Re: Federation protocols

Hi Michal,

On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 11:44 AM, Michał 'rysiek' Woźniak
<rysiek@fwioo.pl>wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> Dnia niedziela, 2 czerwca 2013 o 17:05:30 Nick Jennings napisał(a):
> > > Correct me if I am wrong, but all of these have a similar datastructure
> > > of entries and of user profile data. Content, author, date, optional
> > > title, optional tags.
> >
> > As has been pointed out by others in this thread, the devil is in the
> > details.
> > There is a basic common-denominator, but the more you look into a social
> > network the more little things make huge differences, and that's why I
> > asked that we get more specific about what we mean by federation.
> >
> >
> > > Why are you putting "chat" into this? Chat is more real-time, instant
> > > communication. It does not make sense here.
> >
> > Why doesn't it make sense? It would make sense that two people who mutual
> > follow each other (and allow it) share their presence information. In
> which
> > case some form of instant messaging would make sense. Google & Facebook
> are
> > doing it, so why not consider it in some form?
>
> Google and Facebook are doing this as a separate service. As an add-on on
> their social networking platforms. If you're going to include chat, why
> not e-
> mail? Google is doing it, after all!
>

Sorry, but Facebook chat and Google Hangouts are integral parts of each of
their social platforms.

And yes, we should be including email. Of course. These are all methods of
communication, and used by many different social platforms in many
different ways.



> > > I can dream it up, it's quite easy. I would like to be able to have an
> > > account
> > > on any of these and be able to communicate (poke, friend, comment, etc)
> > > with
> > > any other account on any of them. Just like I can across Friendica and
> > > Diaspora to a large extent.
> > >
> > > I don't see any concrete reason why this should not be possible.
> > > Calling that a "monolithic feed", "kitchen sink" is disingenuous. It
> > > would be
> > > interoperable, yes -- that's the whole point. But "monolithic" is not
> the
> > > right word, just as "kitchen sink" is not at all appropriate, as each
> > > user would create their own environment by "friending"/"following"
> > > people and putting them into "aspects".
> >
> > You just described the ability to poke, friend, comment, etc. across any
> > number of "federated" social networks. Which would effectively mean that
> > each of those networks would have to implement each of those features. A
> > twitter clone would need to implement poking and friending? commenting
> and
> > tweeting are different concepts too. Messaging, posting, commenting,
> > tweeting, activity updates (Jim played Texas Hold'em on Facebook, on your
> > Twitter stream?)... If this is what federation is, then that's exactly
> what
> > I see as one giant monolithic feed that social networks are all expected
> to
> > support.
>
> I beg to differ. Look at StatusNet. It is a Twitter clone if I ever saw
> one,
> yet you can either have "twitter-like" un-threaded conversations or view
> them
> in a nice, Facebook-like threaded form. That's a presentation layer detail.
> That seems to answer your "commenting" question.
>

If you force the format to behave in a twitter-like method of 'tagging'
people you are talking to in your post in order for it to be considered a
comment, then yes, you could make it 'look' like a comment on a thread.

However, an actual comment to a post (ala-facebook) cannot be changed to
twitter format, since only one original post gets the comment.

Not a very pretty solution IMO. Unless you want to try to normalize the way
people "do" threads. In which case you are saying that we have a better
idea of how these sites should be structured than they do, and we are
discouraging people from innovating by saying we know what's best.

It's one thing to try to standardize what's out there, but when you try to
change existing paradigms to fit one "standard" then you are reducing your
chances of people adopting your "paradigm" in the first place.



> Friending: if you follow A, and A follows you, you have a "friend"
> relationship. Solved.
>

... except facebook has 'follow' and 'friend' as two separate things, and
following someone back does not = friend.


Poking -- I don't care much for that, but that can be implemented on the
> level
> of Private Messages or by simple:
> "@some_user poke"
>

Private messages that you can't always send, and when you can it looks dumb
unless the platform integrates it in their UI. Just to "standardize" poke?



> > Take XMPP. There are a huge number of things you can do with XMPP,
> various
> > extensions that describe certain features and provide the XMPP stanzas to
> > implement them. However, most XMPP chat clients don't support even half
> of
> > the extensions described [1].
>
> And that's a perfect reason not to have those extensions.
>
> ...not.
>
> > In the end, when you talk about XMPP federation & interoperability,
> you're
> > only really talking about *the lowest common denominator* which is
> sending
> > a message from one place to another (OK, and presence & buddy lists).
> It's
> > more common than not, that all the nifty extensions your XMPP client
> > supports will not show up in someone elses chat (encryption,
> alert/buzzing,
> > even 'user is typing' /'user has stopped typing' is an extension not
> every
> > chat client supports).
>
> It's still much better than the situation in libre social networking. At
> least
> I can tell a friend that's fed up with Skype "go for XMPP". I cannot tell
> anything like that to anybody interested in libre social networking,
> without
> making choices for them and playing favourites.
>

What's wrong with playing favorites or "making choices for them" (ie.
suggesting something you've deemed suitable).
Afterall, that's what you are doing by suggesting XMPP.

Or, are you saying you want "one protocol to rule them all" (and you know
the best ways to go about that) so that you don't have to play favorites
when someone asks you where to go as an alternative a social network? So
you want to pick favorites so you don't have to pick favorites?



> > So, if we follow that same principle, in the end what we have is "
> > http://twitter.com/user1 sends a messages to http://facebook.com/user2"
> ...
> > but hell, on twitter you can't even send messages to someone who isn't
> > following you.
>
> I call bull.
> "Dear @user_not_following_me, how's the weather?"
>


The solution to sending private messages is sending them publicly. Problem
solved.
Write up the draft.



> > That's what I mean about what do we mean about federation :)
>
> And I stand by my "we need to find ways to interoperate, or we will die in
> the
> wilderness between walled gardens".
>
> Look at the whole PRISM debate right now! People are waking up, and are
> enraged, and are looking for alternatives. And there is no alternative
> there.
> The more a user looks at libre social networking, the more they get the
> feeling that all there is is infighting and bickering about which of the
> several incompatible social networks to use.
>
> This is absurd. This is something we *have* to do something about. Instead
> of
> looking for a myriad of reasons not to.
>
>
I don't want to continue to hash out protocol semantics. There are many
different people with many different perspectives and ideas. Not everyone
agrees with your ideas but I'm sure a lot of people do as well. In the end,
though, you can talk about it until you're blue in the face and we'll still
be right where we are.