Re: Federation protocols

I pointed this out earlier but it got lost in the interim discussion - 
from a Red point of view, any DNS-based name is transient. So we cannot 
easily inter-operate in your DNS-based world. I am "Mike Macgirvin".  At 
the moment I might be located at mike@zothub.com - tomorrow I might post 
from george@jetson.com; and still be seen to my friends as Mike 
Macgirvin. If you subscribe/follow/whatever either of these webfinger 
ids from a traditional "federated social network", you'll miss many of 
my posts, and I won't see many of yours. They're going to or from a 
different DNS-based location. We didn't do this to be different, we did 
this because of a clear need in our communities for such mobility.

Some will respond that WebID is the obvious solution - not really. I 
don't want to carry an identity dongle with me when I'm at the 
university in the computer lab.

And the modern world is also about a lot more than just passing messages 
back and forth. We've got static resources attached to each of those 
identities - and wish to make them available 24/7 to all our friends 
(and often even those who are not).  I don't see accomplishing this kind 
of thing with a "message passing protocol".

I would like more than anybody for all these services to inter-operate, 
but these are the kinds of fundamental issues we're up against - not 
whether or not somebody uses XMPP. Heck for passing messages, we could 
just use SMTP and be done with it. There's a lot more to this world 
we're building - a whole range of authenticated services, applications 
and integrated data repositories. Communications is one (very) small 
part of the puzzle.

Received on Friday, 31 May 2013 23:11:19 UTC