Life with StatusNet ... a personal experience (part 2)

Life with StatusNet ... a personal experience

federated I'd like to continue this review about my introspective experience with StatusNet. The first part ended when I was setting it up to an OStatus node. As this happened nearly two years ago it's not so easy to write down in a few words how meaningful that was. I not only think of the exploration of SN's technical aspects, rather more of that it really changed things in my life. I'll try to keep this overview about the passed two years short and then furthermore continue with notes from an actual state of things or pick up specific topics which come to my mind. So that the instance was running OStatus federated it was a complete new experience. Quickly the contacts decreased and there was a lot of conversation about technical knowledge but also the federation spirit. We all had a lot to do. Soon it was clear that not everything would run out of the box. Sometimes things turned out quite frustrating. But on the other hand this led to a help- and powerful community from which one could learn a lot. The year 2012 was really a great one. I learned to know a lot of nice people and also there were still a few "real life" buddies who were around. There were still some private groups ported from the passed away non-public instance. Sadly my mates did not jump on the federation thing. SN evangelization is a story of its own. People just don't understand or even ain't willing. Over the months I became more and more frustrated by this ignorance and I was communicating more with SN people than the "real life" ones. At this time I used the gwibber multiprotocoll client a lot. It was still working with facebook/twitter and so I could hold contact to the people there in one single application. It was interesting to see how different I used the platforms. I never posted personal stuff to facebook although my profile was only non-public anyway but I did this to the SN timeline. Within this year I also tried out Friendica amongst other feds. I never figured out how to get it federated well with other networks. That's sad because this goal of Friendica would be exactly what I'm looking for. I think this is the reason that people come to the point to make a decision for one network. It's annoying to maintain several instances, if the result does not satisfy completely. For a while it was ok for me to go on with a SN and Friendica instance. I used Gwibber and Mustard to keep up with the decentralized networks and also identi.ca, facebook and twitter. Also I held contact to Gmail and facebook people over XMPP. Then early 2013 began the troubled times. New twitter API and changes in facebook made gwibber useless for it. Google brought in Hangouts which does not use XMPP anymore. And then as killer we were informed about identi.ca's migration to the new pump.io platform which could be expected as a dramatic cut for the SN network. All this really pissed me off. But it turned out that the pump migration was not initial for a slow death of the SN network. Quite some buddies moved their identi.ca accounts when the migration was to come. So my timeline did not change really that much. Of course there were identicats missing who stayed there. Then more new SN instances came up, groups were rebuilt and more people joined the federated network again. Great news was that StatusNet would live on in the GnuSocial project. It was amazing to see the strength of a decentralized system, the fact that it will survive, even if its biggest node is closed. And so it is. At the end 2013 we're still denting to the timelines. May the circle remain unbroken ... !vivalafederation #statusnet

Source: http://blog.morphtown.de/life-with-statusnet-a-personal-experience-part-2/