Lovd is made by Less Everything (http://lesseverything.com/), which runs a thriving contract development firm and makes a beautifully elegant accounting application (http://lessaccounting.com/). We think Lovd is great---in fact, you'll find some Lovd code inside the current Insoshi code base, with more to come---but it's a side project for them. In contrast, Insoshi is our sole focus, which means we have more resources for community-building, documentation (http://docs.insoshi.com/), and future development.

Lovdbyless is impressive, but it is mysql-specific and depends on some non-standard plugins to work (one of them is proprietary, somebody correct me pls if I've understood it wrong).

Insoshi on the other hand is DB agnostic, works beautifully out of the box with sqlite3 (or mysql) and does not require any esoteric plugins.

Elimination of unneeded dependencies is a major requirement for me so I consider Insoshi a winner.

I am pretty sure that lovd is db agnostic. And it uses no proprietary or "non-standard" plugins. Can someone tell me what a "non-standard" plugin is? For that matter, what is an "esoteric" plugin? This smells like fud me.

>And it uses no proprietary or "non-standard" plugins

It does. http://ostatic.com/158658-blog/is-lovd-by-less-really-open-s...:

"Lovd by Less touts itself as an open-source platform for social networking. And indeed, the software itself is released under an open-source license, and provides some useful functionality. However, restrictions on some of its essential plug-ins raise questions about its actual licensing status."