On 7 December 2012 02:14, hellekin (GNU/social)
<address@hidden> wrote:
(resent: I'll defeat the lag monster that really does not want me to
reach you. Another mail from October!!! is following)
Hello list,
there has been some confusion I fear, about a namespace clash between
two distinguishable projects. RMS granted me maintainership of GNU
Social to revive it as described hereafter. It is a completely different
thing as *your* GNU Social (hence the typographic difference) that
appears to be dormant for a couple of years.
It's defined as:
An umbrella project to facilitate coordination of free software
social networking projects to encourage freedom, privacy, public
space, and decentralization.
I wish we could not have this name clash and make it smoothly. It was my
intention to send an email to this list to ensure everybody gets a say,
but for some reason it didn't happen so far. So, today, I want to let
you know about this new initiative that the Chief GNUisance announced
back in October.
I was waiting for the availability of the gnu.org/social URL to get
started, and things crawled away. I didn't change nor remove any of the
settings ofthe existing project so far, so you can have a say on how you
want to proceed with the StatusNet theme.
So I have two questions:
- how do you want to handle the transition? (keep your project going,
phase it out, move it?)
Phase out the old project. Fresh start.
- are you interested in participating in the new installment?
Yes!
Please find below a more complete description of the new GNU Social
initiative,
regards,
==
hk
** Introduction
Over the last decade, we've seen the emergence of centralized
commercial services for online social networking. These services
are dedicated to surveillance of their users, and threaten free
speech, privacy, and the end-to-end Internet. They tend to reduce
the Internet from a public space to a private platform for
commercial interests.
Various free software projects aim to provide decentralized
freedom-respecting alternatives to centralized corporate platforms.
The GNU Social project hopes to facilitate these projects' working
together.
** Free Software
As part of the GNU Project, GNU Social promotes and fosters
adoption of free software in the field of social networking. Using
the GNU General Public License and the GNU Affero General Public
License, developers can dedicate their code permanently to users'
freedom, and thus ensure it advances the public digital space.
** Social Networking
: "Some people conflate social networks, which are the aggregate of
: relationships that humans have, with online social network services
: such as Facebook and, arguably, G+" -- Howard Rheingold
Too often, the term social network is used interchangeably with
social network services, implying that the services themselves
provide the social network. But that's plain wrong: the social
network is a human cultural phenomenon, and a network service can
at best facilitate it.
** Decentralization
A centralized service, whether Facebook or its alternatives, is
expensive; to make money, it needs to monitor its users and sell
information about them. Furthermore, states will compel the service
to hand over the data it collects about its users, and laws
generally give users few rights over data that they have handed
over to the service.
Therefore, rather than proposing a more ethical centralized
service, GNU Social aims to encourage decentralized systems.
Ultimately we hope each user will have a server from which to share
her own personal information with others as she sees fit, managed
by free software fully under her own control.
** Interoperability
Where commercial services embody a one-size-fits-all vision,, the
GNU Social project recognizes the diversity of use-cases and
communities.
Hence it fosters diversity in the approaches to social networking
support tools.
** Anonymity
With interoperating free software social networking systems, no
user will be compelled to provide any particular kind of
information, whether it be her name, her age, or what country she
lives in. It will be up to those she communicates with to judge
what information she chooses to provide or withhold.
** Roadmap
Hereby we propose an initial roadmap, to be refined in conjunction
with the participating projects.
*** Distributed Networking
When the technology is ready, it makes sense to restore end-to-end
communications as the normal way to convey social networking
activity online.
The GNUnet and Secushare programs will eventually serve that
purpose, by providing the transport mechanisms for each device on
the network to become a fully-featured social networking service
for its owner.
*** OStatus Federation
In the meantime, decentralization can occur at community level:
each community can operate its own server, and federate its
contents with other communities using the OStatus protocols.
Hence, the GNU Social project aims at coordinating the evolution
of these protocols through the active participation of developers
across projects to achieve complete interoperability for existing
and upcoming federated resources.
We propose Lorea as the initial model implementation since it
provides the most advanced OStatus implementation to date. It's
readily compatible with StatusNet, Diaspora*, and Friendica
implementations.
*** Other federation protocols
The GNU Social project considers OStatus the best current protocol
for federating social network services, but we will also consider
other protocols that become available. We invite developers to
present their developments to the GNU Social community for testing
and feedback.
*** Use Cases
Due to their similarity, free software social networking programs
face a whole lot of similar use cases. These should be clearly
defined and tests provided to ease implementation.
But all programs are not equal: some will focus on desktop usage,
others on mobile devices; some on individual use, others on group
collaboration; some on always-on-connectivity, others on
eventually-connected-networks.
*** Threat Modeling
An important part of designing massively interactive program
resides in the ability to provide a clear and sensible threat
model for that program.
As many free software social networking programs encounter similar
issues, it makes sense to define comparable threat models. We
encourage projects to use the TRIKE methodology to define the
threat model, and will provide tools and resources to do so.