We failed to overcome the chicken-and-egg issue
January 13, 2017 6:32 AM   Subscribe

App.net to end. Would-be Twitter competitor App.net is closing up shop and open-sourcing its code. The project launched in 2012 through crowdfunding, and tried to make the pay-for-play model work in social media. It also wanted to be very friendly to developers, especially when Twitter wasn't. Other services appeared alongside the microbloggery, like a push notification tool and a crowdfunding function. (via HN)

One glimpse from 2014 and another.
posted by doctornemo (47 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
The egg came first.
posted by clawsoon at 6:38 AM on January 13, 2017 [6 favorites]


The only way app.net was going to succeed is if Twitter was federated like email.

Like that was ever going to happen.
posted by Talez at 6:56 AM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


As Sarah Jeong put it, "Viva la roiling rat-king of Nazis".

I joined App.Net back when they lowered the price from $50/yr to $36, and stuck with for a year. I never got much out of it, mostly because they had trouble getting traction, and because the promised app ecosystem never materialized. It was just a Twitter clone, an Instagram clone, a Foursquare clone, a chat app, a notes app, and maybe a handful of other things I missed. When it came time to renew, I didn't, and eventually shut down my account.

But as Twitter got shittier and rumors of it being sold sale swirled, I decided to create a new account, in case of emergency.

And, welp... so much for that idea.
posted by SansPoint at 6:58 AM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


Can anyone comment on the quality and utility of the codebase? And if various App.net-based sites emerge around specific affinities, can they talk to each other? Like.......Fidonet?

Strategies to abandon centralized, corporate platforms subject to easy surveillance without giving up on the relationships and crowd effects they facilitate are becoming more important.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:18 AM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


snuffleupagus: I'm not a developer so I can't speak as to the code base of ADN. That said, if you're looking at federated Microblogging, Manton Reese is working on an interesting Kickstarter for one.
posted by SansPoint at 7:24 AM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


Yet another example of the corrosiveness of "free".
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:27 AM on January 13, 2017 [6 favorites]


I was always confused by the name... I'm not a programmer, but App.net doesn't sound like something I'd use to microblog.
posted by selfnoise at 7:29 AM on January 13, 2017 [14 favorites]


NoxAeternum: The tricky thing is that "not-free" limits access in ways that disenfranchise a lot of people. Part of what made Twitter, er, not _great_, but at least compelling, is the diversity of users on the platform that would be stifled by an entry fee.

On the other hand, Nazis.
posted by SansPoint at 7:30 AM on January 13, 2017 [7 favorites]


selfnoise: The name makes more sense when you know that the actual App.Net pitch was for it to be a platform for social applications, not just a Twitter clone. Alpha, the actual Twitter clone part, was their proof-of-concept application. Third party devs built a few other social apps on top of it, but they were mostly clones of existing social apps, and not terribly compelling. What good is a Foursquare clone without Foursquare's database of places to check in to, for example?
posted by SansPoint at 8:17 AM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


Well Ello follow? Fark's calling foul, BoingBoing too, and MF had its run-in...
posted by lazycomputerkids at 8:20 AM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


I just came in here to mention Manton's micro.blog project. Seems like it could work out to be a good timeline-style alternative, though there will always be the eternal issue with what made twitter useful as an upstart way to get information out being what makes it a cesspit - the free and unrestricted signup. I just don't know how you will ever have something that isn't just for well-off tech folks but which is funded such that they can restrict and monitor misbehavior.
posted by phearlez at 8:22 AM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


phearlez: Free and unrestricted signup didn't make Twitter a cesspit. Lack of community management, unenforced guidelines for behavior, uneven enforcement of rules, and a general apathy for curating the space because something something "free speech" made it a cesspit. Paid membership can _help_ keep something from becoming toxic, but it's not enough. Imagine MeFi with the $5 entry fee, but no moderation team.
posted by SansPoint at 8:24 AM on January 13, 2017 [14 favorites]


The current new hotness in federated Twitteroids is Mastodon.social, if you're looking for a new Not Twitter.
posted by egypturnash at 8:25 AM on January 13, 2017 [4 favorites]


I had an app.net account; it was essentially a technically better Twitter which nobody used (other than a few cypherpunky weirdos), and those who did, usually had bots crossposting to Twitter. It took idealism and commitment to check app.net first and engage there and not on Twitter. I stopped using it when the TweetBot variant for it stopped working.

