Social networking: The good, the bad & the ugly

GNU social
StatusNet, formerly known as Laconi.ca, powers the http://identi.ca microblogging site, and 25,000 others, totalling more than 1.5 million users. It offers features not seen in rival Twitter, such as groups, and context – a threaded view of conversations. Development of OMB and OStatus adds up to a codebase that couldn’t be ignored by ‘The Socialites’ – the GNU social developers – who were already big fans: “We hope to be the non-evil Facebook to their non-evil Twitter,” social’s Rob Myers told us.

StatusNet’s Evan Promodrou and Craig Andrews have recently met GNU social devs, and former Twitter coder Blaine Cook – who had a proposal for Webfinger and OAuth that’s been taken up by the project for privacy control.  We asked GNU social developers if a federated social networking system where you can run your own server instance, just as you can with StatusNet, could be made easily usable for non-technical users.

“Like StatusNet, we’re using MySQL/PHP/Apache to make sure that there’s the widest possible range of hosting services and operating systems that people can run the software on. Because social is a GNU project, people’s freedom to use the software is very important to us,” Rob Myers told us.

“Users who don’t have the minimal technical knowledge required to install the software will be able to choose from a range of hosts running the software. And the beauty of a federated system is that whichever host they choose, they can subscribe to their friends wherever they are.”

Matt Lee explained it to us thus: “I believe at the core of all of this is ease of use. Choosing a social network shouldn’t be about features or functionality – it should be about who provides the best case for your social relationships: ease of use, privacy, freedom, transparency.”

He elaborated, “GNU social runs on a minimal PHP stack, along with GNU/Linux, MySQL and a web server, meaning it can run on the emerging minimal ‘plug’ servers as well as the traditional stack that hosts so many other popular websites. Users will be able to treat social networking like email – taking their contacts with them, instead of entering into a relationship that I don’t believe people want to be in – one where your social information is locked away by a private corporation.”

Like Prodromou, Lee is keen on collaboration: “We are very close to having decentralised social networking that we can all use… any project that is free software is a win in this.”

Distributed social platforms, based on free software and strong, open standards, seem to be an idea whose time has come. Facebook may come with “free spying”, as Eben Moglen highlights, but these projects come with real freedom and control. Sounds like a good deal to us.

One link to bind them
OStatus is the standard that could make all the alternative social platforms work together. It  builds on OpenMicroBlogging (OMB), StatusNet’s custom protocol which allows subscriptions between different sites running the software. OStatus enables better communication between StatusNet instances, but also extends the protocol to make it work better with other social networks. It has already been adopted by Google Buzz, and is the key tech choice for interoperability between GNU social and other free and open solutions.

“OStatus isn’t a single protocol, it’s a protocol suite that incorporates other lower-level protocols: Atom or RSS, PubSubHubbub, Salmon, Activity Streams, Portable Contacts, Webfinger,” StatusNet’s Evan Prodromou told us. We asked him how integrated it was with other networks: “To break it down, most software provides these features in about this order:

1. Share PubSubHubbub (PuSH) enabled Activity Streams feeds for a user. LiveJournal, Google Buzz and WordPress do this.
2. Enhance Activity Streams with Portable Contacts profile information. Buzz
does this.
3. Use Salmon to send replies or comments from subscriber to publisher. Buzz has this coming; Cliqset already has it working well.
4. Let users subscribe to remote PuSH-enabled Activity Streams.
5. Use Webfinger for discovery. Buzz does this.

“Because OStatus is so modular, StatusNet is compatible with these systems partially or in whole. I think that’s a great approach. It gives implementers a quick way to have a social web presence, and then improve their integration as users require.”
Prodromou adds “I’m excited about the developments with GNU social. Our plan is to have StatusNet provide a base layer of functionality for GNU social – authorisation and plug-ins.” We asked Prodromou about how collaboration on OStatus was going with the other projects mentioned in the article…

“We’re actively engaging with them. We’ve organised a federated social web summit for the weekend before OSCON 2010 for all developers currently working on the problem of federation. I hope it will help us avoid unnecessary protocol incompatibilities. I think we want to encourage innovation at this stage of the game, but I’d rather that people did new things on purpose, not through ignorance,” he told us

Follow the link for StatusNet’s Evan Prodromou’s interview with Linux User & Developer about Facebook, Twitter and more besides…

Click here to read more from Linux User & Developer, or find out what else featured in issue 90.