Diaspora, Powered by Tent

@seantilley-communitymanager "in the furute". Exactly. And we are back at Jonne's point. :-)

The way I understand it, this is indeed about building a prototype from the ground up and then seeing if the experience can be applied to Diaspora. I have absolutely nothing against that since in the very least case, Tent is going to have a nice new app.

I suppose the abstration layer stuff can be done by the Diaspora development team simultaneously to the Tent guys building their prototype app. Perhaps we can then link those two pieces together; the clean, modularized Diaspora code and the Tent protocol schemes as used in the prototype. Tent wouldn't have to be in the core.

Or perhaps when the prototype works better than the current version of Diaspora, we'd just have to move everyone over to Tent and then take over the development of the prototype.

@flaburgan The real question is, if Diaspora-Tent were in every way comparable to Diaspora-Current, but with Tent's architecture improvements, would we consider adopting the prototype into our upstream development?

What is the real question ?

Can Tent developers try to put the Diaspora interface on their protocol ?
Of course they can, it's free software !

Will we help them to do that ?
We can answer to their questions, improve our doc and clean our code. But we have no time to build something, a proof of concept or a real new branch.

Will their poc be the new Diaspora ?
Who knows ? They can make a poc, they will learn a lot by doing that. And if the poc is really good, then we will vote. But it will be in months.

The real question is, if Diaspora-Tent were in every way comparable to Diaspora-Current, but with Tent's architecture improvements, would we consider adopting the prototype into our upstream development?

So, refer to the 3rd question below. We will decide it when we will see the poc :)

So after playing around with tent-admin and tentd, I've discovered that while Tent's reference implementation(s) do work, they are still somewhat difficult to hack on. However, I find working with the software to be very straightforward and I look forward to at least a philosophical/sharing-ideas partnership with Tent. After playing with tent-admin, there does seem to be a bit of an issue with the way we work and the way Tent works.

For starters, Tent is "more distributed" than DIASPORA. What do I mean by that? Well, each user is responsible for their own tentd, and a (reference) tentd can only serve 1 user at a time. I'm not sure how the shared Tent hosting works, but if they aren't using anything special I bet it's just launching new instances of tentd-admin for each user that logs in. This is definitely an unsustainable practice, and IMHO Tent will have to figure out a shared hosting paradigm before the network gets too big. Otherwise, it won't, leaving Tent to stagnate in the realm of obscure hackerdom and one of the curiosities of the strange social-networking environment our society has created for itself.

That's why I'd like to see this Loomio thread die, and us continue discussion of a possible DIASPORA/Tent partnership on either the mailing list or somewhere else, because I think the research done from mixing the paradigm of "one server for many users" with Tent's distributed architecture, and allowing a single pod to function as multiple Tent servers.

This can definitely be done, but will probably require a lot of effort on both our and Tent's part.