The Social Web is not federated

[evanp]

Social networks are isolated and disconnected. People put their creative works, their social graph, and their personal connections into services with dubious terms of service. Service providers depend on the network effect to prevent healthy competition. Gigantic user databases are a one-stop-shopping target for hackers and spy agencies.

We must federate the social web.

[OpenCode]

This is a mission impossible! Federate the web means insert society as Facebook or Twitter in the some universe of Pump.io or friendica or Diaspora. Is it possibile for you? Friendica and Diaspora have tried to create a federation and are failing slowly. Red is a new project that snubs all other. GNUSocial changre strucure every month.

Do you think you can create a federation knowing this?

[mama21mama]

OpenCode you see the empty half empty. Die identi.ca and multiplies as gremlin. http://cut07.tk/cdg

[csolisr]

I guess this will finish as awfully as Ubuntu's bug number one. That is, its objective was to "defeat" a certain brand or system, not to make an ethical change in society. I suggest to change the name of this bug to something like "The web depends upon centralized, non-free servers".

[evanp]

@csolisr There's no named company in this bug. There is no defeat involved; it's about making connections, not crushing competition. Federating the existing social networks would close this bug.

[evanp]

@OpenCode Going faster than the speed of light is impossible. Connecting social networks is feasible and achievable.

[ghost]

It has to be possible. This is a great first bug.

[almereyda]

A small update on this topic, as these also strongly relate to work of @evanp :

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Historical developments leading to the Federated Social Web:

• http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/
  • http://www.w3.org/community/fedsocweb/

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Refined preperations for official @w3c standardization processes

• http://www.w3.org/Social/
  • http://www.w3.org/2013/socialweb/social-wg-charter.html
  • http://www.w3.org/2013/socialweb/social-ig-charter.html

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Current preperations for the soon to be published Social Web Charters:

• http://www.w3.org/2014/05/14-social-minutes.html
  • almost empty wiki stub http://www.w3.org/Social/WG
    • redirects to http://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg
  • almost empty wiki stub http://www.w3.org/Social/IG
    • redirects to http://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialig

---

Constantly to be updated, public Wiki entries:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_web
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network

[evanp]

I am more optimistic about this bug today than I ever have been before.

[pdurbin]

@evanp that's great news, but why? What's on your mind? 😄 Your recent commit at 57161cb about ActivityPub looks promising!