App.net

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App.net (ADN) was a microblogging silo similar to Twitter for posting notes of up to 256 [1] characters in length. It closed 2017-03-14. [2]

When it launched, App.net had pay-to-use model. Since launch they've added a free registration option.

App.net has a proprietary snowflake API similar to Twitter.

How to

Export your data from ADN

It was possible to export your data from ADN before it shut down.

App.net sent an email with a link to a ZIP file which contained all posts, messages etc. in JSON files with the same format as their (snowflake) API.

Open Source Components

As part of Dalton Caldwell's response to User:Brennannovak.com about his plans with App.net he claimed a "Commitment to coordinate between internal and external parties to create and support open-source lightweight clients..."

App.net has held true to this claim and have thus far open sourced the code for the private messaging clients Omega.app.net which is built on the App.net platform. Additionally ADN posted their entire documentation for their platform which makes it much easier for developers operating outside the eco-system to easily build / contribute tools that will interface with them in a more IndieWeb friendly fashion.

IndieWeb Friendly Components

App.net had promised support for various open social web standards. They rolled out some indieweb friendly support:

PuSH support both as a publisher and (!) a subscriber, i.e. you can POSSE to App.net without writing a single line of code if you already publish an ATOM feed
rel-me support for verified domains, enabling use as an indieauth provider
microformats2 support on feeds and post permalinks including h-card and h-entry
displays a link to the canonical version of your own posts (example)

Some launch dates:

2013-04-29 rel-me support launched as the key building block for App.net Domain Verification
- thus authentication provider for Web Sign-in and RelMeAuth
2013-08-07 microformats2 support added.
- h-entry and h-card [3]
- per Dalton Caldwell: Response to Brennan Novak, part II

History

Previous Posts about app.net and other history.

POSSE to ADN

PourOver

App.net provided a utility called PourOver for syndicating posts into app.net from an RSS feed. You can read their blog post announcement. Using this utility, you could syndicate in a feed in real time since PourOver will subscribe to your PubSubHubbub-enabled feed.

This method also automatically added the "crosspost" annotation, which is App.net's way of indicating the canonical version of a post. This makes the posts look like native App.net posts and also provides a link back to your canonical post on your domain. You can see an example of a syndicated post from @aaronpk here.

IndieWebCamp community members who did this:

Aaron Parecki

IFTTT

Summary: Setup an IFTTT rule to pull from your site feed and post to ADN accordingly, then poll your ADN feed to retrieve syndication permalinks and update your original posts to link to them with rel-syndication

POSSE to ADN flow description:

post to your own site
IFTTT periodically polls your Atom feed and syndicates it to ADN
Have your site/server periodically poll your ADN feed (e.g. tommorris's ADN feed, in case that helps to find yours)
Determine what the ADN URL is for each original post permalink URL by looking at link elements like this:
<atom:link href="PERMALINK" type="text/html" rel="source" />
where PERMALINK is the actual http(s) permalink URL to your post.
Update the posts on your site to link to the ADN syndication copy with rel-syndication.

IndieWebCamp community members who did this:

User:Tommorris.org uses IFTTT to syndicate (POSSE) copies of his posts to App.net. Very simply, this is done by having a custom Atom feed that publishes the body content of each entry. IFTTT then republishes this to app.net.
- Since ADN provides the capability to set the "from" of a post, which Tom sets to the original permalink of his post using rel="source" in his feed as noted above. E.g.
  - ADN post links with text "from tommorris.org" to the original article
  - ADN ellipsed post which similarly links to the complete note
  - Code used to poll app.net feed and update original posts in Ferocity to link to their ADN syndicated copies with rel=syndication.
...

This is now deprecated as of 2016-03 as IF have removed the App.net channel.

API Access

If you had paid for an ADN API key, your site could send a copy of your posts directly to ADN using their API (instead of using and waiting for IFTTT to do so, and then polling for the ADN syndication permalink after the fact).

Using this method you could also send the canonical link to your post at the same time you create the post on App.net. To do this, you used the crosspost annotation field.

IndieWeb Friendly Potential

App.net had a developer community of apps and specifically integrations that allowed for interesting indieweb friendly potential:

2017

It was announced on 2017-01-12 that the site would be shut down.

The site became completely unavailable on 2017-03-14.

2014

On May 6th, 2014 App.net has published a "State of the Union" blog post in which they have announced a team layoff and end of the Developer Incentive Program due to low subscription renewal rates: http://web.archive.org/web/20170215080905/http://blog.app.net:80/2014/05/06/app-net-state-of-the-union/

They explicitly stated that the service would keep on running "on an indefinite basis". (However 2017-01-12 (see above) shut down was announced)

Developer Incentive Program

Also of interest is that App.net offers a developer incentive program for developers who build apps that interact on the App.net platform. Each month paying App.net customers are asked to vote on the quality of the apps they use. The total scores of the most highly ranked apps then receive a relative percentage of the $30,000 monthly pool. Read more about it here:

This seems like a ripe opportunity for a talented IndieWebDev to build a "hub" type app that does all the heavy lifting of web mentions, favoriting, following, and federation of data between Indie nodes and App.net networks. The end goal would be to allow any person on Alpha.App.net (or other App.net networks) to seamlessly publish and reply between networks once they've authenticated the app!

The Developer Incentive Program was shut down with the SOTU announcement of 2014 (see below).

2013

Issues

As of 2013-09-23, App.net reply permalink pages (example) mark up the reply context and actual reply using h-entry, but on the same level, leading to mis-parsing (example) The reply context h-entry should be changed to a h-cite, and made a child of the main h-entry on the u-in-reply-to property (e.g. with a class attribute like class="u-in-reply-to h-cite"), as detailed at reply-context#Markup --Waterpigs.co.uk 15:05, 23 September 2013 (PDT)

2012

https://social-igniter.com/blog/2012/08/why-we-support-app-dot-net
- http://daltoncaldwell.com/a-response-to-brennan-novak