Life with StatusNet ... a personal experience (part 1)

Life with StatusNet ... a personal experience

Time goes by so fast and on the interwebz it seems to go even faster. I always wanted to write down some of my thoughts about StatusNet. As it is I never managed and so some "eras" of my personal expereince with this network passed away and others came up ... undocumented.

I first got in touch with StatusNet quite some years ago and this must have been at an early state of this awesome project (around 2008...?). I came over it when I searched for some alternatives for a common board software. If I remember correctly I did find it on the GnuSocial site, not the official one. I loaded it down and didn't understand a lot. So it never came to an experiment. Anyway it would have been on a shared hosting planned as a private board and would not have been what StatusNet is able to be.

In early 2011 I was given an HTC G1 android device and also around this time I looked at the facebook, which beside its fascinating possibilities quickly turned out its annoying side effects as mySpace did before. At this time I had no twitter or identi.ca account and the microblogging world was somehow new for me. As I am not really an extroverted person I still was looking for a private platform for "real life" (I prefer "physically known") friends. So I installed SN the first time on a shared hosting as a non-public site. It was working and me and an android affine friend were amazed to have our own social network powered by mustard on our android cellphones. Of course it suffered from the difficulty to involve more friends into it. At this point I had no idea of the federation powers of OStatus.

Soon it was clear, that running StatusNet on a shared hosting service will not satisfy. Too many technical borders occur to bring in the full possible fun SN is able to offer. So it was moved to a VPS. Still my instance was non-public and targetted on my beer and football friends. Of course it turned out that it is not easy to reach paople with a closed system. So we were in fact very few active users. During that time I've read a lot about OStatus and so on. It was not easy to get it in the beginning. I got an identi.ca account to get in touch with other SN users beside the forums. For I had yet not used twitter, this was also something new to me and a first step into the microblog world. Coincidently and also luckily for me it was the time at the end of the year when many identicats have moved to their selfhosted StatusNet instances. So there was a lot of knowledge and assistance shared within the community. It was clear that I had to get a federated instance.

addPlugin('OStatus'); opened the gates. I remember when I posted the first federated dent and got a reply from somebody. It was really fantastic.

At this time I still had no idea how meaningful the StatusNet community would become for me personally and still is. !vivalafederation

... to be continued. #statusnet

Source: http://blog.morphtown.de/life-with-statusnet-a-personal-experience-part-1/