Re: [buddycloud-dev] email metadata

> The fun thing is that once libre social networks integrate e-mail, they will
> become, on some very basic level, interoperable.

Friendica had email integration just after OStatus and before Diaspora. 
It's just another conversation stream made up of messages. Granted there 
are a few policy rules which govern email in social streams - the 
conversations are assumed to be private; unlike OStatus where 
conversations are assumed to be public. Identity is often fiction, and 
friendship has no provenance.  Distributed deletion doesn't work; which 
presents privacy issues to other networks where it does. There are 
rarely any identifiable profile pages and often no profile photos unless 
you use gravatar, libravatar, or try to revive the old Unix "faces" 
protocol.

Once again, sending messages back and forth (even between different 
protocol stacks) isn't rocket science. Dealing with policy differences 
between different communication system is where it gets interesting.  An 
abstraction layer has to account for different privacy models as well as 
different content deletion models as well as different access control 
and message distribution models.  There is no one-to-one mapping of 
anything. It is definitely not "impossiburu" because we did a fair job 
of pulling it off, but you can't take either apples or oranges - and 
make grape juice.

You *can* make fruit salad. But as we discovered, that may not be what 
your customers want.  And therein lies the rub.

Received on Tuesday, 30 July 2013 08:36:45 UTC