WordPress(.org) is one of the few open source projects to have encouraged large numbers of non-technical users to download, setup, and host their own serverside software. I think the Ostatus "movement" could learn a lot from it.<p>A single OStatus-based PHP app, marketed well, and with an easy install path, might make widespread adoption of OStatus more likely. It could even piggyback on existing WordPress installations as a plugin. Then, anyone with a self-hosted WordPress blog would be able to host their own status updates under a fixed path appended to their existing blog, such as example.com/status/. It also offers the potential for anyone with a WordPress blog to become a <i>provider</i> of status pages for people who didn't want to host their own (because WordPress has an inbuilt user registration system), which could create a distributed, portable network with no lock-in.<p>There are supposedly 60 million WordPress installations out there. These users already understand the value of owning and hosting their own content. That's an awful lot of potential to kickstart the uptake of a distributed social network, and I'm not sure that anyone's thought to exploit this yet.
I'm one of the co-authors of the OStatus spec and the lead developer on StatusNet (<a href="http://status.net/" rel="nofollow">http://status.net/</a>) and the ActivityPump (<a href="http://activitypump.org/" rel="nofollow">http://activitypump.org/</a>).<p>I think the secret weapon in the OStatus arsenal is that there are literally hundreds of millions (literally HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS) of PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds on the Web.<p>Blogger, YouTube, WordPress.com, Tumblr, and Posterous as well as StatusNet and Diaspora* all provide PuSH-enabled feeds. That's a huge body of content to follow in real time.<p>Another good part is that PubSubHubbub will help with SEO -- Google Search bots subscribe to PuSH-enabled streams, which gets you indexed faster. Lots of incentive is good for getting things done.<p>There is distinctly lower support for the other parts of the OStatus stack. But I hope we'll see this stack continue to develop.
There is a hot discussion going on about Tent.io, a project with a very similar and promising direction: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4572427" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4572427</a><p>They launched there first Alpha Status App that's build on top of the Tent.io protocol: <a href="https://tent.is/" rel="nofollow">https://tent.is/</a><p>If you like to get more information about the Tent.io protocol, checkout: <a href="http://tent.io/" rel="nofollow">http://tent.io/</a>
I would love for this to work, but "like X but open" is not enough. What you need is "better than X <i>and</i> open". I wish I knew how to do "better", but unfortunately, I don't.
A distributed message bus seems to be the most promising model. It'll be better than 'twitter but open' through the variety of messages being passed (see the sidebar of the UI mockup below). I believe the messages being spoken will come from activitystrea.ms, but the bus itself has yet to be determined.<p>There is some interesting work along these lines from the founder of StatusNet going on in <a href="https://github.com/evanp/activitypump" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/evanp/activitypump</a><p>A UI mockup of a client that would read from the 'pump' is here: <a href="http://statusnetdev.net/inbox.html" rel="nofollow">http://statusnetdev.net/inbox.html</a>
I really appreciate what StatusNet is doing, but I've found that it's just not useful enough to... use. It's Twitter but more free and with far fewer users. That's rather different from Diaspora and Tent.io's visions.<p>FYI: Today, Tent.is -- the first implementation of Tent.io, a protocol for fully decentralized social networking -- went from 0 users to 2000. In a day.<p>...And since it's free, I bet it'll grow MUCH faster than App.net which, after TONS of media coverage and endorsements from the likes of not just Scobleizer, but The Washington Post and even fucking CNN(!), got just ~12,000 people to sign up by the deadline.<p>Specific sites aside, I'm glad that people are actively creating alternatives to the centralized, corporatized, developer-unfriendly services that currently dominate the landscape.
WordPress already has the complete infrastructure and adoption needed for a social network. The only missing key is interconnecting them, why the need for a separate platform? app? It's all in place. Only a plugin is needed.<p>Anyone with the plugin would be able to connect their network into anyone else with the plugin. I would imagine it could be done with openid and xmlrpc.
