Re: [Social-discuss] What I think GNU Social's structure should be

[Jason Self]

Sean Corbett <address@hidden> wrote ..

> I'm confident this scheme would be functional, however the possibility
> that someone's data just isn't available everywhere would still exist.
> If one of my friends posts a link and some commentary, and a few hours
> later one of my coworkers tells me to check it out, and it turns out
> that data isn't available to me because I wasn't online while it was
> cached somewhere, I'd be ticked. Or would this not happen?
> 
> Also, why is push delivery better than pull? (The following probably
> stems from some misunderstanding) If I have a few hundred friends spread
> across a hundred cores in the network, and there's also a lot of people
> using this core, wouldn't the server running my core get bogged down?
> Wouldn't it just be more efficient to serve that data on a per request
> basis, and cache it at a remote server once this happens? So, if one of
> my friends on a remote node in the example above requests my data, and
> another on the same node requests it, that server can deal with the
> second request directly (provided other updates haven't happened in the
> meantime).
> 
> Please, please correct me if I've just plain overlooked something. :-/

I think it's best if my node, running my copy of GNU Social, is authoritative
for my data: just like my webserver & my DNS server are authoritative for me. In
the model mentioned earlier, where there's multiple copies of my data, I don't
think that there's a way to guarantee that everyone has a copy so why bother? It
greatly simplifies the design if we don't, and besides: In your example: If a
friend of yours received a link & a comment from me, but my node went offline
before you could get it from me, there's nothing to stop your friend from
including that link & comment in their feed to you. (Or you could get it from me
once my node is back online again.)

It's very easy to overdesign GNU Social. It needs to be simple.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/P2P-network.svg