Re: [Social-discuss] My Facebook Problem - And Yours

[Dan Brickley]

On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Henry Litwhiler <address@hidden> wrote:

> We have very little written down regarding the design of GNU Social,
> partially because we haven't agreed on/figured out even some of the more
> fundamental aspects of the design, and partially because we just haven't
> gotten around to writing it down.


Yet you can say with perfect confidence that you'll make a new
independent software package, even before there's rough consensus on
what problems you expect it to solve?

> A few people got together at the FSF on the 21st of April, and put some
> (very minimal) meeting notes up on the LibrePlanet wiki:
> http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social/2010-04-21 .

Indeed minimal, but it's a start :)

I'll copy them here:

short term goals

"sign up and log in
text area ("about me")
gravatar
add friends by URL
update and store status
view other profiles"

Ok, I'm still missing the need for a brand new project here. There are
a dozen systems that do this, probably several of which GPL'd.

> We also have
> some (contradictory) ideas written down here:
> http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social/Ideas .

That's useful, and detailed. And contradictions are OK for now. They
guarantee no existing software will meet your needs, at least ;)

Excerpting,
"Goals
Privacy- users should be in control of their own data
Distributed- anyone can set up their own node or server to become part
of the network
Portability- software should run on the widest array of hosts possible
Simplicity- simple to set up; a simple base installation to serve as a
platform for a wide array of extensions
Extensibility- easy to implement and distribute new functionality
Scalability- the extended network should be able to scale to the same
degree as the World Wide Web
Freedom (of course)"

I'll argue something quirky here. that decentralisation on the Web
rests on user control of domain names. And that the UI offered by DNS
registrars currently is not suited to the needs of ordinary people,
who partly as a consequence head off to live under facebook.com or
myspace.com domains.

Rather than creating yet another package for blogging, writing
profiles, listing and linking friends, ... how about addressing a
deeper problem: it is way too hard to do these things while doing them
from a domain that *you* own and control. Decentralising out of the
social-network megasites is a start, but we'll end up with users
getting locked into smaller social network sites instead; sites which
are equally likely, perhaps more likely to fail in various ways. The
only way they'll be truly portable is when each users's Web content
lives under domains that they can freely move around to different host
services.

If the goals are really to drive the software rather than vice-versa,
I think the list here motivates some serious work around improving
usability of DNS for hosting normal users' sites. For example,
lobbying dns registrars for oauth Web API and writing patches for
Drupal etc that allow user pages to be different per user.

> We should probably get around to having an organized, well-planned IRC
> meeting at some point in the near future.

Sounds like a good idea...

cheers,

Dan