I’ve evangelized Identi.ca to a few friends who use Twitter and are only somewhat familiar with free software. A lot of these friends sign onto Identi.ca and immediately post, “I don’t understand why I would use this instead of Twitter.”
The capsule answer is that Identi.ca is free software, meaning that anyone is free to download the code, share it, or change it to make it better. As a result, Identi.ca is developed through individual contributions from its user community, rather than according to the desires or needs of a single company. Some people (like me) believe this freedom and cooperative effort have inherent value even when they don’t work or produce measurably better results, which is the same thing I believe about democracy. And when a program’s users are not beholden to a single company for new features and bug fixes, many people (like me) also believe better software will often result.
But to get specific about the Identi.ca v. Twitter issue, here are some advantages of Identi.ca over Twitter which are more or less the result of its community development model and ethic:
- Identi.ca is not a monolithic service. This is the big one: Identi.ca’s underlying software, Laconica, can be installed on other websites (you could even install it on yours), and users on one site can subscribe to users on another. Identi.ca calls this “federation” — the upshot is that if the people running Identi.ca get lazy and stop fixing bugs or creating new features, or if they adopt insane Terms of Use, you can take your data and set up camp at another site. Federation also means less downtime; Identi.ca initially sprang into being while Twitter was experiencing frequent failures due to a combination of popularity and poorly scaling software design. Because Laconica users can be distributed across multiple sites, those sites can share the load and decrease the likelihood of any one server being overwhelmed.
- Groups. In addition to tagging posts with #tag, Identi.ca allows users to form groups and tag posts with !group. That way, your feed will show any post directed to your group, even if you’re not subscribed to the user who posted it.
This is not to say that Identi.ca outshines Twitter in all areas — it’s younger, still building a user base, and there aren’t as many applications out there yet. But Identi.ca is built like web applications should be, because it keeps the power in the hands of the users. Among other things, this is insurance against the constant privacy invasions that plague Facebook and other social networking sites. It’s something users should demand, and the best way to assert your rights is by using Identi.ca and other free/open services when possible.