User:Shammancer/sandbox

Libertree is a free distributed social network. The reference implementation for the server and frontend is written in Ruby.

Philosophy
Libertree is a social network free from the tentacles of commercial interests. The community is cultivated to be open and friendly towards others. The Libertree project thrives to help people experience being listened to, talked with and acknowledged, this can be seen with the relationship that the developers have nurtured with their community.

Features
Libertree follows a forest metaphor. The networks are forests, the servers are trees, the administrators are arboristas. Their are also hashtags, rivers, pools and springs. Hashtags are very similar to how they work on Twitter as they are used to mark the topic of a post. A river is a customized feed that a user creates to have displayed, his tree gathers all the posts marked with the hashtags and other preferences that he chose for his river and displays them on request. Pools are posts privately grouped together by a user so that he can organize them to his liking. Springs meanwhile are pools opened to everyone to see, they are posts grouped together by a user that anyone can explore. To facilitate inter member communications there is also a chat implementation based on websockets as well as direct messages (DMs). The text in posts and DMs are styled with markdown.

Libertree has been translated in thirteen different languages including German and French. The ramaze frontend can be styled by the user so that it can have a customized look.

Rivers
A river in libertree is quite powerful and it lets a user filter posts quite well. Users can set filters based on hashtags, words in a post, who posted the post, if it was read or liked, however the most interesting filter for rivers is the ability to filter posts with other rivers.

History
The Libertree project was founded in March 2012 by two former Diaspora* contributors. The original commit on GitHub was made on the 13th of May, 2012. Currently there are four public trees that can be found in the USA, Slovenia, Germany and France.

Future Development
Libertree is still evolving, currently in the works is making the Libertree network communicate over the XMPP protocol. There is also some discussion on adding groups.

Links

 * Libertree on GitHub