On dim., nov. 2, 2014 at 2:37 , rysiek
Hi,
okay, fuck that, I'm going to dive in, because the level of FUD is strong in this one.
Well, thanks :)
Dnia niedziela, 2 listopada 2014 12:19:24 edhelas pisze:
I can resume this fragmentation issue by a simple sentence that I'm saying more and more these days : "If you have a problem, do not write an API, write a protocol".
Sure: https://xkcd.com/927/
I don't understand why we need over9000 different, incompatible federated social web protocols. It would seem to me we need *ONE* with several *GOOD* implementations.
The social federation protocol is already here : it's XMPP. And yes it can support everything a social network has to offer (feeds, subscriptions, profiles, contact list…). There is already millions of users on the XMPP network, and you can easily find several clients on all the plateforms for it.
I'm working since 2008 on the Movim project (https://movim.eu/), to build a full, good looking, "decentralized" (federated) and open source social network on XMPP. And believe me, yes it's possible.
I won't discuss that. I will however point out that "possible" is not enough.
It's possible to push it forward and try to not reinvent the wheel again and again by creating a new protocol.
I like the link that the guy made in the presentation with Firefox. Why Firefox surpassed IE ? Because they just choose to implement the W3C standards and try to improve it (and they offer some nice features too).
Absolutely.
Diaspora, GNU Social, Friendica are not trying to do that, they create their own "proprietary" protocol
Oh, wow. Do you even understand the words that you use? I mean, "proprietary"? It's documented, the code is open, the protocol has at least two FLOSS implementations. Seriously, what were you trying to achieve here?
Ok, the term "proprietary" was a little strong. Of course the sourcecode of theses projects is open. But can you give me any serious documentations (more than a Wiki or some ML links) that can help me to implement properly the Diaspora/Friendica/GNU Social protocols like RFC, IETF stuffs ? A protocol have to be stable in the time, most of theses project just create their own protocol from their need. The Diaspora protocol was re-written already one time (which totally broke the Friendica compatibility at this time), the guys from Status.net moved to Pump.io…
to talk between each other and after that face the same issues than all the others network : "Hey, we are not compatibles ! Lets create an API and the other networks will be compatible with us".
No. They created a protocol that other networks implement. For example Friendica implements GNU Social's protocol, Diaspora's protocol and their own (documented, opensourced) protocol. Red similarily.
No, they wrote their own protocol for their own project, and someone just try to implement it to try to be compatible. But it's a one way work, the guys from Diaspora will not adapt their protocol to help the guys from Friendica/GNU Social/whatever.
Reading a bit on it would be a good idea.
So keep calm and implement XMPP ;)
No. Come to The Federation assembly at #31C3, get involved in a more meaningful way than calling open protocols "proprietary" just because you don't know them, and try working with quite a few projects that already cooperate and federate with common *protocols* (not APIs).
The question is not "which protocol is better", because while we bikeshed on this question, people are still sitting on Failbroke and Shitter, instead of moving out of these walled gardens.
The question is: "how can we *cooperate* to get people on the libre, federated side of social networks". 1.5 year ago I submitted to all the fedsocnet devs a simple question, here's the link again: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-fedsocweb/2013May/0058.html
The answer was: "impossiburu, we won't, not invented here, my protocol is better than yours". So instead of trying to herd those cats, I am grabbing the opportunity arising from the fact that we already have The Federation. Let's expand it and build upon it, eh?
What is your plan with The Federation ? To build a project to help all theses project to talk each others and find a way to "standardize" the communications between them to be compatible with eachothers ? Then you will define some basic schema of authentication/packet format (JSON/HTML/XML…)/global architecture… In the end it will looks like this : https://xkcd.com/927/ If your aim is to ask theses project to have a public API to share stuffs between their different servers, well good luck.
Shouting "XMPP! XMPP!" is not helping.
No, but I prefer to contribute and improve a 15 years old protocol, with millions of users and hundred of implementations, managed by a strong Fundation that works with the IETF than on a 4 yo protocol implented by ~2 project where all the documentation you can find on it is here https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Federation_protocol_overview.
-- Pozdr rysiek