Micah Lee writes "there are now at least three different instant-message services that implement robust encryption: WhatsApp, Signal, and Allo. How is someone who cares about their privacy and security to choose between them?" -- why is that even necessary? Needing to choose a messaging app based on which friends you want to chat with shows how broken the whole messaging space is.
!GNUsocial is !FreeSoftware. If the current contributors don't bake in the ability to block users/groups/tags/instances then someone else will fork the code and do it. And as long as it stays Free Software someone else can fork that code and remove it again.
I find !GNUsocial successful because it works for me. Having tech-oriented conversations actually makes GNUsocial more successful for me than #Twitter -- compare the hashtag #LaTeX on the two services and see the difference. And there are plenty of non-tech topics on other GNUsocial instances, see http://rainbowdash.net/ for example. Also, I don't see GNUsocial being any more complicated to use than Twitter. Using the WebUI on GNUsocial insulates the average user from the technical specifications of #Federation. True, people running their own instance need a bit more technical know-how. But at the GNUsocial demo at the #Linux conference yesterday someone said that the Federation and scalability was nice, but she was *really* impressed that a full microblogging site could be set up in half an hour. GNUsocial is different from Twitter, and so its success is measured differently too.
@bes Likely my fault. The server that host(ed) !freesoftware (and a bunch of other groups) has a damaged DB, and I haven't recovered it yet. I'll do serious work in it after the !Linux conference is over. Ironically, I'm giving a !GNUsocial demo http://kwlug.org/node/1015
The @KWLUG presentation on !GNUsocial went pretty well. I'll upload some raw video to archive.org tonight, and the podcast should be up at http://kwlug.org/podcasts shortly.