The annual Social Media Open Source event is hosted by the Harvard i-lab, Innovations in Social Technology. They are a non-profit institution dedicated to supporting social entrepreneurs and social enterprises from varied disciplines who want to make a positive impact on society. The keystone event is the annual Social Media Open Source Conference, an event with content designed around getting to the open-source core of mature tools and concepts that have been used repeatedly and successfully by successful social enterprises. This year, 2016, we will be hosting our 3rd annual conference March 9th at Harvard University’s Emerson Hall in Cambridge.
Open source is all about building a community around code. Many of the tools we use today were built around the idea of community involvement and open source. Social media tools are no exception to this. In this post I’ll be taking you through why social media needs to be an open source tool, and what makes it an optimal solution for your business.
It is no mystery why modern social media platforms were designed to be addictive: the more we consult them, the more data they have to fuel them—which enables them to grow smarter and bigger and more powerful.
The massive, global interest in these platforms has created the attention economy, and people’s focused mental engagement is the new gold in the age of information abundance. As economist, political scientist, and cognitive psychologist Herbert A. Simon said in Designing organizations for an information-rich world, “the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.” And information consumes our attention, a resource we only have so much of it.
According to GlobalWebIndex, we are now spending an average of 142 minutes on social media and messaging platforms daily, 63% more than the 90 minutes we spent on these platforms just seven years ago. This can be explained by the fact that these platforms have grown more intelligent over time by studying the minds and behaviors of users and applying those findings to boost their appeal.
Of relevance here is the psychological concept variable-ratio schedule, which gives rewards after an average number of responses but on an unpredictable schedule. One example is slot machines, which may provide a reward an average of every five games, but the players don’t know the specific number of games (one, two, seven, or even 15) they must play before obtaining a reward. This schedule leads to a high response rate and strong engagement.
Knowing all of this, what can we do to make things better and loosen the grip social networks have on us and our data? I suggest the answer is migrating to open source social platforms, which I believe consider the humane aspect of technology more than private companies do. Here are three open source social platforms to consider.
Pixelfed
Pixelfed is a photo-sharing platform that is ad-free and privacy-focused, which means no third party is making a profit from your data. Posts are in chronological order, which means there is no algorithm making distinctions between content.
To join the network, you can pick one of the servers on the list of instances, or you can install and run your own Pixelfed instance.
Once you are set up, you can connect with other Pixelfed instances. This is known as federation, which means many instances of a software (in this case, Pixelfed) share data (in this case, pictures). When you federate with another instance of Pixelfed, you can see and interact with pictures posted to other accounts.
The project is ongoing and needs the community’s support to grow. Check Pixelfed’s GitHub page for more information about contributing.
Okuna
Okuna is an open source, privacy-friendly social network. It is committed to being a positive influence on society and the environment, plus it donates 30% of its profits to worthy causes.
Mahara
Mahara is an open source web application for building and sharing electronic portfolios. (The word mahara is Māori for memory or thoughtful consideration.) With Mahara, you can create a meaningful and verifiable professional profile, but all your data belongs to you rather than a corporate sponsor. It is customizable and can be integrated into other web services.
You can try Mahara on its demo site.
