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Re: [Social] GNU Social and GNU/social


From: Steven Robertson
Subject: Re: [Social] GNU Social and GNU/social
Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2012 11:36:41 +0000

Actions speak louder than words. People should remember that. This looks like lunacy. If this is how things are played around here I think I'm put off and will un-subscribe. I might have contributed, sharing the same kind of interest but I don't like this at all.


On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Melvin Carvalho <address@hidden> wrote:


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.







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