Some social networks, such as Twitter, have a policy that restricts use of their members' posts. This means that if a new social network was to spring up, it wouldn't be able to make use of this data, e.g by displaying it with a better user interface. This is anti-competitive because network effects work against a new startup.

One solution might be a new network (or better still a group of them) which licence all their users' data under a CC license such as BY-SA 4.0.

Would this Work? Has anything like it been tried?

I have been having this idea for a while, but I do not have the technical skills to do it, so I will be sharing it with you all, to see if it could be a good idea, and if someone would be interested in it.

Idea:

Nowadays we rely on closed source / owned by other servers, but technology and storage space has become cheaper, and having a server in your home is easy.

Also, many apps store info about you, and upload all this info to servers that are not owned by you.

But maybe this could change, with a full ecosystem of apps and a server, everyone could host a server, and have all the data that apps/phone/PC generates about himself to be sent to your own server.

Want to have a fitness tracker? No problem, all your fitness data is stored in your own server. Want have all your files in the cloud? No problem, you own the server after all.

Would this be possible to achieve? Would you think this would be an interesting project?

Thanks and feel free to PM Me if you wish.

Hello! I am kind of a newbie around the libre culture and I was wondering if something like a libre blogging platform exists. If it's something that has already been discussed, sorry, but I can't seem to find anything about this. Thanks in advance for your kind answers!

The vision of our Open Siddur Project​ is to make publishing siddurim (Jewish prayer books) available to anyone with the interest and ambition to do-it-themselves or even collaborate with others. This is our dream!

It's never been enough for us to share Jewish liturgy and liturgy-related work in posts on opensiddur.org. We need to make web-to-print publishing of siddurim a reality, and so we've been working on a web application that presents a collaborative space for transcribing, encoding, and editing texts. Since no one else has ever done this open-source, we've been working from scratch, and since to date, we've only had one programmer working on realizing this dream, it's taken a long time.

Efraim Feinstein has been leading this effort. A few hours ago he announced a small but important development. It allows texts to be marked up -- with taxonomic, semantic, and attributional data recorded -- and added to the Open Siddur database by users without having to see any XML -- the markup language we use to preserve this data.

We still have a ways to go but we want to highlight this effort and this achievement, and call upon the community of Jewish software developers to join us or pitch in.

Efraim's update: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/opensiddur-tech/0JzsvGR1EbQ/TSJuTlIqNJgJ

Open Siddur code: http://github.com/opensiddur/opensiddur-client

Hi all.

i don't really know where to ask this (and apologizes if not the right place)

i recently got a gopro-like and made time laps. i would like to upload them so that anybody could legally use them. (if i'm correct, when you upload videos on youtube, vimeo... they become youtube's, vimeo's... "propriety", right ?)

=> where can i upload them and keep them legally free ?

thanks.

After nine months in development, today we have launched pling, a site where projects can register and get some funding via microdonations.

Some pics.

The idea behind Pling is to help fund completed or ongoing projects while, at the same time, help users to discover new stuff.

From the creators' point of view, you create an account, write a description, upload some media (pics, a video, or a sound file) and the PayPal account you want to get paid through^1 , and that is basically it. There are no fixed deadlines, no commissions on our behalf, no ads, you don't even have to host any of your files with us. The creators of the site especially appreciate free and open projects, but any project that requires funding can register.

From the users' point of view, it allows the discovery of new stuff, be it music, art, videos, software, games, blogs, whatever; and then Pling simplifies donating. A user doesn't even have to register to donate.

We are also working on a blog-cum-online magazine (there's nothing there yet, sorry) to promote the works, publish news and interviews with creators, and organize events.

I am open to PMs if you would prefer to ask me questions 1 to 1, so fire away.

^1 Yes, we are well aware of PayPal's bad rap. We are looking into alternatives, including cryptocurrencies, but for simplicity's sake, we chose to go with them to start with. Also, from a user's point of view, it is non-threatening platform.

Edit 1: /u/emacsen is right: Pling is for all kind of projects, not only free and open. There were probably two things at work here: (1) We discussed this at some point and I probably didn't get the memo and assumed (my bad) that nothing had changed, and (2) my own personal preferences were at work, as I would personally like to see more free and open projects get some credit (and not only in the shape of praise) that would help creators continue developing their stuff.

I have changed this text, but I can't change the title.

My apologies for the confusion.

Edit 2: The terms and conditions currently state that pling charges a 7% commission per donation. THIS IS NOT CORRECT and the result of copying old text from the test site. Pling does not charge anything for its services.

Sorry for the inconveniences these kind of things may cause. If it's any excuse, it is early days for us and we're still working out the kinks.

Edit 3: The issue described in Edit 2 has now been corrected.

"Off-label" is a term typically used to describe using a drug to treat a condition other than the one for which it has been approved. "Off-Label OS" is the name I've given to this first concept version of a significantly customized Ubuntu image that runs in Vagrant using its VirtualBox provider (in other words, you need to have both VirtualBox and Vagrant installed on your system--you can find versions for Mac or PC or Linux).

Basically, this first version is somewhere between digital art project, training tool, and open-ended game. There are a few riddles, if I can use notpron's definition of riddle, and there are some surprises(?). Some gems? Some treasures? I dunno... Having done this one, I have ideas on how to make it more game-like, but I'm interested in sharing this one to see what people get from it, make of it, and think of it.

I would recommend starting at OffLabelOS.com. If you do go through the effort of getting up and running, feel free to message me with questions and feedback. Thank you for your time.