[FM Discuss] Open source social media manual?

[Tomi Toivio]

Hi,

So when are we going to do a book about open source social media
alternatives like Identi.ca and Diaspora? There is an urgent need to get
people to join something less monolithic than the proprietary ones I dare
not to mention.

I don't mean a manual only about the technological aspects, ie. "push a
button to publish a status update" or "how to set up your own Diaspora
pod." It should definitely include the social and political aspects, since
a lot of interesting information about the behavior patterns and even the
political effects of social media are already available.

I was just reading some Finnish books about proprietary social media and
they were basically quite shallow. I think that FLOSS Manuals could easily
create something that would have a lot more depth.

And definitely do a chapter about IRC, which is basically a decentralized
social media and has been around since 1988. (Usenet just had too bad
privacy settings. You cannot find my IRC logs from 1994 with Google, but
the Usenet will be available forever?)

Then you might collect some interesting background stories from around the
world. It might be interesting for you to know that the first Finnish
Facebook-like social media was the IRC Gallery, which was basically set up
for IRC users to share their pictures while chatting, but got swamped by
hundreds of thousands of non-IRCing teenagers, who ended up thinking that
IRC meant the website.

What do you think about this idea? Is there a need for a book on the open
source alternatives? Thumbs up or ignore?

Regards
Tomi
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