Re: [Social-discuss] Diaspora?

[Raphael Sofaer]

Hello!

I too have been lurking for a while, and this is what I think.  We obviously are confronting the same problems as projects.  How completely can we move all decrypted data to the owner?  How can we have data models that are minimally restrictive but support arbitrary content?  How much can we maximize compatibility with external services and current standards like ostatus, activitystreams, and therefore minimize barriers to entry, without compromising our goals? 

Right now we have a Ruby on Rails prototype that communicates with HTTP GET calls that get encrypted JSON blocks, and friend requests with PUT calls.  For the real thing, we're talking about XMPP as our first between-node interface, but running an XMPP server might be a little heavy.  We definitely think that defining http routes is a lightweight way provide pull access to data.

Some things we plan to do, but which we consider to be second version items are multi-user support (though we plan to design with that as a later goal), bit-torrent like transfer of larger files with the seed acting as tracker, OpenID provision (we might do this earlier as I really want it), possibly a TahoeFS implementation to make redundancy inherent, and the ability to quickly implement pull from arbitrary services to make moving to a decentralized system easier.

I'd like to have that standards and protocol discussion here, despite the differences in our current approaches.  I think Ted Smith's separation between UI and Core controller parts is a good way to be sure the right components of the message are encrypted at every step. 

I look forward to discussion and look forward much more to coding!
 -- Raphael Sofaer



On 04/26/2010 05:46 PM, Max Salzberg wrote:

Hello, yes!

 I am Maxwell of said diaspora project.  Sorry for being such a lurker (a bad habit) and about the flash on the project page, we will fix that ASAP.  It's all my fault, Ilya complained about it to me when we first put it up, and it slipped my mind.  Bad Max.

We are very excited to talk about some of the common issues we will face, and once the semester is over, we all will be much more active on this list and many others.

I shouldn't be reading mailing lists while in class, but let's talk more soon. 

Rafi... make yrself heard!

Maxwell

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 5:32 PM, Matt Lee <address@hidden> wrote:

On 04/26/10 17:21, Deborah Nicholson wrote:
> Has anyone seen this project, http://joindiaspora.com/project.html ?
>
> On the one hand, yay for distributed and privacy respecting, but flash on
> the front page? *sigh*

Yeah, the Flash is unfortunate. We can fix that with them, hopefully.

> Anyway, since it's GPL we may be able to use some of their ideas once the
> code is public.

The folks from Diaspora are on this list... speak up folks!

I emailed them, and this is their reply:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: GNU social
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:20:09 -0700

Hey Matt,


We have been getting the updates for you list for a couple of weeks, and
we are really excited about contributing to the list and making our
projects work together!  We are strong believers in Free Software, so both
projects are very important.  The past few weeks have been kinda crazy for
us, trying to finish school, finals, hack on the diaspora, and me
personally, my thesis.  We are kind of in "gear up for summer" mode, but
once school is over, we will be much more involved.

Looking forward to talking with you all more,

Maxwell + Diaspora