Re: [Social-discuss] Future of GNU social

[Ted Smith]

On Fri, 2010-05-28 at 18:45 +0200, Dan Brickley wrote:
> In fact looking at http://ostatus.org/ it does seem to be the kind of
> higher-level integration you're asking for:

I would like to see a protocol that makes statements only about abstract
concepts ("users", "friends", communication, etc.) and leaves everything
else up to the implementation. OStatus gets too far into "web"
technology (XML, HTTP) to meet that need.

I don't care if there are some Social servers that communicate via
OStatus - for some situations, that's fine. But OStatus is designed with
a particular implementation in mind (web apps on a GLAMP stack on a web
server) that doesn't provide adequate user autonomy. As such, it would
be nice if there was one protocol that described social networking
primitives that was just transmitted via any other protocol which could
encapsulate it.

It's clear to me that the most "free" social network possible is
composed of programs running on the end-user's own computers,
communicating over a peer-to-peer network that doesn't require constant
uptime. This gives a user of this network maximal autonomy and privacy.
I don't think OStatus can be used for this, because to me, it seems that
OStatus depends on HTTP as a transport protocol. It might be possible to
hack in a peer-to-peer network, but it would take a lot of work -
probably more work than just finding those social networking primitives
would.

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