I get the theory that app.net wasn't a Twitter clone but infrastructure, and the Twittroid app they had (“Alpha”) was just a popular example; it was ostensibly meant to be used for inter-app messaging or IoT stuff or something, though I have no idea what that did in practice. I know that there were other app.net apps for the iPhone which didn't engage with Alpha but used it for other, incomprehensible, ends.
posted by acb at 8:26 AM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


A philosophical, or rather a design-eye problem I have with many-to-many discussion formats like twitter and tumblr (and yes, I'm working this rant into a longer piece) is that computer-mediated communication (CMC) wasn't originally designed for networks of millions of actors. It was designed for relatively small groups. So you shout into a crowd of millions of people and if you're lucky you'll get some fellow travelers to shout back. If you're unlucky those shouting back are going to be a clique of dedicated ideological trolls, since they are highly motivated to do searches by keywords to find people who shout at.

And for me, that defeats the purpose of doing blogging. Not that I'm successful at much beyond throwing the best of my bookmarks out for others to read. But if I'm going to curate my obsessive online reading habit for other people, I want to curate the responses as well. A breaking point for me on many-to-many was when a TERF clique decided to shitpost me on the non-existence of bi erasure (ironically). Playing whack-a-mole with block lists doesn't really fix that post.

I don't see an easy alternative out there. I'm comfortable with a static site generator and cheap self-hosting out of the belief that if you're not a customer, you're the product. I lose out on feedback, although I see few mechanisms for doing it that don't invite spam and trolling.

Is diaspora still kicking around?
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:27 AM on January 13, 2017 [8 favorites]


I really wanted App.Net to work and was sad when it didn't. When Tapbots built a client, there was a huge surge of interest, at which point he should have listened to people telling him to drastically cut the price and make the free tier better. But c'est la vie.

For a while there, it had morphed into this really cool thing where the people I followed had gotten kind of weary of Twitter's zing-iness and were engaging in this really earnest and vulnerable way. It was kind of astonishing really, and it's about half the reason that I'm sad it didn't work (the other half being of course Twitter's gradual toilet-drain swirl).

The new attempt at an alternative is micro.blog, which has a decent enough pitch, uses the open web, etc. I'm skeptical about what traction it will get, but the time may be ripe. More and more visible users are leaving Twitter, and if micro can give them the tools they need to deal with randos, harassers and noise, it might take hold.

On preview, what phearlez said. Manton makes passing mention of hate speech and harassment in the Kickstarter video, but I'm not clear what his solution here is. So you can still publish Nazi shit to your own site, but...what?

I dig that they're wanting to stick to the open web, but "we'll allow Breitbart-style white supremacist and rapist ghettos using our system, we'll just let them stay on their side of the tracks and pretend they're not there" is not much of a solution, if that's what Manton's going for there.
posted by middleclasstool at 8:27 AM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


Strategies to abandon centralized, corporate platforms subject to easy surveillance without giving up on the relationships and crowd effects they facilitate are becoming more important.

Another way of saying "important" here at the moment seems to be "essentially foreclosed as actual possibilities".

It's just possible, for a while yet, to limit engagement with the megacorp silos and live a fairly normal life, though the social costs keep escalating. At some point, absence from the dominant platforms (to the extent that it's even possible as a voluntary choice) is going to shift from a good way to slowly erode your familial and social relationships into something a lot more drastic. I imagine the option will be viable the same way that technically you can join the Amish or live in an off-grid cabin in the woods if you work real hard at it.
posted by brennen at 8:28 AM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


I wonder whether the federated-microblogging idea could be merged with the more-modern-LiveJournal-equivalent idea. It'd need a federated way of exchanging permissions and aggregating private posts securely, and a model of short events which can have attachments (multi-paragraph journal posts, images) and metadata (mood, music, &c.), along with the usual 140 characters or so (which could double as the post title). And, of course, a modern API so it can be accessed from apps.
posted by acb at 8:31 AM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


Is diaspora still kicking around?

Last time I heard, ISIS/Daesh were the only users of it. Sort of like Orkut, only with terrorists instead of Brazilians.
posted by acb at 8:32 AM on January 13, 2017 [7 favorites]


Last time I heard, ISIS/Daesh were the only users of it. Sort of like Orkut, only with terrorists instead of Brazilians.

