Re: [Social-discuss] Future of GNU social

[Rob Myers]

On 05/28/2010 05:11 PM, Ted Smith 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?

No other protocol has the same mixture of maturity (as you point out), 
large existing deployment base, and FSF-assigned code.

> What of all the other discussion on this list regarding other protocols?

They have been very useful and can help to improve OStatus and any 
Social additions to it.

> 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 is being singled out now because it has become possible to do so 
and because it has momentum from the great work StatusNet have done.

We have something concrete to work with, build on, and evaluate.

And if people want something more abstract, we have something to 
abstract from.

- Rob.