Re: [buddycloud-dev] email metadata

On 30 July 2013 10:36, Mike Macgirvin <mike@macgirvin.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
This is it.  "There is no one-to-one mapping anywhere".  Applying a 1-1
mapping to a many-to-many can make federation impossible.

Email is a great example.  So many systems assume a 1-1 between email and
identity, when it's more accurate to say email is a facet of someone's
identity.

1-1 mappings are great in that they are easy to program and can get you up
and running fast, but when it comes to federation, it's a cause of
breakage, particularly because once you're in a 1-1 paradigm it's hard to
change, either technically or psychologically.