I have a large chunk of friends and acquaintances who now conduct their ongoing visible conversations with each other almost entirely on Twitter, many of whom have started becoming impossible to reach by other means.<p>They <i>also</i> have visible half-conversations with a similar number of other people whose tweets are “protected” so that only “confirmed followers” can read them. I don't see OStatus doing anything with the latter, and I don't think those people are going to move to public streams, and if they don't move, the other people interspersed with them won't move because it'll become impossible to talk to them. This is more or less the same reason I still reluctantly keep a LiveJournal: the open-Web facilities for “but only show it to these people” are severely lacking (and I haven't found a good way of doing anything about this yet).<p>There's also the issue of social networks including things that are <i>de facto</i> currency-like: “number of followers” on Twitter is an obvious one. In a distributed network these usually can be faked, or at least are that way on the UI side since it's hard to generate a UI for that that doesn't drive the user's security-related cognitive load through the roof. (Or reveal more information about subscriptions than people prefer, but that's a shakier reason since some existing networks already reveal that graph.)<p>Is there any push for OStatus or other distributed social network approaches to handle these use cases? I haven't been able to find any, and OStatus seems to think the restricted stream case is explicitly out of scope.
Does anyone know of "friend discovery" services using OStatus? Most proprietary social networks have that "let me riffle through your addressbook" thing, which I imagine the privacy-conscious would eschew (I certainly do), but e.g. my Twitter "following" list is publically available, so it shouldn't be hard to go through that and find people I'm following who are also on an ostatus-compatible service somewhere
As a developer, I would love to see this get more traction. I really would.<p>It's really painful working with Twitter now. Twitter's display 'requirements' and other aspects of the API are super restrictive after their latest update.<p>However, the sad truth is that the population of Twitter users isn't going to be shifting anywhere else anytime soon. Most users hardly care about the 'openness' of the platform. I imagine the best way for a competitor to succeed would be by allowing users to cross post statuses to Twitter.. but Twitter API restrictions would kick in there too!
I think the big problem with distributed systems is how to address people. "@abc" is getting more and more synonymous with "abc" as a Twitter username, and App.net uses the same style. This already leads to confusion when they don't match (e.g. Marco Arment is @marcoarment on Twitter and @marco on App.net); I have no idea how you fix this for decentralising.<p>"@example.com/abc" is one (not particularly nice) way of doing it, but I'm struggling to think of any way that would work nicely.
I see a problem with OStatus that, it seems, is also seen by others - it may not be user-friendly. When a deployment that uses OStatus shuts down/fails, that's it - the users are gone. And that seems like a dealbreaker.<p>I've shared my thoughts on distributed social networks here <a href="http://web.bozho.net/?p=235" rel="nofollow">http://web.bozho.net/?p=235</a>
This looks interesting.<p>We built ScoopSpot[1] to make microblog better, one of the core proposition was to allow the application developers work with the statuses more openly. However, it didn't caught attention of the people. One interesting aspect of ScoopSpot was to allow user follow a tag or topic.<p>The possibility of application built on what users' interests are limitless (at least that's what I think). I will look into the protocol of OStatus to see how can we make our API's open.
[1]<a href="https://www.scoopspot.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.scoopspot.com</a>
What ever happened to app.net? I keep waiting to see it resurface in comments related to Twitter, but it never does. Not a mention of it in any of these comments either.<p>What gives? End of the hype?
Long time ago we did this service to check if your site / email follows the ostatus specifications : <a href="http://www.madebymonsieur.com/ostatus_discovery/" rel="nofollow">http://www.madebymonsieur.com/ostatus_discovery/</a>
Test it with you website or email adress, exemple enter <a href="http://identi.ca/glynmoody" rel="nofollow">http://identi.ca/glynmoody</a> in the form
enjoy!
Slightly off topic, but i've only just seen these Twitter API usage changes now, how are they going to enforce these new display requirements? It's surely not feasible to manually check the display of tweets in all apps?
Ok, um, this is not going to work. Half of the magic of Twitter is that it's a single service, so you can subscribe to anyone, pull anyones feed into yours, retweet, share, all that junk.<p>People use twitter because other people use twitter.<p>An open service doesn't solve that, it just makes things more complicated and worse.<p>Wordpress works because it's not a network platform, it's a publishing one. Wordpress is inherently not a social network, it's a CMS. Sure, there are social bits, but it works well as an installable thing because you don't have to deal with issues like connecting or discovering other blogs. You can just install it, write content, and hit publish and boom, you're publishing on your own site on the net.<p>The only people who see a problem with Twitter right now are devs, not users.<p>All the "open twitter" projects are going to turn out the way of Diaspora, not Wordpress.
Guys I'd like to share another bootstrapped Italian startup in the microblogging panorama: www.meemi.com<p>Full Disclosure: I know the creator, not by person but on the Net
It annoys me that folks with a poverty of imagination are creating clones of existing apps that have already solved the problem. Another Twitter but open or Facebook with proper privacy..etc. Fail!.