Re: Linked in Alternative - free / privacy respecting

[robbt]

A Libre Social Network focused on developer skills/profiles would be 
interesting but I'm not aware of anything like that currently in 
existence. Good idea, but building it would take a lot of time and effort.

One of the major challenges of building something totally libre at this 
point is finding the funding or otherwise securing the commitment of 
developers to make it happen. Keybase I think in some ways was designed 
around this concept at least with the encryption aspects but they were 
just bought by Zoom. In some ways Github operates in this sphere in 
terms of building a social graph of contributions but it is of course 
owned by Microsoft at this point and their underlying codebase has never 
been free software as far as I know. Gitlab never got as much traction 
in terms of people using it as interconnected federation of instances 
but the libre version of it is used by a lot of projects.

Thanks for sharing you conceptual ideas though, it is inspiring just to 
think about the possibilities and remember that there are other people 
who share a similar vision even if we aren't yet in a position to build it.

Robbt

On 5/14/20 2:11 PM, Paul Sutton wrote:
> Hi
>
> Not sure if this is a little off topic, I am currently on LinkedIn which
> is OK for some things but seems just sluggish and not very friendly in
> places.
>
> I wondered if there was an alternative that is more in line with the
> values of the free software community and respects privacy.
>
> Possible features
>
> 1. Could be built with free tools
> 1. Built by developers for developers, which would allow free software
> projects to find other developers (or hackers as we call them) to help
> with projects.
> 3.Perhaps enabled with Activity pub to allow a decentralized approach
> and linking to fediverse accounts.
>
> 4. With linkedIn you can pull down dates from a menu, sometimes having a
> free form entry box would perhaps be better.
>
> 5. Tags for job or other skills, this would allow easy searching by
> tags, similar to the fediverse.  if you have for example #kernel in your
> list, then anyone doing a search should be able to find others with
> kernel expertise
>
> 8 easier to add qualifications and courses,  LinkedIn seems to be rather
> clunky with this, you add a provider, then add courses and have to link
> to the provider. It may be easier to have a text box for this and you
> add in the information manually.
>
> 9.  I was asked recently on Mastodon to prove I was not a robot user, so
> something similar may actually encourage / force some sort of interaction.
>
> 10. Make it easier to add work history,  be it employment, volunteer
> etc, Friendica makes it easy to add a post, with a topic box, tag box
> and the a free form text box.  So maybe something similar. As with
> Friendica or Mastodon I can add pictures to posts, to adding a pdf /
> picture of a certificate should in theory be doable that way (may be
> better for the qualifications but that would also cover in work training.
>
> 11. Maybe have encryption and gpg built in (privacy / security)
> 12. Allow for gpg keys if you sign gpg my key you have met me, so could
> be a way to sign my profile or say I am that person (if that makes sense)
> 13. integration in to chat services or ids for chat services.
>
> I was thinking that this would make it easier to find people to help
> with development.
>
> I am not looking at developing this (I really don't have the skills or
> even know where to start), just asking if there has been any discussions
> anywhere regarding developing such a service.
>
> I know there are lots of individual projects that need help and there
> has to be an easy for developers to sign up and find where others need
> help.
>
> Thanks
>
> Regard
>
> Paul Sutton