Why make or contribute to a Twitter alternative? What might motivate someone to work on a social media alternative? I had the good fortune of asking these and other questions to Carol Nichols, an open source software developer and longtime contributor to rstat.us, a microblogging service (see the S-MAP collection on rstat.us here, and you can read Nichols’s discussion of the rstat.us API here). In this interview, she talks about the rise of rstat.us, its organization, and its relationship to the mainstream Twitter.

RWG: Tell me the basic background on rstat.us. How did it come about? Who came up with the idea? How were others recruited for involvement?

Nichols: I wasn’t involved in the initial frenzied few weeks that got rstat.us to its MVP, but from what I understand, Steve Klabnik and some of his friends in Pittsburgh were inspired/incited by the dickbar (that’s the term of endearment that the Twitter QuickBar earned).  Most of the frustration about the dickbar was the feeling that these were YOUR tweets, and the tweets of YOUR friends, but Twitter had control over how you interacted with those and could assert that control to do whatever they wanted at any time. Twitter has done a number of things its users aren’t happy about since then, and every time rstat.us got a bit of attention.

Steve Klabnik is kind of a big deal in certain circles on the internet, so rstat.us’s initial popularity was mostly due to his publicizing it. His circles are mainly other open source programmers, and since rstat.us is open source, anyone who wanted to help could just jump in. There’s an IRC room on freenode, #rstatus, where people used to coordinate and collaborate on development (it’s pretty quiet now).

I got involved because of Steve– I also live in Pittsburgh as he did at the time. I started using rstat.us and wanting it to do more, so I started submitting code. Eventually, Steve and most of his friends got tired of working on it, and as I was the only person really working on it at that point, Steve decided to give control of the rstat.us domain to me. I tried to label well-defined, smallish issues in github as “Pick me!!!” to help people who wanted to contribute but didn’t know what to work on.

I can’t remember anyone doing any formal recruitment; it was all pretty organic.

RWG: Rstat.us is open source. Why is that important?

Nichols: It’s important that rstat.us is open source because at any time, anyone can take the code of rstat.us and run their own social network with it. Anyone can take the code and modify it to do something else if they disagree with any decision we’ve made. Anyone can read the code before they run it to verify that it isn’t doing anything they don’t want it to do. And now that we’ve all kind of burnt out on it, if anyone else wanted to continue where we left off (or simply learn from our attempt), they can.

RWG: How is rstat.us related to Twitter?

Nichols: rstat.us implements Twitter OAuth so that you can sign into rstat.us using your Twitter account instead of creating a new account on rstat.us, if you want. If you do that, you can also syndicate your posts from rstat.us to Twitter so that you can post both places at once. We can’t pull any content from Twitter back into rstat.us though, since that’s against their TOS and/or API restrictions. rstat.us also pretty clearly inspired by Twitter.

RWG: So if we can cross-post from rstat.us to Twitter, why do we need rstat.us? Why not just use Twitter?

Nichols: Yeah, and I’m as guilty of staying on Twitter instead of using rstat.us as anyone. But things of various severity that sometimes make me want to stop using Twitter include:

• the ever-increasing amount of ads
• the lack of granular privacy/blocking/harassment reporting features
• the possible compliance of Twitter with law enforcement/government agencies in revealing even private account information
• weird User Interface decisions they make like the blue conversation threading
• the hostility Twitter has towards 3rd party app developers
• they’ve started putting tweets from people you don’t follow in your timeline
• they’ve stated they will start curating your timeline for you like facebook does in the near future

Especially since Twitter has gone public, and really since they started taking VC, it’s to be expected that they will always be making changes that will make them the most money, not those that will make their users the most happy and safe.

RWG: I’d like you to elaborate a bit on this. What is your take on the evolution of Twitter? How has it changed  over time? How have those changes affected its value to end users?

Nichols: I was just listening to an NPR Marketplace segment on the stock prices of Twitter and Facebook and things that are affecting it, and they talked about how Twitter is being judged on their Monthly Active User count, which is a measure of how many people are seeing ads on the site. And it’s just so depressing. I use Twitter to keep in touch with friends, to keep up with things happening in the open source software world and the world at large, and to make new connections with people I wouldn’t otherwise meet. So my measurements of whether Twitter is working well for me are not aligned at all with Twitter’s measurements. They don’t have my interests in mind at all.

However, the network effects are making it difficult for me to move to using rstat.us instead of Twitter all the time, since if no one I know is using an rstat.us-compatible tool, I can’t get the things I want there either.

