Re: what idno is

On 3 July 2013 19:36, Ben Werdmuller <ben@benwerd.com> wrote:

>
> Melvin - thanks for posting this!
>
> I wanted to add a couple of comments for this community. I definitely
> recognize that the federated social tech here is nothing like the kind
> that's being showcased in, eg, the likes of pump.io - but I think there's
> a place at the table for both. And I think there's *also* great potential
> for an app like idno to be extended to talk in a friendly way with the more
> sophisticated federated social web standards that are being developed. So
> despite my RSS comparison in the original post, I don't want anyone to
> think I'm pooh-poohing their work.
>
> I've gone to great pains to emphasize in that post that idno is currently
> a spare-time consideration. I'm actually exploring a patronage model for
> supporting its ongoing development, based on some phenomenal ideas by Kevin
> Marks (and inspired by nsfwcorp).
>
> If anyone's interested in idno, its underlying code and how the IndieWeb
> fits into the wider federated social web community, I'd love to talk to
> you, either here, off-list or over coffee. (I'm based in the East Bay.)
> I'll also be submitting a position paper for the upcoming Workshop on
> Social Standards. It's also worth re-emphasizing that the wider IndieWeb
> community is definitely worth exploring, and http://indiewebcamp.com is a
> great jumping off point for that.
>

I love the indieweb approach to federation.  They seem the one area that is
passionate about dogfooding and testing out code.  The IRC channel is
constantly active.  In this way you can incrementally increase
functionality and be reasonably confident that your code is well aligned to
other nodes in the federation.

The fact that they use the "your homepage is your identity" model is a
great way to develop rapidly.  In many ways it's superior to the "your
email is your identity" camp, because there's an obvious and natural way to
dereferance the ID and gain more information.

One slight limitation with indieweb is that you can (at least yet) set up
profiles for, say, family members in different directories if you own our
own domain, there's a one to one correspondence from identity to index.html
of your domain.  But I'm sure that if that becomes a popular use case
indieweb can adapt.

Idno looks very interesting, I've used elgg quite a lot.  Actually a lot of
federating functionality was created by the lorea team.  I tried to get
lorea included in the SWXG final report but it didnt quite get there, XG's
tend to be more business oriented, CG's may include more from grass roots.
Also elgg was at one point a good candidate to be the code base of GNU
Social.  I think elgg was very well designed, looking forward to seeing how
idno goes!


