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Org-social is a decentralized social network that runs on Org Mode (github.com)

183 points by andros ↗ HN
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.

27 comments

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bitwize
Reminds me of .plan files from back in the day.
ethan_smith
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
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.
BrouteMinou
What does it solve compared to a normal plain HTML blog?
kyykky
There seems to be a function to generate a feed based on the posts of the people you are following.
OhMeadhbh
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
This looks like a bad hybrid between RSS and Markdown. Am I missing something?
cml123
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
This sure is a social network for a very small and specific set of people.
jancsika
In other words, it's a real social network.
rhelz
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.
crabbone
We kind of already have groups in Gnus... I even messaged one group, like twice in my life.
giancarlostoro
Finally a social network that only true nerdy people will ever join, I might just finally pick up emacs again.
jraph
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?
jayde2767
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.
t_mann
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?
omaranto
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
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.
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philipwhiuk
> 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
As someone who uses org-mode to take notes this seems genuinely wonderful, personally cannot stand HTML/CSS drudgery.
OhMeadhbh
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
How about social.md which is gpg signed ?
3036e4
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