* <<H6N.0844>> GNU social notes
In February of 2015, I wrote in my journal, "I should probably start 
some kind of blog/page with my thoughts/experiences on using GNU 
social & the OStatus network in general."(F26.0120).  It's now June 
of 2017. Better late than never!



My brief history with GS:

The SDF (<http://sdf.org>) started running a GNU social instance on 
wm.sdf.org in 2014, and I started using it at that time. Before that, 
SDF was running StatusNet – I think I had an account, but didn't 
use it. After a discussion on bboard about the current state of 
federated social media, the StatusNet install was upgraded to GNU 
social, and the old database was wiped as it had suffered some kind 
of malady.

I installed GNU social on a home server in June '14 for testing, and 
to help debug the SDF instance. It was briefly federating, but I 
can't remember what URL it lived at.

I wrote the bulk of the SDF GNU social tutorial: 
<http://sdf.org/?tutorials/gnu_social>. For a while, I think this was 
one of the best documents explaining how federation worked to the 
layperson. Subsequent authors have done it better.

I sent a series of cheeky emails to the GNU social mailing list in 
2015, saying that the project's name sucked: 
<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/social-discuss/2015-01/msg00001.ht
ml>. I honestly cannot remember why I felt so strongly compelled to 
do this. I still like "HORD", though.

My home server was reincarnated at <https://hord.laemeur.com>. I 
disappeared for days into the wretched bowels of the CSS for GNU 
social's classic UI. Upon emerging, my site looked amazing. But 
running a home server wasn't ideal for a few reasons. I shut it down 
in July of 2015.

SDF's GNU social instance was reborn again on its own subdomain, 
<https://gs.sdf.org>. I still have an account there.

I wrote the first (that I know of) GNU social federated conversation 
completion tool: <http://laemeur.sdf.org/gs/convo>. Prior to the 
emergence of Mastodon as the OStatus platform of choice, it worked 
pretty well.

I wrote a tool to scrape GS servers for their federated groups, for 
compilation into a searchable index: 
<http://laemeur.sdf.org/gs/fedgroups>. 

In 2016 I hacked together a browser-based GNU social client, ÆEGNUS 
(<http://aegn.us>), which uses the AtomPub API for posting HTML 
notices, and which has conversation reconstruction built-in, with 
foldable threaded conversation display.

--
Excerpted from:

PUBLIC NOTES (H) 
http://alph.laemeur.com/txt/PUBNOTES-H 
©2017 Adam C. Moore (LÆMEUR) <adam@laemeur.com>