Insoshi

» see insoshi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In December 2007 Michael Hartl moved to Silicon Valley with Long Nguyen, his friend and former college roommate, for Y Combinator's Winter 2008 batch. Hartl had a physics doctorate from Caltech and had co-written a book called RailsSpace, a tutorial that walked readers through building a social networking site in Ruby on Rails. Insoshi was that book turned into a company.

The product was a complete social networking platform you could download and run yourself: profiles, friend connections, messaging, forums, photos, blogs. It was MIT licensed, so you could take it, change it, and keep your changes to yourself. The public repository went up in April 2008, a few months after GitHub itself opened, and for a while Insoshi was one of the most forked projects on the whole site. The P2P Foundation was still writing about it on 5 February 2009, under the headline "Open Source INSOSHI - The Next Facebook?"

The answer was no, for reasons that sat entirely outside the code.

~ the dossier ~

~ the open source facebook ~

The pitch made sense in 2008 in a way that is easy to lose now. Facebook was still gated and growing, and Ning was selling hosted networks by the thousand. A great many organizations wanted a social network for their own members without handing the membership list to a company in California. Insoshi's answer was that you should own the code and the database. A university department, a company, a fan community, anybody could stand up their own network and nobody could change the terms on them later.

What nobody had solved, and what Insoshi did not solve either, was the part that has killed every self-hosted social network since: the value of a social network is the people already on it, and installing software does not deliver any. Every fork started empty.

~ october 2008 ~

By Hartl's own account they came close. They had nearly raised a significant round in October 2008, about the worst month in modern memory to have a term sheet out. Lehman Brothers had collapsed in September and the venture market shut within weeks. The money did not arrive, and the public repository's last substantial activity dates from that same month. They shut the business down early in 2009. The open source project carried on under its own momentum for a while afterward, as abandoned code does when the license lets anyone pick it up.

~ the part that outlived it ~

Hartl's conclusion from the experience was that he had picked a structure where everything depended on one binary outcome, and that he wanted a medium-risk business instead. What he built next was the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, a book and screencast series teaching people to build web applications. It became the standard introduction to Rails and taught a very large number of working developers their first framework.

I was finishing university in those years and Rails was not the stack around me. In Turkey in 2008 the web was PHP, and the English-speaking startup world's enthusiasm for Ruby arrived here later and thinner. The company is a footnote nobody outside the valley noticed closing. The textbook that came out of its failure is on far more hard drives than the platform ever was, and that trade was not available to the founders at the time.

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