Org-social is a decentralized social network that runs on Org Mode

183•andros•5mo ago

After collaborating with several communities around twtxt and gathering many improvements requested by the community, I thought that many of the technical limitations or wishes that people had could be resolved within an org file. Org social is a first draft to ask the community for feedback and see if it was something that could be useful to people. The response has been very positive and overwhelming.

It is and will remain a niche technology, its use is intentionally limited to a group of people who love the org format and want to share their thoughts, articles and reflections without having to generate HTML. In addition to being able to interact with the different Emacs communities through mentions and replies.

I am gradually responding to everyone who has written to me, sent me ideas and suggestions. If you really have something interesting to contribute, please make a pull request in the repository or send me a DM on Mastodon.

Comments

bitwize•5mo ago

Reminds me of .plan files from back in the day.

mxuribe•5mo ago

Well, there is https://plan.cat ...which, hosts a user's plan files. :-)

I guess think of it as a little microblog for displaying one's plan file?

lemonberry•5mo ago

This is kind of neat, thanks for sharing.

temp0826•5mo ago

We're rewriting the books. finger was the first social network!

bitwize•5mo ago

I've observed that Unix itself was a social networking platform. Your Unix account was your identity across many services: email, finger, USENET, talk, etc. And it was distributed. And didn't rely on cruft like ActivityPub.

temp0826•5mo ago

Totally! ident alongside IRC too. So many reinvented wheels. (Side note- I'm a little sad that https is the only protocol used for everything anymore).

mtillman•5mo ago

Still is if you have an account on sdf.org.

ethan_smith•5mo ago

Exactly - the finger protocol with .plan/.project files was essentially a proto-social network where users could publish status updates on Unix systems, and org-social follows that same decentralized, text-file-based philosophy but with modern tooling.

gentooflux•5mo ago

This seems less "decentralized social network" and more "html-less www with extra steps," especially since it's only going to allow socializing between the specific types of people who fall within 3 very specific Venn diagram circles who 1) use emacs, 2) use org-mode, and 3) want to go through the trouble of hosting their own section of the network.

bee_rider•5mo ago

I guess this is an internet for the folks who are still annoyed by the Eternal September?

Joe_Cool•5mo ago

I thought that was Gemini: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

thesuitonym•5mo ago

Gemini is for hipsters who want to look like they like Gopher, but can't live without their cat pics.

(Said in jest, of course)

macintux•5mo ago

You reminded me that many years ago I gave some Microsoft sales folks grief for dropping Gopher from IIS, and then I wondered whether IIS still existed, and that led me to discover that iis.net was retired this summer.

https://www.iis.net/

And I still don’t know whether IIS itself still exists.

raspyberr•5mo ago

Gemini lives rent free in the heads of like 99% of HN users. It's really weird. Look at any Gemini network posts on here. So much hate for a little network that just sits there and does its thing.

Joker_vD•5mo ago

And also 4) somewhat want to talk to other people ― but not that much that they'd be ready to exit Emacs.

small_scombrus•5mo ago

> but not that much that they'd be ready to exit Emacs.

There's great news for the people who want to talk to other people and NOT exit emacs - you can get IRC built straight in.

https://github.com/emacs-circe/circe

gentooflux•5mo ago

Try as I might, I have not been successful in getting my wife to use IRC. I guess I should take that as a sign that she just doesn't want to talk to me...

d0mine•5mo ago

There is a telegram client for emacs: telega.el https://github.com/zevlg/telega.el

The installation instructions are scary but It has been straightforward to install melpa version via use-package with telega-server in docker.

luqtas•5mo ago

and a Matrix client! https://github.com/alphapapa/ement.el

kogasa240p•5mo ago

XMPP too, but no OMEMO encryption.

crabbone•5mo ago

Sort of. There's Org for Vim users :)

BrouteMinou•5mo ago

What does it solve compared to a normal plain HTML blog?

deltasquared•5mo ago

This filtered out those who 1) don’t use eMacs 2) don’t use org-mode

I suspect org-mode users are willing to go through an extra step if needed.

My notes are in .org if I want to share with someone else I export to .md and use the output

kyykky•5mo ago

There seems to be a function to generate a feed based on the posts of the people you are following.

