Re: [Social-discuss] My Facebook Problem - And Yours

[Henry Litwhiler]

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On 04/25/2010 11:17 AM, Dan Brickley wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Henry Litwhiler <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> We have very little written down regarding the design of GNU Social,
>> partially because we haven't agreed on/figured out even some of the more
>> fundamental aspects of the design, and partially because we just haven't
>> gotten around to writing it down.
> 
> 
> Yet you can say with perfect confidence that you'll make a new
> independent software package, even before there's rough consensus on
> what problems you expect it to solve?
> 
>> A few people got together at the FSF on the 21st of April, and put some
>> (very minimal) meeting notes up on the LibrePlanet wiki:
>> http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social/2010-04-21 .
> 
> Indeed minimal, but it's a start :)
> 
> I'll copy them here:
> 
> short term goals
> 
> "sign up and log in
> text area ("about me")
> gravatar
> add friends by URL
> update and store status
> view other profiles"
> 
> Ok, I'm still missing the need for a brand new project here. There are
> a dozen systems that do this, probably several of which GPL'd.

I'm sure that there are plenty of projects that can meet our needs (for
the time being, anyway), with only minor modifications. I was simply
arguing that StatusNet might not be our best choice, because of its
focus on (relative) centralization.

> 
>> We also have
>> some (contradictory) ideas written down here:
>> http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social/Ideas .
> 
> That's useful, and detailed. And contradictions are OK for now. They
> guarantee no existing software will meet your needs, at least ;)
> 
> Excerpting,
> "Goals
> Privacy- users should be in control of their own data
> Distributed- anyone can set up their own node or server to become part
> of the network
> Portability- software should run on the widest array of hosts possible
> Simplicity- simple to set up; a simple base installation to serve as a
> platform for a wide array of extensions
> Extensibility- easy to implement and distribute new functionality
> Scalability- the extended network should be able to scale to the same
> degree as the World Wide Web
> Freedom (of course)"
> 
> I'll argue something quirky here. that decentralisation on the Web
> rests on user control of domain names. And that the UI offered by DNS
> registrars currently is not suited to the needs of ordinary people,
> who partly as a consequence head off to live under facebook.com or
> myspace.com domains.
> 
> Rather than creating yet another package for blogging, writing
> profiles, listing and linking friends, ... how about addressing a
> deeper problem: it is way too hard to do these things while doing them
> from a domain that *you* own and control. Decentralising out of the
> social-network megasites is a start, but we'll end up with users
> getting locked into smaller social network sites instead; sites which
> are equally likely, perhaps more likely to fail in various ways. The
> only way they'll be truly portable is when each users's Web content
> lives under domains that they can freely move around to different host
> services.

The way the internet's domain system is set up, it would be almost
impossible to give every user of current social networking "megasites"
their own unique domain name. For now, we'll just have to accept the
fact that, for most users, the only practical way of giving them a way
of identifying themselves outside of their (usually dynamic) IP
addresses is by giving them either:

a) A subdomain (johnsmith.gnusocial.com).
or
b) A subdirectory (gnusocial.com/~johnsmith).

Or users could go with an existing service, like DynDNS. Either way, the
site wouldn't be storing or managing any of the user's data - it would
just be providing the user with an easy way of identifying themselves -
that is, through their own subdomain/directory.

> 
> If the goals are really to drive the software rather than vice-versa,
> I think the list here motivates some serious work around improving
> usability of DNS for hosting normal users' sites. For example,
> lobbying dns registrars for oauth Web API and writing patches for
> Drupal etc that allow user pages to be different per user.
> 
>> We should probably get around to having an organized, well-planned IRC
>> meeting at some point in the near future.
> 
> Sounds like a good idea...
> 
> cheers,
> 
> Dan

- --
Henry L.
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