Jesus. If that's true, that is a horrifying ending to an already sad as hell story.
posted by middleclasstool at 8:33 AM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


brennen: It's just possible, for a while yet, to limit engagement with the megacorp silos and live a fairly normal life, though the social costs keep escalating. At some point, absence from the dominant platforms (to the extent that it's even possible as a voluntary choice) is going to shift from a good way to slowly erode your familial and social relationships into something a lot more drastic. I imagine the option will be viable the same way that technically you can join the Amish or live in an off-grid cabin in the woods if you work real hard at it.

Yeah, I wrote a piece a while back comparing Twitter, Facebook, et. al., to plumbing. You can't really opt-out of plumbing, at least not without massive, massive inconvenience to you and anyone you need in your life. Plus, people look at you funny.
posted by SansPoint at 8:33 AM on January 13, 2017 [4 favorites]


middleclasstool: So you can still publish Nazi shit to your own site, but...what?

Well, I don't think that Nazis shouldn't be allowed to post on Twitter, or anywhere else. You have a right to be a racist shitbag online. What you don't have a right to is using a platform to attack others. If the Nazis on Twitter stayed in their own lane, and the Twitter Safety staff gave them the smackdown when they didn't, I'd be more inclined to stick around.
posted by SansPoint at 8:37 AM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


I remember ICQ and then AIM and its competitors and then cross-compatibility messengers and then a period of relative...complacency. What followed was possession: Stalkster, MySpace, and AdultFriendFinder and ReUnion...

And then what happened?
posted by lazycomputerkids at 8:41 AM on January 13, 2017


Of course, I don't want to discourage people from trying. I withdraw further from the network norms myself all the time, and have been trying to take the approach that little bits of infrastructure like a little IRC server for my friends are where networked community can happen. I'm just conscious that this track is going to make me (even more of) a socially isolated weirdo, and I'm fairly pessimistic about what can happen in such an overdetermined situation, where both the existing infrastructure and the economic prospects of all the people who could build alternatives are so thoroughly owned.
posted by brennen at 8:42 AM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


phearlez: Free and unrestricted signup didn't make Twitter a cesspit. Lack of community management, unenforced guidelines for behavior, uneven enforcement of rules, and a general apathy for curating the space because something something "free speech" made it a cesspit.

I don't want to get into a long back and forth about this, largely because I think we'd be in 99% agreement at minimum. But I said "free and unrestricted" to mean those words in many senses. Providing free accounts to every single person in the world without requiring payment, credit, or any number of other ways to identify people - a thing that is great for purposes of providing a platform for people under oppressive regimes or in developing areas - means you don't bring in funds as you add users and you have a lot fewer tools to deal with identifying bad actors in a persistent way. Even if you impede that access with, say, a $5 token entry charge, that works more as a basic filter than a way to fund ongoing moderation and management.

I'm not going to make a blanket statement that there's no way to run a responsible and moderated twitter analog with the same sort of open access and no-cost basic tier, but I'm highly comfortable with my belief that it's a huge challenge and that a lot of the easier ways to achieve the moderation/management goals would impede a lot of what makes twitter more egalitarian. Manton's Micro.blog could well work out that way but on the other hand I have no idea what he has planned as management systems for the thing. Based on a year of listening to him talk on Core Intuition I believe he certainly cares about protecting the vulnerable but whether that translates into making it a priority or having systems already designed, who knows? They're not mentioned on the kickstarter, either because he doesn't think that interests his possible audience for the KS or he's suffering from unexamined privilege as a white dude or who the hell knows.
posted by phearlez at 8:44 AM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


What about Ello?
posted by oceanjesse at 8:49 AM on January 13, 2017


oceanjesse: Does Ello even have a business model yet?
posted by SansPoint at 8:57 AM on January 13, 2017


I forgot about Ello. I had an account and found even less use for it than app.net. One day I found my app had gotten logged out, and I couldn't be bothered finding my password, and that was it.
posted by acb at 9:13 AM on January 13, 2017


Of course, I don't want to discourage people from trying. I withdraw further from the network norms myself all the time, and have been trying to take the approach that little bits of infrastructure like a little IRC server for my friends are where networked community can happen. I'm just conscious that this track is going to make me (even more of) a socially isolated weirdo.