OhMeadhbh•5mo ago

My take on it is it's for people who live in org-mode. Though I'm thinking a org-social to html converter would be a decent tool to have. One more project to fill my copious spare time.

Beretta_Vexee•5mo ago

This looks like a bad hybrid between RSS and Markdown. Am I missing something?

cml123•5mo ago

Just last week I was fiddling around with a tangentially related idea. I made some modifications locally to my setup so that when browsing a .org file in eww, org-html-export-as-html would render it in the buffer as HTML directly. eww doesn't really support much styling via shr, so I was working on adding some basic css parsing to expand the range of expression for an org-based blog approach.

Many people export their org file based blogs to HTML and then publish them, but my thought would be to skip that and instead provide a path for eww to directly render org files, cutting out my html export stopgap.

egypturnash•5mo ago

This sure is a social network for a very small and specific set of people.

jancsika•5mo ago

In other words, it's a real social network.

mtillman•5mo ago

I feel like https://github.com/buckket/twtxt didn't get enough love when it was released. Registry hosting doesn't seem to be any harder than DNS.

stronglikedan•5mo ago

> harder than DNS

Oh, so extremely hard then.

arduanika•5mo ago

The anti-social social network

rhelz•5mo ago

You say that like it's a bad thing? :-) I almost never see posts on facebook from my actual friends. it's all either E.D. adverts or bots pushing an agenda.

egypturnash•5mo ago

I do not say it like it's a good thing or a bad thing. I'm just observing this fact.

I'm not in that very small and specific set of people but I am not that far from it; last week I logged into Furrymuck for the first time in decades and attended a memorial service for one of its wizzes and remembering how that text-only MMORPG worked sure was interesting when I wasn't busy crying my face off.

crabbone•5mo ago

We kind of already have groups in Gnus... I even messaged one group, like twice in my life.

giancarlostoro•5mo ago

Finally a social network that only true nerdy people will ever join, I might just finally pick up emacs again.

scubbo•5mo ago

What about Mastodon?

(I'm, like, 80% joking)

krapp•5mo ago

As far as I can tell, Mastodon is nothing but nerds, which is what I like about it.

giancarlostoro•5mo ago

Anyone can get past a dog, nobody f$;&&) with a lion.

Anyone can get on mastodon, nobody f&)@) with emacs.

But seriously the barrier to entry is high enough you will only get the true geeks.

scubbo•5mo ago

A barrier-to-entry isn't necessary if no non-geeks want to join in the first place (which is, IME, true of Mastodon). Mastodon has successfully made itself a place that no non-geek would ever _want_ to spend time on anyway, so no barriers-to-entry are necessary to maintain that state.

(You can decide for yourself whether this comment is praising or criticizing Mastodon)

throwaway81523•5mo ago

It sounds more like a blog than a network, I think. From way back:

http://ahungry.com/blog/2013-04-01-blogging-with-org-mode.ht...

jraph•5mo ago

If this takes off and becomes mainstream, will you show some inclusiveness towards poor people like me who will dare editing their org social files with an editor like Kate?

jethronethro•5mo ago

While an interesting idea, it's kind of niche. I somehow doubt that this will become mainstream, even among techies.

jraph•5mo ago

Oh yeah, I was being humorous, I don't think this can take off neither.

nosioptar•5mo ago

(I don't use org mode or Kate. Love Kate, but prefer vim.) At least one person's set Kate up for org mode.

https://akselmo.dev/posts/kate-and-orgmode/

jayde2767•5mo ago

In the end, Streaming Services have proven to be nothing more than advertising platforms scattered with brief moments of content. The ads outweigh the content making it less cost effective than going back to Cable, which is still terrible also. Hence the need to pirate and control what content you see.

monkeywork•5mo ago

think you replied on the wrong post friend.

frogulis•5mo ago

Which is funny, because my mind filled in the word "social media" and I thought it was a fair point, until I got to the word "Cable".

nosioptar•5mo ago

Same. It's almost like everything has been enshittified to the point that the same complaints can be made in numerous places.

t_mann•5mo ago

Sounds a bit like the idea that Bluesky started out with. I don't really get why specifically org mode though, sounds like you could be doing the same thing with a simple Markdown file. And while you're at it, why not just use HTML and read your friends' blogs in the browser?

tocs3•5mo ago

I think you can use whatever. The markdown is very org mode like.

metalliqaz•5mo ago

Because that would require leaving emacs, I guess.

