[Social-discuss] Four projects

[elijah]

I just read the archives from start to finish, and I think there are
really four distinct yet interrelated projects:

(1) Stand Alone, Federated Website: the world needs a codebase that is
easy to download and install to run a social network on your server.
This website must publish its data, and subscribe to data, in some as
yet undetermined social protocol. It must be AGPL.

(2) A New Social Protocol: there are many proposed social protocols,
each with strengths and weaknesses, but none that really meet all the
needs (secure, partitioned social context, push, data agnostic, etc).

(3) Semi-autonomous Clients: If we are to protect ourselves from the
dangers of a society in which all our personal data is controlled by
some cloud provider then we need encryption to take place on the client
(the data itself may be largely stored in the cloud). An example of a
secure, decentralized social network client is wuala (proprietary).

(4) Social Data Gateway: A daemon that speaks a routing protocol to
queue and deliver messages, agnostic of the data the messages contain.

So, I think we are really having four conversations: gnu-social-site,
gnu-social-protocol, gnu-social-client, and gnu-social-gateway.

At this point, it seems to me that a wiki page is in order. It would:

(a) summarize the major design issues with each project
(b) summarize prior work in the area related to each project
(c) analyze the limitations of prior work

If we all chip in, this research could be done quickly. I think it would
be premature to do much coding before this map is drawn.

-elijah