Interoperability with other social networks

A privacy extension for Ostatus shouldn't really be that hard. At least for a scenario where the subscription server (the webapp) has the same rights as I as user. This would of course imply that you have to trust not only your contacts but also their podmins. But at least I have made my peace with that.

A tier 2 security can of course allways be built on top of the other for the tinfoilhats.

I see private messages and conversations as a fully parallel/seperate problem. We could use the jabber protocol for that or come up with a protocol that is similar to Ostatus. Maybe Omessages?

For private data storage there is allready Oauth, which is playing niceley with Ostatus i think.

Such a modularity would help to make to protocol more versatile as well as easier to implement.

Don't we already have the federation working group - shouldn't this really be there?

From everything I understand about OStatus, it's great for building a Twitter clone, but it's very limited for doing much else. Not to mention, as a protocol it has virtually no support for private posting. It doesn't cover very many use cases, and IMO, it'd be better to build together on something younger and more suited to being influenced by third-party change. OStatus, conversely, is much older, and I think a lot of projects would be facing an uphill battle trying to get it to fit their use cases. By design, it only really applies to a StatusNet-like use case.

I know, that idea with SMTP was only an example and an enforcement to think of alternatives. But my experience within social networks is this: direct messages from one person to another person are an outdated form of communication. People are used to group-discussions like discussions on threads in facebook, that are real-time. If such postings can be private to a restricted but extendable audience a social network doesn't need something like an email anymore. Your proposal for smtp is a nice idea, but a social network based on that would only be a subset of email and any real-email-user participating who is not clicking "reply" instead of "reply all" would totally destroy the flow of messages.

And now for something completely different: I really enjoy this discussion. Your ideas are all totally great and I thin we are heading into the right direction. I can't wait to get to know the protocol, that is going to be the standard. If it's Ostatus2, libertree, red or a revised tent, I don't care. But I wanted to work on adapting a federated protocol for a platform (Stud.IP) that is highly used on universities in germany. I already have created the social network-gui-functions, people who tested it enjoyed the function and it works within one server. But I still need to do all the work for the federation. My first thought was to implement OStatus. But whatever protocol you will pick here, I am going to implement it for a large new userbase.

People have said a lot of things that I wanted to say in the first place.

The problem with Tent right now is that it isn't open source. Maybe it will be one day, but that day may never come.

What I wanted to propose is to create an open standard, named, for example, Internet Social Contract, which would specify how data is structured, what kinds of various information can be exchanged between users and socnets, and it wouldn't care about the actual implementation. Some socnets might use SMTP, others might use OStatus, etc.

I wanted to develop a standard that would be implementation - neutral, and then every socnet that conforms to Internet Social Contract would be compatible with every other socnet implementing it. We can, for example, exchange data in pure XML between networks and users, and then write hot pluggable code that will deal with the actual implementation.

It is important to note that the standard would be completely open and free, otherwise it defeats its purpose. I am willing to dedicate my time and resources for this, only if we agree that we all need an open standard for exchanging data between different socnets.

@petar i think what you are looking for is http://activitystrea.ms/

The protocol has to be modular to allow a hirarchy of compelxity, so that not everyone has to implement everything in order to communicate with the network.

@Julian Yeah, this is something that I was talking about. However, I think it's not as modular as it should be, though I've only taken a look for a few minutes.

Summed up my thoughts on Ostatus in this (longer) blogpost: http://tschaul.tumblr.com/post/34096733944/ostatus-state-and-potential

I think we should ask guys who have a big experience with communication on the web. We can talk to Mozilla, for example. They made a lot of standards, validated by the W3C. Maybe they already work on something like this ?

I find this on the W3C website : http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-push-api-20121018/
This is the future..