Re: Federation protocols

Hi again,

Dnia piątek, 31 maja 2013 o 09:05:45 Mikael Nordfeldth napisał(a):
> 2013-05-30 20:26 skrev Michał 'rysiek' Woźniak:
> > Hi there,
> > 
> > I'm #NewHere, to use a popular cliche on federated social networks. I
> > am an
> > active user of Diaspora, Friendica and StatusNet (soon to be converted
> > to
> > pump.io).
> 
> Greetings, you're very welcome!
> 
> > What I feel we need is a single, extensible, well-defined protocol, or
> > suite
> > of protocols, that we can build a single, compatible, interoperable
> > federated
> > social network upon.
> 
> When speaking to Simon of Buddycloud, http://buddycloud.com/, last
> FOSDEM, he sort of persuaded me into thinking there is no actual need
> for a single, well-defined protocol. It's made me accept that there are
> always kinks in how things should be interpreted in a social environment
> - what is a friend/contact/group/list/tag/grouptag for YOU?
> (my personal self-persuading argument is that it's more like the
> evolution of anything - no genetic implementation is guaranteed to live
> forever).

Ask yourself how e-mail would look and interopearate had that been the case 
with SMTP.

And this *is* the case with IM and social networking right now. At least with 
IM the whole FLOSS community stands by XMPP -- this gives at least *some* hope 
to actually take on the heayweights.

Libre social networking is fatally broken right now, in my opinion, due to 
lack of interoperability. Hence, it is fragmented and unable to compete with 
TwitBook+.

For example, it isn't really that hard for me to convince new users to at 
least try a libre social network. The hard part is choosing the network! How 
am I to explain them that they do not talk to each other? This is where we 
lose them.

> > Right now we have OStatus, Diaspora's protocol, DFRN (used by
> > Friendica) and
> > the protocols that are used by Red, tent.io and pump.io, that I am not
> > even
> > sure are properly defined anywhere.
> 
> What I believe is important is what you stressed above, the proper
> definitions (btw, pump.io API is on
> https://github.com/e14n/pump.io/blob/master/API.md ). Not just in API
> specs or protocol RFCs, but in actual implementations and libraries. If
> we want StatusNet to talk to Diaspora and then bounce that off to
> pump.io and Friendica/Red instances, these software must exist in a
> plugin-able form for others to use. That's what I believe is the hard
> part today, making an effort in "someone elses" codebase to support
> "one's own" implementation.

This is a bit (a small bit) similar to what is going on in XMPP, and what has 
been going on in HTTP and SMTP. Extensions that got implemented by some 
clients and some servers, some of them eventually dying off, some getting 
implemented across the board.

The crucial difference is, *first* there were the underlying standards, well 
defined, well documented and broadly adopted. This is not the case with libre 
social networking. Standards are either not adopted widely enough (DFRN2), 
lacking crucial functionalities (OStatus), or not documented well enough 
(Diaspora).

> Other than that, of course, there is the requirement of some global
> unique id which can somehow let the web know which protocols are
> supported and preferred. Which today seems to be email-like identifiers
> which get looked up with Webfinger, so that's not really a problem.

Great, if we can get all libre social networks to acknowledge that, we're 
halfway home. The other half would be getting them to implement a single, 
interoperable standard of communication.

-- 
Pozdrawiam
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak

Fundacja Wolnego i Otwartego Oprogramowania