I wasn’t on Twitter in its very early days, but from what I’ve heard, the service evolved a lot because of how the users shaped it: retweets and hashtags were something users started doing on their own, and THEN the service started native retweets that wouldn’t use more characters and linking hashtags. I know once you get a user base the size of Twitter’s, you’re never going to make everyone happy, but it seems like now they’re actively ignoring the needs of their users in order to serve the needs of their advertisers and shareholders.

I’ve been lucky enough to not experience massive harassment on Twitter, but their current way of handling threats made on their service is unacceptable and they don’t seem interested in fixing it. I don’t see people, especially women, staying there too much longer if it continues to be so easy to harass people without consequences (and in fact several women I know have recently left or taken their account private). Not that I have perfect solutions for rstat.us, but it seems like Twitter isn’t even trying.

RWG: How is work on rstat.us organized? How do people decide who contributes what?

Nichols: Right now, not much of anyone is contributing anything, unfortunately. I mentioned the “Pick me!!” github label above– we also have “In progress” if someone is currently working on a feature or bug, and a few other topics to help people find things they’d be interested and able to do.

When many people were actively developing, we had a few policies:

• No one merges their changes directly into the master branch– everyone must submit a pull request and another committer has to do a code review and merge it for you.
• If you have had one pull request accepted, you became a committer with push access to the repository– this means you could code review other people’s pull requests.
• Only a very limited number of people could deploy code to the version running at http://rstat.us or access the production database– it was just Steve for a while, then just me, and now it’s just wilkie.

Other open source projects are more centralized– they have one or a small number of maintainers/owners who are the only ones able to merge a pull request into the master branch. I really like the way we went about doing it– it gave people a sense of ownership really early on and we had a few people who were really helpful about reviewing other people’s work so that we didn’t have a bottleneck of only a few people able to do that. The nature of git is such that no one could really do irreparable damage with these privileges.

RWG: Up until recently, rstat.us was overrun by spambots. How did this happen? Was this expected? Did you try to prevent it?

Nichols: I think we’re in some SEO tool(s) that post links– I just did some looking into it and rstat.us was on some lists of “instant approval, dofollow links” sites to post to for SEO purposes.

We totally should have expected this, since spambots seem to try submitting any form on the Internet these days. We didn’t start thinking about handling until it was already a pretty high volume. If you were signed in and only looking at the list of updates from people you follow, it wasn’t very noticeable– but the homepage with the latest updates from all accounts became all spam, all the time.

As an all-volunteer team, we definitely didn’t have the time to go around banning accounts or sift through reports of spam. And, really, the goal was never to make http://rstat.us a high-quality destination site in itself– we wanted people to be running the rstat.us codebase themselves, in which case you only need 1 account. So we ended up recently deleting all posts from http://rstat.us, disabling signups, and having an option to disable signups after the first user is created for anyone running their own node.

A bunch of our discussions about this on github: here, here, and here.

RWG: How do you think about rstat.us and any potential intellectual property issues you might have as you make a Twitter alternative? Are you concerned about Twitter suing rstat.us for copying any aspects of its functionality or design? How do you think about the legal aspects of your project?

Nichols: We’ve been really careful not to violate Twitter’s TOS, even in gray areas. I could definitely see them trying to sue us, if they decide to patent “posting text on the internet in 140 character segments” or something, which I hope wouldn’t be patentable but Amazon has one-click buying patented so who knows. We’re also a pretty nebulous organization, and we aren’t making any money from this, so I have vague hopes that this would make it not worth Twitter’s while to try and sue us, but I am not a lawyer. If they would try to sue a group including me personally, I think it would be pretty fun to go to bat over this, and I would hope organizations like the EFF would help.

As far as the legal aspects of our project in general, we’ve tried to do what we think is ethical, since a lot of our work doesn’t have relevant laws that have been tested in court yet. We changed the license from WTFPL to CC0 at some point, and did the best we could to contact all contributors when doing so, including here and here.

That’s probably the biggest legal issue we’ve dealt with so far.

I think we need more technology-aware lawyers, judges, and political representatives as more and more of our life happens on the Internet… hearing court decisions or laws and the misconceptions and conclusions they draw based on their limited knowledge makes me cringe. Like the European attempt to create a “right to be forgotten” — it sounds nice in theory, but it’s just not possible. Again, I don’t have any solutions for this though.