Re: Federation protocols

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!

> > 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.

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

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"

> 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.

> 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?"

> 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.

-- 
Pozdrawiam
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak

Fundacja Wolnego i Otwartego Oprogramowania