My review of Becovi Search made a brief cameo appearance on page 1 of Hacker News. Hacker News page 1 cameos lead to the appearance of interesting referrers in our Koko Analytics referrer logs. One referrer, Mokum.place, caught my attention.
Mokum describes itself as a “small-scale Firefly-class social network.” It is available in English, Russian, Italian, and Turkish (Russian and Turkish appeared to be the most commonly-used languages from my cursory look at Mokum’s time-line). It has a very minimalistic user interface and its functionality seems to resemble Twitter, but with a bigger character limit (Pleroma may be a good analogue for those who are familiar with the Fediverse).
Mokum states that it was founded in 2015 and is privately owned and funded through community donations (it appears to have been created as a replacement for FriendFeed). An earlier version of the About Page (July 2021) listed contributors to the project and similar social networks. I was curious if Mokum was open source, but it does not seem to be. One of the similar projects in noted in 2021, FreeFeed, is open source. Mokum’s lacks ads, but it does record IP addresses and use Google Analytics (see archived privacy policy).
I was curious how we were linked on Mokum. It appears that someone created a Hacker News account (or bot) for Mokum.place which aggregates tweets from various Hacker News accounts. We appeared in one of its posts after our brief page 1 appearance.