Just a guess. I'm a Vim user so unlike emacs users I do know how to shower but like emacs users I can't manage to carry a conversation with someone in person. We only think partly alike.

bsoles•5mo ago

> Because that would require leaving emacs, I guess.

Yeah, but if this kind of social network was hosted on Vim, nobody would be able to exit it I guess.

arduanika•5mo ago

Frankly, you'd need to make vim even harder to exit if you want to compete with the big players in this space.

abdullahkhalids•5mo ago

Org mode is far more structured than markdown. Structured enough that so you can naturally store data in, and easily access/edit it later.

Whenever someone tries to do something similar in markdown, they have to invent an extension of markdown to do it.

SoftTalker•5mo ago

Yes markdown is simply about formatting text. Org is a data format.

3036e4•5mo ago

Markdown really isn't a specific thing with all the incompatible implementations, many of which allow embedding HTML (i.e. "whatever happens to be supported by current version of Chrome" is also part of those Markdown formats).

If you pick one of the more sane (or at least less insane) variants of Markdown, like Pandoc's variant, you do get at least some ways to embed data in reliable ways. It also makes it easy to export and style documents and write your own filters that can make use of the data in various ways. In general I prefer to use ORG-mode, but for some purposes I use Pandoc Markdown instead.

https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/8-pandocs-markdown.html

omaranto•5mo ago

You could do the same thing with a Markdown file, but I wouldn't call it simpler than Org. Maybe by simple you meant "familiar to more people"?

t_mann•5mo ago

I meant 'less markup' (in the sense of a simple ratio of markup characters over total characters). Now you can say that the markup is still fairly low and actually useful. But that goes to my second point of why not just use HTML. This is pretty much exactly what it's been designed for originally.

philipwhiuk•5mo ago

> Because of the decentralised nature it is very difficult to discover new users. You have to think of it as a technology similar to email or RSS feeds. The natural flow to find new addresses, URLs, or nodes, is because you have been given the address or because you have seen a link on a website. Org-social is the same. You have to share your address with your friends or on social media.

Feels like it's missing the point.

kogasa240p•5mo ago

As someone who uses org-mode to take notes this seems genuinely wonderful, personally cannot stand HTML/CSS drudgery.

OhMeadhbh•5mo ago

I made a few patches to coax it into working. But I haven't gotten around to making a new GitHub account and I can't find @tanrax's email address. So...

  * Patch 1: https://www.bi6.us/ER/MSH/0001-add-closing-paren-to-org-social-parse-feed-to-comple.patch  
  * Patch 2: https://www.bi6.us/ER/MSH/0002-Add-my-social-URL-to-the-registers.txt-file.patch

Well, yes, technically you only need the first patch to get it to work. The second patch adds my name to the list of social-org sites. They're both one line changes, so it should be easy to verify I'm not adding to the global index of chicanery through software.

And if it's been a while since you applied a patch to a repo (instead of just pulled from a repo you merged into), here's the HOWTO I wrote about it:

  * https://www.bi6.us/GI/B/#/The%20Caveats/Applying%20Patches%20to%20Bare%20Repositories

ruslan•5mo ago

How about social.md which is gpg signed ?

OhMeadhbh•5mo ago

Why not just sign the social.org file and publish it as social.asc or something?

ruslan•5mo ago

Right. But I would still prefer markdown file format, so I could simply open it in web browser. :)

OhMeadhbh•5mo ago

Sure. But the point of this system is you use it from emacs.

3036e4•5mo ago

I am a heavy ORG-mode user, but this looks like a more complex variant of a gemlog. A gemlog is just a gemtext file with a list of links to posts, including the date of each post in the link text. Then each post is just a gemtext file. Gemtext being the extremely simple, line-based, format that is used for making Gemini sites. A gemlog is basically a blog that is also its own RSS feed, without any of the complexities of things on the real web.

It is never going to go mainstream, but there is a critical mass of people using it and it is probably for the best if it never grows much beyond that.

https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/gemtext-specification.gmi

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Org-social is a decentralized social network that runs on Org Mode

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