About 1 year ago, I switched to identi.ca, an open-source microblogging service. Most of the open source folks moved from Twitter to identi.ca, it had (and still has) a quite some advantages over Twitter. See this article for a comparison among these two services. There was not much to lose, I could still forward my tweets to Twitter. But after one year I've pretty much had it with this service. There are quite some nice people out there, but the service was getting on my nerves. What follows here is a rant, you've been warned.

The problem I quickly encountered with identi.ca was the fact that I see all reply notices to people I don't follow. With Twitter, you can filter those, but not with identi.ca. It makes following some verbose people quite difficult, resulting in unfollowing them in the end. After about three months I had enough and installed Apache, PHP and MySQL on my workstation and installed laconica from Git (laconica is the project name of today's status.net). Despite the fact that I was not very familiar with the code base, I managed to create a patch which introduces an option to filter @replies to people you don't follow. I posted the patch to the laconica mailing list. At first it was completely ignored, then mr. Identica (@evan) said he didn't trust the patch (regarding caching and what not). Later it appeared he didn't look at the patch at all and drawn some premature conclusions. He told me to apply it, and then... nothing. I reminded him by e-mail quite some time later on and no response. Another while later I tried again, but some parts of the code were heavily rewritten and my patch wouldn't apply anymore. I had to start from scratch again. Screw this feature. That was the first and last time I contribute to this project.

Another problem with identi.ca is spam. There are two different kinds of spam: real spam and group spam.

Group spam occurs when people send a message to more than 3 groups, with messages like:

"just installed linux, lol !linux !ubuntu !archlinux !gnu !kubuntu !kde !vim !amarok !cli !q"

This is not a technical problem, but a social problem. People should be educated not to send a message to more than 2 groups at the same time. Of course I could also unsubscribe from some/all groups, but then I would miss some other interesting bits. Related to group spam, every now and then a flamewar appeared on one of the groups. It made me unsubscribe from the KDE group, every week a new KDE vs. GNOME discussion. A pity, because KDE is the project I really care about, and now I would miss some bits which are interesting.

As identi.ca gained more popularity, it also attracted more spammers to join the service. Spammers were supposed to be mentioned by writing a dent to the spam report group or the support account. It took the developers many many months to introduce a Flag button for each account. Also, the status.net Wiki and bug tracker were/are quite attractive to spam. Take the bug report I linked above, it contains a spam link which got never removed. To me a sign the developers didn't care one bit about solving spam problems.

A minor problem was the Facebook connection. Back in the days I still had Facebook, it would've been cool to automatically forward my dents to Facebook, like identi.ca does for Twitter. I never got this feature working, but it worked for other people. @bugabundo kindly filed a request at the identi.ca support channel to look for assistance. I never heard anything back (not that I expected to, actually). Oh well, a little later on I ditched Facebook anyway, so I couldn't be bothered with it anymore.

Back in the 'early' days, Twitter used to have XMMP support (i.e. Jabber), which allowed you to tweet from your instant messenger. Twitter silently dropped this feature as the service had major scaling issues. identi.ca to the rescue, they still provide an XMMP interface. But it never ran for one week reliably. I constantly heard people complain that the service was down or not responding. For instance, when you send a dent longer than 140 characters, the service is supposed to notify you about that. Sometimes that didn't work, a bit annoying. And often when I wrote something with XMMP, I found myself checking the website immediately to check whether it has arrived. That pretty much invalidates the advantage of XMMP over web.

And this is the last complaint, it is what made me leave identi.ca and go back to Twitter. identi.ca is considered as a laboratory for the status.net project, where they install all broken alpha releases, beta releases and release candidates. It's by far the largest status.net installation in the world and they treat their users like lab rats. After each upgrade, you are assured that XMMP is down, dents are not arriving or the complete service is down. And once they finally fixed all problems, they think it's a pretty good idea to install yet another beta which breaks other things again.
I thought Twitter was pretty bad at this, but I think they have learnt their lesson. They still show some problems every now and then, but not as often as identi.ca. Today I had enough of it, my dents didn't hit the anyone's timeline or the public timeline (it was in my profile, though). Ironically, the dent about dropping identi.ca also didn't reach out, I think (edit: 2 hours too late).

So after this whole list of complaints, I'm pretty much suprised I used identi.ca that long. Normally I would stop using a service showing this poor quality, but it was the nice group of people I followed (mostly KDE folks) which kept the service interesting for me. But now I'm going back to Twitter, and maybe go back to identi.ca when they have their act together.