Support Trackback/PuSH/Salmon/OStatus/Pump

[singpolyma]

Federating the whole federated web :)

I'll add this to my infinitely-long list of things to look into, but if someone else decides to poke at it, that'd be awesome too!

[kylewm]

I would love for the indieweb to federate with pump.io and gnu social, but I do have concerns about doing it with Bridgy. See my response to the issue about Diaspora (#198 (comment)). I say this as lovingly as I can, Bridgy's kind of a kludge :) It hammers unfriendly proprietary silo APIs into a friendly common format that we can read and understand. This kind of thing should not really be necessary for protocols that are meant to be open and interoperable. Either indieweb sites should federate directly with federated social networks, or they should talk through relatively dumb proxies that can just convert from one form to another, without having to resort to POSSE and backfeed.

[singpolyma]

Agree that the use case is slightly different from POSSE and backfeed. I doubt we're ever going to see all the platforms implement all the protocols, though, so a proxies are definitely a thing. Maybe it should be a seperate project -- I certainly wouldn't want to see quitter.se-specific POSSE+backfeed the way we do for twitter silos, etc (though that would work in the short term... just feels like a gross solution).

The reason I think it might make sense in brid.gy, is that brid.gy is already set up to take differently-formatted upstreams and generate the microformats2 stuff that the indieweb expects to consume, which would definitely still be needed here, but maybe can just be borrowed by another project.

[tantek]

Trackback is a dead flawed protocol that no one should support, in fact anyone supporting it should remove support: http://indiewebcamp.com/Trackback#Criticism

PuSH doesn't apply to Bridgy as Bridgy does post-to-post specific bridging, which PuSH is not designed for.

Salmon is too complex, too difficult, and lacking in any kind of community support therefore is also not worth implementing: http://indiewebcamp.com/Salmon#Criticism In addition the number of implementations/sites is shrinking (with the loss of Status.net) - it's another dying protocol.

[singpolyma]

@tantek things that are widely-deployed and used are 100% worth implementing. The silos brid.gy already talks to are also gross, but we talk to them because we need to. Salmon/OStatus support would get us the whole GNU Social communities (all the quitters, the FSF node, any many personal nodes). I understand it's more complex than webmention, but if every site supported webmention natively there would be no brid.gy at all :)

[snarfed]

interesting ideas and discussion. thanks all!

@singpolyma, just to clarify, you're talking about bridging ostatus etc to indieweb (webmention + mf2), not bridging the social network silos to ostatus etc, right?

assuming the former, i think we're on the right track here. it's definitely doable, but should probably be a standalone translator proxy, not part of bridgy. fortunately all of the translation logic is in a separate library project, granary, so it's very reusable. it even uses activitystreams as the common format, so it can convert to/from mf2. check it out!

if you actually meant bridging the social network silos to ostatus etc, that ironically might be a better candidate for doing inside bridgy. i actually shipped standalone MVPs that do it a while back, salmon-unofficial and ostatus-unofficial. they're totally unmaintained, but should be straightforward to dust off and port to granary if you're interested!

[singpolyma]

@snarfed definitely -- talking about bridging all the competing federated social network protocols. I'm talking to their communities about bridging with each other and us as well, but the existence of brid.gy gives me hope for the future that I never had back when everyone was just fighting :)

I'll look at granary, thanks!

[snarfed]

tentatively closing since this is about bridging indieweb <=> ostatus (etc), which would probably happen outside bridgy. feel free to reopen if i'm mistaken!