Join forces with Diaspora

Hi, in which way would you see an integration with diaspora?

One other tool I think is close to Loomio is Discourse.

@raphaeljadot just wondering.. the first network that include social + task + decisions will be a hit like Diaspora + Loomio

@miguelpradosrodrig I agree :) However that would need a kind of API

The few times I tried to use Diaspora I gave up in frustration. All I could see was a poorly engineered "open source" version of Twitter. I'm struggling to understand what connecting Loomio to Diaspora would accomplish. Please explain in more details.

I'm really excited about Diaspora.
To achieve their mission they need to build a fairly complex architecture.

Loomio intends to build it's user base from addressing the needs of smaller groups and scaling up from there. I'm really interested in how Loomio could leverage the diaspora platform in the future, but not the near future, as I feel we need to focus on meeting the user experience requirements of great dialog and decision making before we get too deep into a distributed architecture.

I would recommend checking out Tent. It’s a standard we’ve been evaluating for a while. There is ongoing work putting Diaspora federation into a gem that can be integrated into Rails sites, and we have discussed the possibility of doing a Tent-powered Diaspora in which users can then authenticate apps of many types from, which I believe would allow for true personal data storage for end users. Users could authenticate their app to a pod, and their account on that pod could act as a secure data store.

I can’t speak definitively for the entire Diaspora project, but it’s an open possibility and looks like a strong contender from what I’ve studied of it.

Their monthly office videos are quite good at providing info on things they're working on and what they hope to accomplish. Loads of great ideas.

Tent is also looking at ways to make apps easy to host: https://flynn.io/docs

I am very motivated to ensure that Loomio and Diaspora can exist together in an ecosystem that is mutually beneficial. I am also a regular evaluator of Tent and I'm really excited about federating Loomio on top of it.

Some recent events have had a strong effect on my personal prioritisation of workload. I currently want to get the Loomio Angular client out the door, and work to make loomio discussions/decisions scale to 10,000 concurrent users.

On the backend, I think that a single server can manage the 20,000 connections, but we have a bunch of UX related issues to deal with to get it usable for each of those 10K people.

After that point we'll have a very clear idea of what information needs to be passed between Loomio servers/nodes and I will be supporting every effort I can to make a distributed/interoperable system.

It's also worth pointing out that quite a lot of Diaspora's active contributors use Loomio; I'm sure quite a few of us could benefit from some kind of seamless integration in the long run. :)

I just want to apologize to the Diaspora crew for my comment above, which came across much more dismissive than I intended. I'm glad that Diaspora and Loomio are having drinks, and I'm pleased to see Tent being discussed here. While we're discussing federated social networking, has anyone checked out Pump.io, the new back-end for Identi.ca?

I don't think federated social networking projects will succeed if they are content to clone FB, Twitter etc in isolation. Our best chance of succeeding is by working together, making our projects elements of a larger system, and agreeing on open standards to make them play well together.

Why? After following free code software for more than a decade, I can't help but notice that the really successful projects are the ones which solve a problem in a totally new way, rather than just cloning a proprietary system. Tools like GNU/Linux, OpenOffice, and GIMP have always struggled to pull users away from Windows/ MacOSX, MS Office, and PhotoShop. By contrast, Firefox gained ground on IE by offering novel features like tabs and add-ons, the most popular CMS are free code (Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla etc) because there was never a dominant proprietary package in this space, same with Apache and MySQL.

@strypey I regularly keep an eye on Pump.io. I have mixed feelings about it; the front-end is less than stellar, and it throws out all the old federation technologies that StatusNet was built upon. At this point, it feels like just another version of what Tent has already accomplished.

I do agree with you wholeheartedly; a clone of something rarely does better than the original in terms of user adoption. Just look at the original launch of Google+ and how little traction it initially had against Facebook.

However, many people would argue that Diaspora really isn't a clone; there are still quite a few fundamental differences, and Diaspora doesn't advertise itself as "the anti-Facebook". In many ways, you could say that these existing projects are stepping stones towards changing the ways web applications can fundamentally work with one another.

Part of the problem, possibly the biggest problem the federated web currently faces, is the fact that so many different decentralized social projects exist, but they all use different standards, concepts, and implementations.

Many of them think that they have the best method of doing things. Lack of a central standard to look to has hampered these communities' ability to communicate and work together, but I still think that something like Tent could unite many of these projects and their respective communities.