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.<p>Please have open feeds in iCal format for your site, including one that lets people get all public data.<p>This will make the data on your website so much more reusable and useful.<p>And definetly iCal - it's so popular, and most personal calendars can even import it directly.<p>Yes, it's odd text format is a pain, but there are libraries in almost every language you can use.<p>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)<p>But definitely congrats to Framasoft for this :-)<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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...
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.<p>Framasoft is great!
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].<p>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.<p>[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.<p>[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.
Reading through the page I just couldn't shake off the feeling that the illustrations remind me a lot of the Pepper and Carrot comic.<p>I scrolled down to the footer almost expecting to find the name David Revoy there and indeed it was :D
This got me surprised:<p>"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."""<p>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.
Looks like they self-host their source code too: <a href="https://framagit.org/framasoft/mobilizon/" rel="nofollow">https://framagit.org/framasoft/mobilizon/</a> 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.
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
What an amazing looking project!<p>I think this type of "someone in the group runs an instance" type deal will become more and more frequent.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Imagine a raspberry pi with a terabyte of storage attached. Certainly that's enough for a "Familybook" of your closest people.<p>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. :)
I feel like this misses the point.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.
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?
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.)
mozilizon.org page says:<p>>try Mobilizon<p>>Create a fake account and fake events on demo.mobilizon.org<p>But for some reason this fake account requires quite real email address. No thanks.
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.
Is it just me, or has "federated" come to mean just mean multi-tenant SaaS (maybe with some features that cross boundaries) that's also open source?
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.