It's not a steady state though and it's not a one-way street either. Quitting Facebook or WhatsApp is much more comparable to giving up alcohol or changing your diet than joining the Amish. It makes some social situations more difficult and some people will be downright hostile (because they feel they're being judged), but when the benefits accumulate over time (this depends on your reasons for quitting and your social circle), most people will come to respect (even appreciate) your choice and some will adopt it, as long as you don't lecture or judge but lead by example.
posted by dmh at 9:24 AM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


I have an Ello account, and check on it periodically. Personally, I would use it more if I could post to it from other sources like Instagram or IFTTT. They claim it is coming, but it isn't always up to them, I guess.
posted by terrapin at 9:27 AM on January 13, 2017


The current new hotness in federated Twitteroids is Mastodon.social,

HA! Instead of TWEET button it says TOOT. *snicker*
posted by terrapin at 9:30 AM on January 13, 2017


FWIW Twitter isn't really solving its own egg problem even though it does seem to have plenty of chickens.
posted by fedward at 9:34 AM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


The only way app.net was going to succeed is if Twitter was federated like email.

I agree, but at the same time it's going to be nearly impossible for a federated service to gain traction in a world where so many centralised services exist. The centralised services have a clear advantage for discoverability and are much easier for the average user to understand, as well as being much easier to sell to investors.

Something like e-mail could never evolve in the modern climate.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:41 AM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


twtxt (disclaimer: created by my roommate) is another decentralized twitter alternative that unlike some others is free and nicely minimalist
posted by snownoid at 9:46 AM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I wrote a piece a while back comparing Twitter, Facebook, et. al., to plumbing. You can't really opt-out of plumbing, at least not without massive, massive inconvenience to you and anyone you need in your life. Plus, people look at you funny.

I don't know...Facebook and Twitter seem so massively annoying that I've happily lived with whatever inconvenience I'm experiencing (but not aware of).

Perhaps this explains all the funny looks directed my way. (Note: I have plumbing.)
posted by she's not there at 11:31 AM on January 13, 2017


Quitting Facebook or WhatsApp is much more comparable to giving up alcohol or changing your diet than joining the Amish. It makes some social situations more difficult and some people will be downright hostile (because they feel they're being judged), but when the benefits accumulate over time (this depends on your reasons for quitting and your social circle), most people will come to respect (even appreciate) your choice and some will adopt it, as long as you don't lecture or judge but lead by example

This may be true of any individual service. It describes my experience of getting off Facebook pretty well, for example. But I guess my expectation is that, with regards to the total system of Facegoogtwittermazon + increasingly centralized control of client hardware and platforms, benefits for disengaging will not accumulate over time, while costs will escalate dramatically.

Things change fast, and it's possible that something about the proliferation of super cheap devices and real bandwidth, or some other trend I'm not quite grasping, will give countervailing efforts real leverage. But I'm not exactly holding my breath.

Networked computation operates as a kind of contagion, while end-user control over computation steadily erodes. Open source hardware, still operating in its infancy, is relegated to the hobby and education markets, while midsized businesses operating as suppliers and platform support in the "maker" space are mostly closing doors or being eaten. FOSS efforts are now leveraged primarily to build the platform infrastructure for centrally operated, closed-source surveillanceware as the dominant software model. Technical professionals face overwhelming economic incentives to work on centralized infrastructure, and respected voices within the culture are increasingly arguing that copyleft licensing, federation, protocols, and decentralization are all either lost causes or the products of hopelessly misguided ideology. Amazon and a handful of other entities will shortly own most of the backend stack.

It's kind of a bleak scene.
posted by brennen at 11:39 AM on January 13, 2017 [12 favorites]


I've never really understood the chicken-and-egg "problem". Eggs predate chickens by a few hundred of millions of years, no?
posted by signal at 12:07 PM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


Is this something I would need a computer to understand?
posted by Samizdata at 1:03 PM on January 13, 2017


Mastodon seems technically cool, although I'm skeptical about how nice GNU culture will be scaled up.

