Why do you believe this, though? Would a BSD/MIT/X11 (even LGPL) license not be more appropriate?
I think the AGPL works very well for applications that employ it. I simply think that perhaps this one shouldn't. Instead of threatening to legally bludgeon non-free versions, it should just work better or have more value than a non-free version.
That's a real sneaky way to describe copyright infringement.
Anything you can do with a piece of AGPL code you can also do with the same piece of MIT code. The opposite is not true.
The reason GPL works so well on Linux is because it doesn't affect licensing of the software that runs on top of Linux or connnects to it. AGPL works around.
The alternative to AGPL software isn't necessarily no software or only non-free software but often code with much simpler licenses.
Was it a good choice? I'd say not.
It seems like a cool idea for a project, certainly, but it's more of a tech demo than a social network because it doesn't have users yet.
I am trying it now, though. And I'll edit this post (or reply to it) with my findings.
EDIT 1: Requires a password instead of public key auth. Will someone get it right, ever?
EDIT 2: And as quickly as it began, it ends. There's no one for me to talk to, really. There are some post lists (the Comics community is actually the biggest, to which pr0n is second) and those are somewhat interesting (except for the fact that all the comics are in French except for CommitStrip, which is ordinarily in French but has an English translation).
The News tab is filled with Buzzfeed-esque articles, rather than being prepopulated with something sensible like Slashdot or HN or Science News (know your audience!).
Looking at most of the public profiles, if they've posted anything to their feeds, it'll be something like "test" and it'll have been posted in April of this year (so it's not worth sending them a contact request in all likelihood).
EDIT 3: I made first contact with a user named "Jake", in a mailing thread. And I got one message back from him. And that seems to be the end of that.
And the end of this.
I hope that a reader could see that I really, really tried to make it work, short of inviting my friends to use it (we already have communication platforms, I'm definitely not going to be able to convince them :)
Too bad.
EDIT 4: Jake and I are having a conversation in chat, actually. We can agree that the design work is impeccable, and that a lot of the details behind the network are charming. He notes, however, that these new platforms "don't put enough effort into community engagement".
EDIT 5 (last): I had a genuinely human experience on a "distributed social network". It's possible if you try hard enough, you just have to power through all of the hurdles. With some algorithmic optimization I'm sure this project could live to see mainstream use. If anyone else is up for a conversation about this, I'm [email protected].