(These are personal opinions based on my own personal interest in free and volunteer-driven social networks, not an opinion as a WMF member.)
On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 9:46 AM, Leinonen Teemu teemu.leinonen@aalto.fi wrote:
Hi,
I have been looking for social networking service that would be fair: not abusing personal data, funded by community, respecting privacy, accepting anonymity, free/libre/ open source etc. Haven’t found many. The Diaspora* Project[1] is not moving forward very fast and the Mastodon[2] is more a microblogging service rather than a social network service.
Can it be that the difference between "microblogging service" and "social network" might be too subtle and subjective to be noticed by the majority of their users? And for the problem you are presenting here?
Would it make sense for Wikimedia movement to build its own social network
service?
Depends on what you mean by "build". If you mean create the software for a new social network service, I don't think it makes sense. Providing support and development of multilingual wiki projects https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects to collect and develop educational content to empower and engage people around the world is already a daunting task in terms of software development, and there is so much to do.
If you mean to run the software developed by someone else, sure, why not experimenting. Thanks to free software licenses anyone can try, and thanks to Wikimedia trademarks licenses I am sure a decent solution could be found by whoever wants to run this experiment.
In the "2017 Movement strategy” we state: “By 2030, Wikimedia will become
the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge”. If we consider discussions and information shared on social network services to be “knowledge”, I think we should have a role in here too.
With some caveats and observations, I agree on the principle, just not on the implication that this means we need to create a free social network for us from scratch, starting with a first line of code. If we consider social networks useful, and free social networks the right and consistent thing to use in an ecosystem of free knowledge, then the first step can be as simple as opening a Mastodon instance. Dozens (hundreds) of volunteers (including amateur sysadmins) are doing just that without much discussion, just scratching their own itch, or for fun, or to learn, or to experiment...
We have 33 million registered users and fulfil all the requirements of
being a “fair service”. A minimum list of features to make Wikimedia Social would be:
(1) Status updates (2) Comments (3) Likes
This is provided by Mastodon, GNUSocial, etc today. They look like minimum features for a social network indeed.
(4)Groups
Mmm can you specify your use cases here? There is a chance, that the need for "groups" actually belongs to different use cases, and we don't need one "social network" tool to resolve everything.
One use case could be instant communication. We have seen Wikimedia groups in Telegram flourishing around events and perhaps more. Again, someone scratched their itches, they just did it, others followed.
Another use case could be more structured and specialized communication, which puts us closer to mailing lists, forums, and our very own Talk pages. For what is worth, some of us are experimenting around this use case with Discourse. Again, scratching own itches and experimenting. More at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T180853
maybe: (5) Events
Well, this is quite a beast on its own, and I believe not a simple one. A few days ago I unassigned https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T1035 to myself because I could not find enough time & focus to push this problem in some productive direction.
I am pretty sure that by integrating this to other Wikimedia services (Commons etc.) we could achieve something awesome.
I agree that there is potential in this area, but I would look more at using and supporting tools developed by others on their own mission, and then think of single-sign-ons and APIs to bridge.
- Teemu[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)