autonomous-discuss
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [autonomo.us] pumped


From: MJ Ray
Subject: Re: [autonomo.us] pumped
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 13:22:33 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.16) Gecko/20121215 Icedove/3.0.11

On 12/07/13 12:47, Kuno Woudt wrote:
> On 07/12/2013 01:17 PM, MJ Ray wrote:
>> Congratulations? Why? identi.ca is now cut off from other free software
>> services and seems to put its users at risk of mass spying.
> 
> How does it put users at risk of mass spying any more than StatusNet did?

StatusNet was usable without allowing scripts from Google to download
and run, and there were many well-checked clients available for it,
while pump.io has a few rapidly-developed clients and reviews suggest
the risky javascript web interface is the one to use.  That may change
as it matures, but now, it seems like it's put people more at risk.  It
would be quite straightforward for Google (on spy orders) to serve a
malicious script to a particular target person or group.

>> [...] There's no login link.
> 
> The login link is in the top right of the page, which indeed goes to
> https://identi.ca/main/login .

Are the three horizontal bars meant to be the login link?  That usually
means Menu and did nothing for me when I clicked on it.

> I think it's also worth noting that supposedly the web interface is
> "just another client".  Everything the web interface can do is exposed
> through the API, so someone else could come along and write a different
> web interface which doesn't use any javascript.

I found the API at https://github.com/e14n/pump.io/blob/master/API.md so
I could try writing a non-javascript UI starting with the missing bits
that matter most to me, like the missing RSS feeds.

Firstly, it looks like one can't use the API at all without
authentication, even for downloading public content, and the
authentication must be OAuth not HTTP.  That sucks (just as it does with
Twitter now) but I know I can overcome it if needed.

Secondly and show-stoppingly, I didn't see an equivalent in the API for
the old /mjray/all page data.  Do you?

>> Given what a great example identi.ca was for autonomous services, I feel
>> this is all really disappointing.
> 
> Given how difficult OStatus was to develop for, I feel pump is really
> exciting.  We have a much better chance now that other applications and
> websites will integrate with pump.io.  Once you get past the OAuth parts
> (which is not specific to pump.io), the protocol is easy to understand
> and work with. [...]

Yeah, I agree OStatus wasn't great, but we'd got it working and it
worked with a few sites and not just statusnet - we're also going to
have to keep on with it for a while because of those other sites,
including statusnet.

Now identi.ca is pump.io, it means more single-service code to be
written and that's a hard sell to website owners, over the alternative
of moving out.  I don't think there's a better chance we'll see
integration, as now the site operator has broken APIs.  I suspect we're
going to be selling more self-hosted social networks as people retreat
into their own spaces where others can't break them... and those won't
be pump.io while it doesn't even support basic things like RSS and so on.

Thanks for the comments,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]