I don't think anyone is talking about uploading anyones contacts anywhere :P Any data should always be opt-in and afaik all the discussion here has been exactly that - everything optional.

What is the real hope for linking up to friends on twitter and FB? Is it convenience? These are corporations who are out to make a profit. The do not care about privacy. Just by posting on either of those networks makes the content theirs to do with what they want. Just because my friends are stupid enough to have accounts on those networks should not be a motivation for me to link up to them from D. I'm really missing the point of doing that.

Sorry for being a broken record, but I did mention this already: 3rd parties that have connected to them, and FB and Twitter have a history of cutting 3rd parties off for whatever reason. Given that that has happened, why should D development efforts spend the time doing that just to have it potentially thrown away?

Next, I'm not sure about this, and maybe this is a teeny bit off topic, but what's to keep FB (or any other wayward leaning pod owner) from setting up a Diaspora pod, tweaking it and sucking up all the data from federation as a "man in the middle"? Is that possible? Maybe I'm not articulating it correctly, but it does confuse me about federating with SN's that are corporate entities. And if a D* SN does take off in a meaningful way, how do we know that the network isn't being compromised by a corporate presence or corporate pressures? It may not be an issue at the moment, but what are we doing to safeguard it?

I realize this may be a naive question, in that I may not understand how federation is supposed to work.

setting up a Diaspora pod, tweaking it and sucking up all the data from federation as a "man in the middle"?

I don't think they could get much from federation: only public posts, and any posts shared with users on the 'dodgy pod', but not much more as D* is careful with what is shared during federation (just the bare minimum, I think). However, the dodgy podmin could certainly harvest data from people who signed up to that pod. It's an issue which does need to be addressed during this development stage, as there's potential for fraud and identity theft on a large scale. So far it has just been done on trust, and that's fine while D is very small, as criminals are unlikely to bother with it. But if it does take off, you can guarantee that crims will take an interest.

The goal is to find the D* accounts of the people you have friended on other networks. The motivation of adding them is not that they're on network X which is so big and nice. The motivation is that they're a friend you would like to communicate with securely, using Diaspora, and therefore you need their D* id in order to communicate with them. Currently, that is very hard to do. I have hundreds of "friends" on Facebook but have no means of finding out their D* ids. Other than manually asking each and every one of them individually. This idea is to automate that process, much the way many other sites do today.

This proposal does not contain anything about sending D* data to another network. The only interaction with other networks would be requesting (from that network to D*) the friend list of the D* user which is looking for D* friends. Therefore, the privacy policies of 3rd party networks is irrelevant, because we do not tell them anything. No D* friend lists and no D* posts.

To reiterate, the friend list would be sent to pods that you select to find friends on. It might even be possible to exclude the D* id of the user performing the search. That way there is no user attached to this list of search terms, as some added privacy…

These other social networks block access to their APIs very rarely. The only time I know of it happening is FB blocked Twitter posts going to Facebook, for understandable reasons (because twitter is the closest thing in size to Facebook). Diaspora is nowhere near as big and nowhere near as big a threat. By the time that becomes untrue, this feature will no longer be required.

As to the cost of dedicating dev time & effort to this idea, it shouldn't be hard for someone who knows the code well, thanks partially to the rapid development tools that are used. I'm almost to the point where I could write it. As Tom Scott said, the code to get permission to access these other networks is already in D*. This is basically an enhancement to Webfinger, with a new rails view to do the search, as pod info will be needed…

I like Rasmus Fuhse's comment also. The search is a problem also. I think this and that could and should be fixed. This would help find people that you might not remember to search for specifically, whereas fixing search would help for those who do not have data on other social network to help them get connected on Diaspora (or who just choose not to use that data).