On 03/28/2010 10:59 AM, Adrian Thurston wrote:
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.
What's the backend? The backend needs to be PHP too, because the user
needs to be able to run their own backend, on their own $1 hosting account.