Diaspora, Powered by Tent

Once we have the federation part of Diaspora properly modularised adding support for Tent is the matter of writing another adapter, no need to maintain two development trees.

I strongly agree with Jonne. Let's build on what we have, separate the federation layer and make a nice API and we are in a major win. This will just slow things down and make sure that no progress will happen for a longer period of time. A bit like the work on Makr.io which in the end benefited D* in no way.

Working on the federation can happen without needing to redesign the whole application.

@jonnehaß I don't know whether simply "Writing an adapter" for federation compatibility is the best approach, not to mention that there could be considerable overhead for trying to support multiple protocols. It's not just our protocol schemas that need to be improved, but also the way our system handles federation internally.

Tent's reference implementation for federation, an API, and apps is already modularized in Tentd as a gem, and protocol development is done upstream to benefit multiple social applications, including Diaspora-Tent.

Furthermore, the Diaspora-Tent development tree would be maintained by three of the core Tent devs for the interim. Think of it less as "potential upstream" at this point, and more of a "proof-of-concept prototype" to demonstrate that it might be a good design decision, and may incidentally actually work quite well. Sure, the option to move it into our own tree might take some work, but I think the benefits outweigh the effort of moving it over, and we have the benefit of waiting for Diaspora-Tent to properly ripen before even throwing it into our development branch.

I don't think it's too soon to think about something like this. It's something that affects our future, and frankly an active upstream developing all these things could only help the future of our project.

Sean,
Jonne was NOT talking about the adapter like the twitter- or facebook-stuff.

We already discussed adding a "federation layer" here: http://www.loomio.org/discussions/612 and we really should focus on that one before doing anything else. Really. We should.

When that part is done we can focus on what we should use as protocol, but please not before the abstraction is done. If we have a nice abstraction layer, it's even possible to "play around" with multiple protocols, and that's what Jonne was talking about.

Honestly, I was thinking about blocking this discussion. Without an abstracted federation, we cannot even say what Diaspora really needs and thus any discussions about that are pointless.

"I don't think it's too soon to think about something like this."
All devs do. If you take a look at the messy code we have right now, you'll understand there is no more brain capacity for this discussion.

@dennisschubert I wasn't talking about the cross-posting functionality. I meant running adapters for multiple protocols at once. Writing a bunch of protocol bridges that all run at the same time could be cause for significant overhead.

Also, the Diaspora-Tent implementation would be done from the ground up using Tent's architecture, with Diaspora's UI on top. It's a clean start, being done by the Tent developers as a prototype, to demonstrate what the protocol can do. So there would be far less mess than trying to jam Tent's architecture into our current codebase, which I agree is pretty messy in parts. Once tentd is proven to scale, and Diaspora-Tent has feature parity with Diaspora-current, we can consider officially adopting it in the future.

The API and federation protocol are already documented, and would significantly lower the barrier for anyone wanting to improve the state of federation in Diaspora, not to mention help make good on the project's original promises.

@seantilley-communitymanager With "prototype" you are talking about the idea @kevinkleinman suggested? Yes, do it if you want to. But that has nothing to do with the work at diaspora-core. And of course all my (and Jonnes, and probably everyone elses) points are against Tent in Diasporas core.

@dennisschubert I've cleaned up the proposal document on the wiki to better explain. Sure, at the moment it has little to do with Diaspora-Core, but the idea is that in the future, it will be comparable to Diaspora-Current in terms of features and scalability, and may be something we as a community could adopt into our upstream development.

So in a sense, it has everything to do with Diaspora-Core, as it directly affects the potential future of the project, and would establish a broader community of more developers working together towards the same goal of decentralized social.