms of the attention economy to lock up our time, capture our behaviour and impose advertising on us.
> Mobilizon does not depend on such a business model: this is an opportunity to try to do better, by doing things differently.
Nice. But I'm curious how they deal with the network effect. I.e., how do they motivate event organizers to post their events on this platform too? And how do I convince my friends to RSVP on this platform so I can see where they are going?
> how do they motivate event organizers to post their events on this platform too
In theory, the event organizers would have their own instance and they would post the events directly onto that. This would make sense for organizations with an existing technology infrastructure.
Mastodon, using the same underlying ActivityPub has several "cross posting" solutions mostly to- and fro twitter. As does pixelfed (the instagram for the fediverse) to and from instagram.
I can only imagine that there will be some way to cross-post to facebook, meetup or EventBrite, somewhere down the line. Even if done by external parties. Especially facebook because a lot of your audience may be there already. And to many organizers "getting enough people to attend" is probably more important than being fully decentralised and privacy friendly.
Got an install up and running on Arch but it required a fair amount of divergence from the installation instructions. (I'll try and whip up a list of what was different later.)
What is Mobilizon's policy on deplatforming, censorship, etc. How will they protect against owner/employee bias? I ask this because Mastodon's founders also pitched a federated tool to the world but then turned out to be very much the same authoritarian pro-censorship actor as the centralized platform we'd all like to get away from.
My understanding is that the project founder and/or leads are pursuing a campaign to pressure all instances to not peer with instances on their political blacklist, and adding those who refuse to their peering demands to the blacklist. In effect the “fediverse” that is claimed as a benefit is in name only. I’m not sure what benefit the project offers anymore over centralized platforms since it is becoming the same thing as a result.
The project "leads" or owners can only choose what happens to their own instances! If they choose not to interact with instances they disagree with, they should be allowed to do that; after all, they are hosting and administering their instances.
Now if you create your own instance you can interact with every instance but they might not want to interact with yours.
I don't understand how this makes it more centralised, please explain further. If anything, as an instance admin I would very much like to keep the freedom to choose with whom I want to interact with.
The fediverse currently is also quite different than e.g. the email ecosystem. While we have big providers like GMail and Outlook there, companies have not really ventured into Mastodon yet. Instances like mastodon.social are run and moderated mostly by volunteers. So while the voice of mastodons creators might be influential, it really shouldn't pose a threat to you or your instance.
Each instance is free to federate or not with every other instance. You have every right to post what you want, but there's no requirement for other people to listen.
There exist a number of self-described free speech extremist instances, and moderated instances that only blacklist spammers like bot servers. There also exist instances that will blacklist servers with high levels of hate speech. You can pick or create an instance that meets your wants and needs, but other instances can exercise their freedom of association and choose not to federate with you.
Things on the fediverse are also less black-and-white than you're portraying them. Some instances will prevent one instance's posts from showing up in the default public timeline of the whole known network, but will still federate with them; users will still be able to follow or be followed by members of the filtered instance normally.
Users on Mastodon can also migrate their account to other Mastodon instances and keep their followers, but migrating from Mastodon to Pleroma is a bit lacking; fortunately, you can still put a redirect on your profile for future followers.
TLDR: no, I don't think the fediverse is just like centralized social media.
If you mean other federated FOSS alternatives to mainstream social media, I gave a brief overview in another comment [0]. You can get a bird's-eye view at https://fediverse.party/ or a more detailed look at https://fediverse.network/. Many of these services use the Activitypub protocol to allow them to inter-operate. Two examples with excellent interop are Pleroma and Mastodon; as a Pleroma user, I can't even tell the difference between a Pleroma and Mastodon user until I open another user's profile on their own instance.
> If you've dreamed of a fediverse where you can send out calendar events and RSVP to things, well, this doesn't do that but it's a step in the right direction because it encourages rich content types.
Thanks. It was included because I heard a comment in https://conf.activitypub.rocks/#talks "Let's Play and Win Our Own Game" saying it had basic support.
With all due respect, i think that might just be you. Email has operated as federated for so many years, and while there are certainly large providers like gmail, etc....There are also plenty of non-multi-tenant, non-SaaS instances of email servers (and associated mailboxes).
Meetup has done a standup job with events. I would love to see them do more with groups too. It's annoying to join the meetup "group" and then join their adjacent Slack or Telegram group.
Even though i've never been a fan of centralized services, i never hated meetup.com that much...Or, rather, i never hated the concept of what meetup.com represents (or could represent). But over the years, i really have always disliked the overall experience. And as years pass by, i seem to dislike the meetup.com experience more and more.
Please have open feeds in iCal format for your site, including one that lets people get all public data.
This will make the data on your website so much more reusable and useful.
And definetly iCal - it's so popular, and most personal calendars can even import it directly.
Yes, it's odd text format is a pain, but there are libraries in almost every language you can use.
Mobilizon has iCal export for a single event, but not for all public events on the site. (I did have a Mastodon chat with them about this but can't find their replies now)
But definitely congrats to Framasoft for this :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar