The Free Network: The Fediverse and The Federation
Links to three Fediverse writings
... we also recognize that social media has become a crucial part of everyday life, which is why we urge you to ditch Facebook and instead utilize freedom-respecting, distributed, user-controlled services like GNU social, Mastodon, or Diaspora.
- https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/rms-in-the-guardian-201ca-radical-proposal-to-keep-your-personal-data-safe201d-1
I believe GNU Social and Federation is a big deal
- http://adam.curry.com/art/1491827141_Kg2tZgpM.html
The Fediverse / Federation aims to eventually unite all the things that still exist into one glorious meta-thing.
GNU Social does manage to make some friends, and there is talk of a grand Federation (this link lists active Diaspora*, Friendica, and Hubzilla nodes). Some success appears to be made in allowing users to communicate between some of these projects, mostly using some variant on the OStatus cluster of protocols, which seem to be the lowest common denominator. The Diaspora* protocol uses similar bunch of protocols to OStatus, but it uses them differently, including adding support for private massages. Sean Tilley of the Diaspora* crew sums up the resulting blends:
“Friendica, Diaspora, Hubzilla all talk to each other through Diaspora. Friendica can also speak OStatus. Hubzilla and Diaspora currently cannot.”
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, another cluster of free code developers are also working on communication and collaboration software. Some of them create the Valueflows project to work towards a standard for them all to interoperate, and a larger federation of projects groups form the Collaborative Technology Alliance to do the same. Working on standards is complex work, but not nearly as hard as getting everyone to agree on what standard to use.
Back in the Fediverse, a few developers get bored with trying to hack around a bunch of baked in architectural limitations in GNU Social (or maybe PHP itself, I’m guessing, I don’t know their reasons), and develop a bunch of add-ons or replacements for the GNU Social server software (formerly StatusNet, remember?), in a few different languages. Qvitter, started by Hannes in 2013, is a Javascript layer used on the Quitter sites to give a more Twitter-ish user experience. In 2016, Maiyannah Bishop forks GNU Social to start the PostActiv project, which is not GNU Social but still part of the Fediverse, and Eugen Rochko starts working on Mastodon in Ruby on Rails, which is not even a GNU Social fork but is still part of the Fediverse and uses the same GNU AGPL software license.
- https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/blog/2017/04/01/a-brief-history-of-the-gnu-social-fediverse-and-the-federation/
#SNS #gnusocial #diaspora #socialmedia #fediverse #federation