Re: [Social-discuss] Future of GNU social

[Pablo Martin]

On 28/05/10 23:50, Ted Smith wrote:
> 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.
>   

I agree that I would like to see more high level statements with more
abstract treatment of transports and concrete types.. but I don't agree
so much with your criticism of http, although I also agree something
else is needed for real time light weight notifications and
communication (like psyc / xmpp)... Anyways as far as I know you need
servers to get anywhere no matter where you go.. there is no such thing
as a clients only network, or is there? I see it more as servers only
network so ostatus should be applicable to some extent.

If you think how you can complement ostatus instead of replacing it, you
can reach those kind of use cases. With ostatus and a bit of imagination
I can communicate with the cloud from my personal computer already, and
host my local view of the universe, answering directly into the
cloud...  Maybe it's just me but I like to think of status as something
that can incorporate other protocols and new high level practices,
otherwise call it how you like it is still the same and still uses some
ostatus protocols... and anyways, you cannot federate and interoperate
by not interoperating, can you? :)

kisses!

 p.