Re: Federation protocols

On 1 June 2013 01:10, Mike Macgirvin <mike@macgirvin.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

The limitations of DNS are apparent, however it does have advantages too.
Not least that it has a massive network.  It seems problematic to build a
social network that is not based on DNS.  It is a common strategy to try
and reinvent DNS, tho no one has done it yet, and I suspect no one will
have done it in 5 years time either.  However, I may have completely
misunderstood your point :)

As an aside, we still dont really know what webfinger is going to be, it
has not yet become an IETF standard and I think it's felt there are some
critical shortcoming, which may or may not get fixed shortly, time will tell


>
> 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.
>

You may want to update your understanding of WebID.  WebID has evolved to
just be about using HTTP identifiers as profiles, similar to tent.io.
Dongles and other authentication methods are orthogonal.


>
> 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.
>

We could indeed use SMTP for messaging and it has advantages, but it would
be nice to get the web up to be able to do something as simple as sending
messages between two parties after more than 20 years.  We're not there
yet, and if we can even achieve that small step it's a victory!