Re: [Social-discuss] Which framework?

[Henry Litwhiler]

On 3/28/10 10:59 AM, Adrian Thurston wrote:

Hello GNU-Social,

My name is Adrian and for a long while I have been interested in distributed social networking. I'm the person behind DSNP, which has been mentioned here before. DSNP has been a great learning experience for me, and fun too. At one point I had my immediate family using my 2-node network of social-networking sites.

Unfortunately, it has grown to the point where it's too much work for me to do alone. Either I must redirect my efforts to another project with momentum behind it, or stop development. I'm hoping that GNU-Social can be that other project. For that to work there needs to be some harmony of design ideals. So here I present mine:

Separating a social application into backend and frontend is the right approach.

The backend is basically a message distribution system and associated database that is aware of social concepts. I think we should not be afraid of designing and implementing a new protocol. A new protocol will give the maximum freedom to make what we need. Piggybacking on other protocols means also piggybacking on the design goals and limitations of those protocols.

The frontnend provides the user's view into the social space. For this you use a language like PHP.

-Adrian

I agree entirely. Do you think that the PHP install should be something that only the person hosting it should have access to (i.e. everyone goes to 127.0.0.1, and it is nothing more than a quick and convenient way to interface with the GNU Social install), or that everyone should, in essence, have their own GNU Social "site"?

My idea is that everyone can have this sort of "backbone" application running on their computer (perhaps in Python or C). This application handles all the "behind-the-scenes" interactions between GNU Social installs, through XMPP or another (perhaps original) protocol.

Users can (optionally) install the PHP frontend to an (Apache?) server. This PHP frontend loads data from the backend, and displays it to only one user - the person who installed the PHP frontend. Generally, this PHP frontend will only accessed from the computer it was installed on (127.0.01), but the user can also get at it from other locations (work, school, vacation, etc.) by typing in the IP address of the computer the PHP install is running on.

It could be compared to our current email system: you don't log in to your friends' email accounts to send them emails - you log in to your own email account, and send them emails. The browser frontend is nothing more than a convenience.

Thoughts?

--
Henry L.