>
> Cheers,
>
> Ben
>
>
> Ben Werdmuller
>  <http://goog_1933028737>
> benwerd.com | werd.io
>
> +1 (312) 488-9373
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 3, 2013 at 1:54 AM, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Some interesting developments in read write hosted technology from the
>> inventor of elgg ...
>>
>> Read more ...
>>
>> [[
>>
>> This site runs on idno <http://idno.co>: an open source social
>> publishing platform that I've been working on for the past few months in my
>> own time.
>>
>> You may know that I co-founded Elgg <http://elgg.org>, the open source
>> social networking engine, which is used by the likes of Oxfam, NASA, the
>> World Bank and several national governments as a social intranet and
>> learning platform. The original thinking around Elgg happened a decade ago.
>> Given that, you shouldn't be surprised to learn that my original thought
>> experiment was: *What decisions would I make if I was building Elgg
>> today, in 2013? What would I do the same way, and what would I do
>> differently?*
>>
>> *Some technical decisions*
>>
>> I knew that I could make a faster social networking platform, with a
>> better templating engine, and a much smaller codebase - even while sticking
>> to PHP as an underlying scripting language. Partially that's because PHP
>> 5.3+ is a much better development platform than earlier versions. It's also
>> because there are now some well-tested, intelligent back-end frameworks,
>> like Symfony 2 <http://symfony.com/>, and front-end frameworks, like
>> Bootstrap <http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/>.
>>
>> One of the major decisions I made when we built Elgg 1.0 was that not
>> only was it a hassle for plugin developers to write their own database
>> schemas - it was undesirable to the point of being dangerous. We
>> effectively faked a NoSQL schema in MySQL by creating a data model around
>> entities (first-class objects like users and blog posts), metadata,
>> annotations and relationships. People were taken aback, and it was
>> row-intensive, but it worked, and it continues to work today.
>>
>> Nonetheless, today we have NoSQL, so #idno<http://werd.io/search/?q=%23idno>is based around
>> MongoDB <http://www.mongodb.org/>. This means there are far fewer
>> database transactions involved - and adding new data to an object is
>> incredibly easy. Together with a plugin architecture based on lazy loading,
>> and Symfony's excellent observer pattern support, as well as the framework
>> code I've built, I'm able to write a new plugin in an hour or two. That's
>> important for a system I'm building in my spare time!
>>
>> Meanwhile, all of the things about #Elgg<http://werd.io/search/?q=%23Elgg>that were great - a plugin architecture, granular access permissions - are
>> intact. And on top of that there's a faster framework, and a responsive
>> front-end that works really well in a mobile browser. Great!
>>
>> *But that's not the end of the story.*
>>
>> The #indieweb <http://werd.io/search/?q=%23indieweb> community has
>> existed for years as a force to advance the state of the independent web,
>> and to promote ownership of our own spaces. IndieWebCamp<http://indiewebcamp.com/Main_Page>is an annual event for creators to discuss their platforms, technologies
>> and ideas.
>>
>> One of the big concepts to come out of #indieweb<http://werd.io/search/?q=%23indieweb>has been
>> #POSSE <http://werd.io/search/?q=%23POSSE>: Publish (on your) Own Site,
>> Share Everywhere. The idea is that your friends or followers shouldn't have
>> to join your site to engage with you; you should be able to post on your
>> own site and be read on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, or wherever they
>> happen to be. idno has built-in plugins for status updates, blog posts,
>> images, checkins and events. Correspondingly, it also has plugins to
>> #POSSE <http://werd.io/search/?q=%23POSSE> this content to Twitter,
>> Facebook, Foursquare and Flickr - and writing more would be trivial.
>>
>> That's just as well, because I've committed to *only* post on my own
>> site and copy to third parties (where that's possible).
>>
>> *Reinventing the social web*
>>
>> This year, though, something else happened. Using Microformats 2<http://microformats.org/wiki/microformats-2>(a way to very simply embed meaningful markup into any web page) together
>> with Webmention <http://webmention.org/> (a way for any web page to
>> lightly ping the pages it references), the community participants created the
>> first indieweb decentralized comments thread<http://tantek.com/2013/113/b1/first-federated-indieweb-comment-thread>
>> .
>>
>> Using nothing more than the markup on their own web pages and a very
>> simple protocol, the participants created the basics of a decentralized
>> social community, where each comment is hosted on its owner's own site, but
>> nonetheless forms a coherent, easily-readable narrative.
>>
>> This is a very big deal.
>>
>> It's a completely different model to traditional social networking, where
>> content typically doesn't bleed outside the walls of a specific social
>> site. It's also different to previous decentralized social networking
>> efforts, which have been in many ways more sophisticated, but much harder
>> to join in with. Because a simple IndieWeb-compatible social tool can be
>> built in an afternoon, just as a simple RSS-compatible tool can be built in
>> an afternoon, these concepts have a much greater chance of succeeding.
>>
>> Needless to say, idno is now a first-class participant in the
>> decentralized IndieWeb social community. I've implemented IndieWeb
>> comments, and moved immediately to also implement decentralized events that
>> anyone can RSVP to, as well as decentralized likes. It also integrates with
>> Firefox's brand new Social API<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Social_API>
>> .
>>
>> *You can browse the web and reply to any page, on a site that you truly
>> own.*
>>
>> As more sites and platforms implement the IndieWeb social standards,
>> those interactions will become correspondingly more social. For now,
>> though, you can go ahead and interact with the web already.
>>
>> Beyond that, idno will continue to develop over time as a community
>> platform in itself. I'm using it here on my own site as a single-person
>> publishing platform, but it doesn't have to be that at all, and all those
>> Elgg-style features will continue surface as time goes on. But there's a
>> big, wide web out there, and it's important to embrace that as widely as
>> possible.
>>
>> idno's homepage is here <http://idno.co>. Meanwhile, I continue to do
>> work I'm proud of in my actual job, working for latakoo<http://latakoo.com>to facilitate media storage and transfer for video professionals and the
>> broadcast news industry. We're talking about using decentralized social
>> networking there too - but more on that another time.
>> ]]
>>
>
>