Brad Kozlek

Why I Am Using Known

2 min read

Why I am using known.

You may be noticing that I am posting this using a self-hosted version of known. I am very excited about the prospects for this piece of software. And since I am feeling like I am moving into an upswing in my public online activity, it is a perfect time to give this a whirl.

Here is why I like known:

It is social at its core.  Known's primary metaphor is a "person" as opposed to a "website."  It is easy to post stuff, you simply add content with a simple bar that appears on the top of your site if you are logged in. No dashboard, no pages and pages of settings with language related to a web site. It is much simpler, very much in the vein of tumblr or twitter.

Known makes it easy to create course hubs for individual student blogs. Setting something like this up with wordpress is a bit of a hack and takes some work to get going. In known, this functionality seems to be a first-class citizen.

Although it is not there now, I see the ability to follow other people from their own sites being built in to the platform as well. What’s great about this is that the network is not centralized like it would be with the giants in this space (twitter, tumblr, etc) as well as other open source implementations of social networks, which still are based on creating one central installation which everyone must use to be part of the network (think of buddypress or statusnet). If there is going to be a solution to people connecting online that is not ad-based, then a distributed model might be the only way such a thing might work.

This stuff is still in the very early stages, but the model and the attempt are both things I want to be part of exploring. This exploration is why I am self-hosting known and not using their managed service. I hope I can make it better by digging into the code a little bit and experimenting with some modifications. Or at the very least I can use some of my own modifications for my own site, even if they only make sense for me.