Protocols and examples

OStatus works as follows: you will be able to set up your own ‘seed’/‘node’ on any CouchDB, or use someone elses CouchAppSpora seed, or use any other software stack in the world that supports OStatus. You are in charge of hosting your own posts. If you ‘follow’ someone, you will start replicating all posts from that person’s node to your local node. You will be able to choose much of your followers data and how long their data stays around on your local node, but you will always want to keep all of your own personally created posts around for others to replicate from.

If you join a ‘group’/‘aspect’, you will effectively now be replicating directly from all group posts from all users in that group. Groups will be able to be public or private.

Once this framework is set up, CouchDB gets really exciting. You can have your main node acting as the public host/server for others to replicate your data from, but on your devices you can replicate local subsets of the data. On your phone you could only replicate posts from one of your aspects instead of all of them, or choose to not replicate attachcments, or any other filters that you can imagine. The benefit of replicating directly to your devices is that it will allow you to work while offline, and CouchDB will automatically handle replicating your data the moment a connection becomes available.