[svlug] time for a Digg fork?

[Christian Einfeldt]

hi

I had sent the message below by accidentally hitting tab send, so it was not
entirely what I meant to send.

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 12:10 AM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt at gmail.com):
>
> > But Pligg is just a tool, not a website....
>
> It's a tool for making Web sites.
>
> You're descended from millions of years of tool-users.  Do the math?  ;->
>
> > We need to hold Digg's feet to the fire....
>
> Because lobbying proprietary software companies has worked _so_ well in
> the past.   And this business of doing things by one's self using open
> source and one's own resources is probably just a passing fad, right?


You make a good point on the page linked below about self-hosting and
performing the functions of Web 2.0 companies for yourself.

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/winolj.html

 But there are three bridges we need to cross before that can become
widespread to the point of challenging Digg:

1)  Capital for distributed production of the functions that Digg now
performs.  Digg has gotten lots of capital, and that is what has permitted
them to scale up to get the traffic and carry the enormous traffic that they
have.  I don't see how we can do that function on the server that is in your
home for example.  If we had lots and lots of people replicating your work
of doing it in your home, then maybe we could achieve a truly Free Software
implementation of Digg.  So the question is, how do we duplicate Rick Moen
1000 times?  I don't know.  I picked the number 1000 randomly because I just
guessed that is how many servers it would take to handle traffic comparable
to what Digg is doing, if we were going to completely replace Digg.  But if
we are only going to mirror one little slice of Digg, just the FOSS stories,
that could be done on one server, I am guessing.

2)  Newbies need simple solutions.  Digg provides that.  I don't see a ready
alternative that could replace Digg's interface this month, nor next month
nor next year.  Again, we would to duplicate Rick Moen x 1000 and make sure
that those 1000 Rick Moens were able to be paid for their work.  One Rick
Moen can maintain his own server, but if we were going to take on Digg with
Pligg, we would need to make sure that those 1000 Rick Moens could carry
that much traffic with the same uptime that we get from Digg

3) A mechanism for coordinating those 1000 Rick Moens.  Digg is a command
and control organism.  If we were going to do it in a distributed way, we
would need to have some way to make sure that those 1000 Rick Moens were on
the same page.
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