ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ Herman's blog

Miscellaneous updates

Hi everyone,

Just some updates about upcoming travel and events; responses to the recent post about social media platforms; and some thoughts about the Bear license update.

Travel

I'll be heading to Istanbul next week for Microconf, which is a yearly conference where non-venture track founders get together, explore a new city, and learn from one another. I had meant to go to the one last year in Croatia, but had just gotten back from two months in Vietnam, and the thought of travelling again so soon felt daunting.

I've made two Bear t-shirts for the conference. One light and one dark mode—inspired by the default Bear theme. Let's see if anyone notices!

bear-shirts

If you live in Istanbul and want to grab coffee, I'm keen! If you've previously travelled to Istanbul and have recommendations for me, please pop me an email. I have a few days to explore the city.

Slow social media

I received so many great emails from people about my post on slow social media. There are many great projects underway at the moment, and many great projects that unfortunately didn't make it. Some notable standouts to me:

Unfortunately no longer with us:

Here are some projects that are up-and-running. These aren't necessarily all "social networks", nor necessarily viable at scale, but each of them has an element or two that makes them interesting.

There were many other projects in various states of development that I haven't had the time to fully explore yet, but I'll get to them over the next week or so.

Bear licence update

Somehow my post about the change in the Bear source code license exploded on Hacker News, Tildes, Lobsters, and Reddit, and has been read over 120,000 times.

The vast majority of the emails and responses I received were positive, but about 10% of the Hacker News crowd got really mean about it without taking the time to understand the context. I guess I can't expect empathy from 120,000 people.

Regardless, if you're interested in reading about the controversy The Grizzly Gazette covered it quite well.

While I don't feed the trolls on Hacker News (and find comments to be a pretty poor place to have nuanced discussions in general), I'd like to respond to a few of the main critiques here.

  1. "You built a community and then exploited it!" (I'm paraphrasing here)

While Bear (the platform) has a community—and a very good one at that; the source-code part of Bear has never been community oriented. Bear doesn't accept code contributions and the code has been written by me personally. I have not engaged in the exploitation of free developer labour, nor used it being open-source as marketing material.

I suspect that these kinds of comments arose from the (justified, but ultimately misguided) assumption that the Bear project had active contributors and a community surrounding the code itself.

  1. "Get your license right the first time!" (also paraphrasing)

Yes, I shouldn't have released Bear on an MIT license in the beginning. I didn't even think about licenses when I launched Bear in 2020 and just used the default. I also didn't expect free-ride competition to be an issue in this space. So, this is a justifiable criticism, even if it feels like it was made in bad faith.

  1. "Use a GPL instead of a source-available license" (yes, also paraphrasing)

This was a common criticism, but fails to resolve the main reason for this change: people forking and hosting a clone of Bear under a new name, social elements and all. The AGPLv3 license only specifies that they would need to release their version of the code under the same license. This doesn't dissuade free-ride competition, at least not in this context.

Bear's source code was never meant to be used by people to set up competing services to Bear. It was there to ensure that people understand what's going on under the hood, and to make the platform auditable. I specify this in the CONTRIBUTIONS.md that was last updated 2 years ago.

In summary, Bear is a platform, not a piece of self-hostable software. I think these criticisms are justified sans-context. With context, I don't think the same arguments would have been made. But Hacker News is well known for nasty comments based on the title of the post alone.

fin

Aaand we're done! Lots of updates. Please feel free to email me your thoughts, recommendations, or anything else. If you haven't dug through my past posts, here're a few lesser-read posts that I enjoyed writing:

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Have a goodie!