Re: Federation protocols

Dnia piątek, 31 maja 2013 o 06:59:52 Melvin Carvalho napisał(a):
> On 30 May 2013 20:26, Michał 'rysiek' Woźniak <rysiek@fwioo.pl> wrote:
> > 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).
> > 
> > I am also a stern proponent of free and open federation protocols and
> > networks.
> > 
> > For a while now I have seen Friendica as a great project, allowing the
> > different federated social networks (Diaspora and OStatus-compatible) to
> > be able to communicate and for a single, huge federated network.
> > 
> > I am however baffled by the different approaches and protocols being used
> > in
> > distributed social network projects. With the introduction of Red,
> > pump.io ,
> > tent.io and other projects not exactly compatible with protocols already
> > utilised, I feel we are not heading in the right direction.
> > 
> > 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.
> > 
> > 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.
> > 
> > If we do not get together and devise a single, workable protocol for all
> > such
> > services to use, the Network Effect will always work against us, instead
> > of working for us:
> > http://rys.io/en/88
> > 
> > So my questions are:
> >  - is this the right list to start this discussion?
> >  - is there any work done in this regard?
> >  - if some, where are we on that road?
> 
> The web was designed to be social from day 1.  There are standards for this
> kind of thing, but they are highly underused, with perhaps, the exception
> of facebook.

Are you talking about how Facebook uses XMPP? Otherwise, I don't see the "open 
social interoperable standard" in Facebook (although, granted, I'm not a user 
there).

> There is a tendency to want to create, rather than, reuse.  However the new
> 'protocols' tend to scale at most to themselves, and it's relatively rare
> that heterogeneous systems can communicate.

That is true, but that is *precisely* why we have working groups like this 
one! Think HTML, XMPP, SMTP. Somehow it was possible to get these defined, 
documented and rolled out across the web.

> This group made a big bet on OStatus about 2-3 years ago, and arguably it
> has not exceeded expectations.

True, but:
 - it gained some traction;
 - it has important flaws (privacy-wise) that have been opointed out.

Let's fix it. Let's choose a protocol that does not have these flaws and put 
our weight behind it.

> There seems to be an effort to steer things back to standards and best
> practices, from a high level perspective.  I'm optimistic that this new
> approach will lead to interop, for those that get on board ...

I do hope so. Otherwise we have no chance to get people out of walled gardens.

-- 
Pozdrawiam
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak

Fundacja Wolnego i Otwartego Oprogramowania