Diaspora – Distributed and contextual social networking
- Ruby
Diaspora is distributed and contextual social networking. It is decentralized and provides freedom and privacy. Instead of everyone’s data being held on huge central servers owned by a large organization, diaspora* exists on independently run servers (“pods”) all over the world. You choose which pod to register with, and you can then connect seamlessly with the diaspora* community worldwide.social-networkingprivacydecentralizeddistributedsocial
HumHub – Open Source Social Network
- PHP
HumHub is a feature rich and highly flexible OpenSource Social Network Kit written in PHP. It provides support to build Social Intranets, Enterprise Social Networks, Private Social Networks. Its social features include Commenting, Like, Following, Mentioning, Tags, OEmbed Support. The communication in HumHub works with spaces. A space can literally be anything, a project, a group or just a simple topic. For every space you can invite multiple users and make up your own access rights and rules.social-networksocial-intranetcommentssocial-frameworksocialsocial-networkingcommunitiesspacesblog-post
Mastodon – A GNU Social-compatible microblogging server. Alternative to Twitter
- Ruby
Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server. A decentralized alternative to commercial platforms, it avoids the risks of a single company monopolizing your communication. Anyone can run Mastodon and participate in the social network seamlessly.social-networkingsocial-mediamicro-bloggingtwitter-alternative
Statusnet – Microblogging platform powers Identi.ca
- PHP
StatusNet is a microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company, or group to exchange short (140 character) messages over the Web. Users can choose which people to “follow” and receive only their friends’ or colleagues’ status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter or Yammer.social-networkingweb20twitter-alternativemicrobloggingsocial
Buddypress – Social Networking features in WordPress
- PHP
BuddyPress provides social networking features to a WordPress. It works well to enable people with similar interests to connect and communicate. It supports Content tagging, Grouping of similar activity stream items, AJAX live updating of site wide activity stream, Message archive, Better XProfile management and lot more.social-networkingsocialweb20blog
kigg – Social bookmarking engine in ASP.NET
- ASPNET
KiGG is a Web 2.0 style social news web application developed in Microsoft supported technologies. It allows multiple users to store, share and tag their favorite links online. The links could be tagged and Users will allowed to vote up or down the links. It rates the User based on their links posted and votes received. SQL Server or MySQL could be used as database back end. It powers websites DotNetShoutout.com – A site where you find links for .NET stories.bookmark-enginesocial-bookmarksocial-publishingsocial-networkingweb20
Hotaru CMS – Plugin Powered PHP based CMS Engine
- PHP
Hotaru CMS is a PHP platform for building your own websites. The most common use for Hotaru is social bookmarking. It has all the plugins you need to make your own Digg-style community. It is a framework for making websites customized to your needs.social-bookmarksocial-publishingsocial-networkingcmscontent-management-system
Elgg
- PHP
A powerful open source social networking platform. It provides the components you need to build a fully-featured social environment, including Profiles, Groups, Activity Streams, Access controls, Blogging / Microblogging, Web Services API etc.social-networkingsocialweb20micro-bloggblog
Voten – The code that powers voten.co
- PHP
Voten.co is a real-time social bookmarking for the 21st century. It’s real-time, beautiful, customizable yet simple.social-networkingsocialbookmarkingvuejslaravelsocial-bookmarkingredditreddit-alternative
Voat – Media aggregator and an alternative to Reddit
- CSharp
Voat (pronounced voat as in goat) officially launched in April 2014 as a media aggregator website featuring user-posted content.redditreddit-alternativesocial-bookmarkingsocial-networkingmedia-aggregator
Photographer.io – Photo Sharing Community
- Ruby
Photographer.io is a new photo community for sharing your photographs. You can Upload, organise, and share your photographs. Every user can make a maximum of 10 recommendations per day. A recommendation helps promote the photo on our recommended page but will soon recommend the photo to your followers too.photo-sharingphotosocial-networkingsharingsocial
Pinry – A tiling image board system, Alternative to Pinterest
- Python
Pinry is a a tiling image board system for people who want to save, tag, and share images, videos and webpages.social-networkingimage-boardimageweb20
GNU Social – Microblogging, Alternative to Twitter
- PHP
GNU social is a free social networking platform and it is a continuation of the StatusNet project. It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short status updates, do polls, announce events, or other social activities (and you can add more!). Users can choose which people to “follow” and receive only their friends’ or colleagues’ status messages. It provides a similar service to proprietary social network sites, but is much more awesome.social-networkingsocial-networktwitter-alternativemicrobloggingtwitter-api
pump.io – Social server with an ActivityStreams API
- Javascript
pump.io is a stream server that does most of what people really want from a social network. You post anything and my followers see it. It is an alternative to twitter. You can post almost anything that can be represented with activity streams — short or long text, bookmarks, images, video, audio, events, geo checkins. You can follow friends, create lists of people, and so on.federationsocial-networkdecentralizationsocialactivitystreamsstreamsapiapp-serversocial-networkingtwitter-alternative
Friendica – Facebook alternative
- PHP
Friendica is a communications platform for integrated social communications utilising decentralised communications and linkage to several indie social projects as well as popular mainstream providers. It provides fully distributed communications protocols (“DFRN” and “Zot!”) for securely sharing with your friends across the internet.socialsocial-networkingsocial-communication-serverfacebook-alternative
Conclusion
Social Media Open Source is a blog created to collect open source social media tools, apps and software used by pros. It will be constantly updated with articles giving you the list of apps or online tools designed by professional marketers and their main use. You don’t have to take my word for it, as all are backed with screenshots and links to the exact tool or app.