I'm also more and more convinced that communities need boundaries, not just in the sense of "that's rude!" but in the sense of "this url is for ___" (whether that ___ is feminism or model trains). Probably the stupidest cultural aspect of Web 2.0 was the flattening of information to unflavored gruel with tags as the only taxonomy across millions of users who share a common language but few common meanings.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 4:25 PM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


I quit facebook last year. Quitting was bad for my peripheral relationships but good for my mental health. I don't regret it, but I am also kind of cheating because my wife still has her account so I get the occasional curated update on what's going on and I don't miss out on all the parties.

I thought about quitting twitter about 100 times last year, but I couldn't pull the trigger because I work from home and being on twitter is a passable simulacrum of bullshitting at the water cooler.

Last week, I deleted the twitter app from all of my iDevices and blocked it on my home firewall. I would have suspended my account, but unlike Facebook (who keeps your suspended account around forever in case you get browbeaten into rejoining by your friends), Twitter nukes your account irrevocably after 30 days.

I really miss joking around with my Twitter pen pals, but on the other hand I don't have horrific news bursting into my consciousness randomly at all hours of the day. Reading news once a day isn't any less horrific, but at least it's contained. I feel less anxious.

if metafilter ever goes away i'm moving to a mountainside and raising dairy goats
posted by murphy slaw at 4:58 PM on January 13, 2017 [7 favorites]


I still have facebook largely to keep in touch with extended family, but I aggressively curate and mute people on my list, so I don't get the worst BS.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 7:36 PM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'm also more and more convinced that communities need boundaries, not just in the sense of "that's rude!" but in the sense of "this url is for ___" (whether that ___ is feminism or model trains).

Yeah. There are a lot of structural and cultural things wrong with reddit, but the "subreddit" model is really useful, at least when the mods bother to enforce topic rules and weed out the low-effort shitposts.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:50 PM on January 13, 2017


I've just mostly ghosted on FB. I don't check it on any regular basis. I'm there so I can RSVP to weddings and like baby photos. Every so often I upload a random photo so people remember I exist. That's about it. I got involved in some political arguments during election season, and occasionally I drop in on a discussion of some cultural ephemera, but that's rare.

I often miss sending Facebook birthday and anniversary wishes and I feel like I pay a certain price for that, but TBH I was already terrible at that sort of thing before FB.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:29 AM on January 14, 2017


.

Back then, I paid for the App.net dev account, made some apps (support tickets thing, buttcoin based ad network (lol), WebDAV proxy for the file storage, feed reader bot, share widget thingy for jailbroken iOS, file uploader for Android). Maybe the source code will be useful for someone…

I still get spam for the file uploader app because it's in the Play Store. People offer app promotion and stuff.

These days, I'm in the indieweb crowd. It's like blogging way back in the day, except with more ~Twitter-like elements.
posted by floatboth at 2:06 AM on January 16, 2017


Manton Reece has just announced the first (and perhaps only?) stretch goal on his micro.blog Kickstarter - hiring a part-time Community Manager. He also discusses what he plans to do to keep micro.blog a safer space:
I'm working on a new feature for Micro.blog. I alluded to it at the end of the Kickstarter video: that we should draw a line between the social network and the content at your own site. Your web site is your own, where you have the freedom to write about whatever you want, but a service like Micro.blog has a responsibility to build a safe community for its users.

The line is crossed when someone you don't follow starts @-replying you. We've all seen the effects of crossing this line on Twitter. It can make for new friendships, but it can also bring out the worst in people and even lead to harassment.

This line will be my focus for a new feature to preemptively combat abuse. I call this feature Safe Replies.

The core of the Safe Replies feature will be automated in code, but that approach will only get me so far. To do this correctly I will need help from someone with a different kind of experience than just writing code. That brings me to the stretch goal.

If the Kickstarter reaches $80,000, I will use some of the money to make my very first part-time hire for Micro.blog: a community manager. The community manager will help set the tone for the service, work on documentation and best practices, and be responsible for curation when Safe Replies fails to automatically catch emerging problems.
Hiring human moderators!?!! Why, any site doing that is clearly doomed to failure...
posted by adrianhon at 1:01 PM on January 16, 2017 [2 favorites]


Manton is about to turn me into a fucking cheerleader on this.
posted by middleclasstool at 5:24 AM on January 17, 2017


I suppose I should connect to the Core Intuition slack channel and tell him we've talked this much about his project.
posted by phearlez at 8:50 PM on January 18, 2017


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