Re: [Social-discuss] Future of GNU social

[Dan Brickley]

+cc: Evan

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 6:11 PM, Ted Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-05-28 at 11:51 -0400, Matt Lee wrote:
>> Due to maturity of the codebase, myself and the other contributors have
>> decided to build GNU social alongside StatusNet, and additionally, we
>> recommend OStatus as the basis for the distributed social networking
>> protocol we intend to champion.
>
> I thought this had been discussed (and rejected) in the past - as far
> back as the autonomo.us mailing list. What's changed since then in terms
> of the StatusNet protocol serving as the basis for the GNU Social
> protocol?

Perhaps it was a change of heart, I don't know. But joining forces
with the StatusNet folk sounds like a good idea to me.

> What of all the other discussion on this list regarding other protocols?
>
> Personally, it is still my opinion that a higher-level protocol,
> speaking in terms of abstract concepts, and implemented over several
> other protocols, including OStatus and everything else, as transports,
> would be best for this GNU World we're building, and I don't understand
> why OStatus alone is being singled out now. The StatusNet codebase has
> been mature as long as this project has been alive.

OStatus isn't frozen in stone for all eternity, but it it's a start at
a small useful piece that hooks different systems together.  And it
was designed by folk who put real time and code into trying to do it
with various pieces of the 'Social Web' technology jigsaw. StatusNet
also explored using OAuth for this, and there is certainly room for
further exploration of various standards.

In fact looking at http://ostatus.org/ it does seem to be the kind of
higher-level integration you're asking for:

"""OStatus isn't a new protocol; it applies some great protocols in a
natural and reasonable way to make distributed social networking
possible.

Activity Streams encode social events in standard Atom or RSS feeds.
PubSubHubbub pushes those feeds in realtime to subscribers across the Web.
Salmon notifies people of responses to their status updates.
Webfinger makes it easy to find people across social sites."""

It might be that XMPP pubsub could be used alongside
pubsubhubbub/salmon for notifications, for example. Or that linked
data / RDFa / FOAF / SPARQL will find a role for the 'find people'
piece. We can work that out together, the only difference is we're
starting from a larger codebase and community...

cheers,

Dan