App.net to support activitystrea.ms, pubsubhubbub, Webfinger, feeds

http://daltoncaldwell.com/a-response-to-brennan-novak

by abraham • 14 years ago

77 30 14 years ago

kmf2• 14 years ago

I understand there's a weirdly huge amount of opposition (like that guy who freaked out on Dalton over comment a couple days ago) about the project, so I'd like to say a bit.

I've been on the site for a good week now (@kristian) and there's some incredible people there. Great conversation, great progress on determining just what this project is. That's not a bad thing — the nature of a project like this is that it is evolving constantly.

In that vein, I encourage people to check out an issue filed at the App.net API page on Github.

https://github.com/appdotnet/api-spec/issues/33

The basic idea is a reworking of the API into something more extensible. If I'm understanding correctly (I'm pretty new at this stuff), the API at this point resembles the use case of something like Twitter: users have many posts, posts have text, a date, etc (Rails associations, anyone?). This issue proposes that the access control on those posts be variable, to fit an infinite amount of use cases. A couple examples are Twitter-style DMs (posts visible between two users), mailing lists (posts visible between specific, but multiple users), etc.

I think the thing that is causing App.net problems is that people think they are funding a Twitter clone. The fact is that the basic system of "users" with "things" goes a lot further than Twitter. It's email, it's chat, it's notifications, it's whatever you want it to be. And that's what's fascinating — we're funding an extensible piece of the next phase of the Internet — something decentralized and more or less living and breathing.

So here comes the part where I tell you to fund it. But I'm not going to. It's your call. I'm a huge fan of the service already and I can tell you that within the last two days, we've had a mobile web app, native iOS app, and streaming web app pop up out of nowhere. It's a crazy active community, and now's the time to get in. If you want to fund it, you probably know by now where to do that. There's my 2 cents (though arguably that was like 80 cents).

icebraining3• 14 years ago

something decentralized

How so? Has anything changed in that regard?

possibilistic• 14 years ago

This is something I would very much like to be informed about. If anyone knows and wouldn't mind chiming in, I'd greatly appreciate it.

kmf2• 14 years ago

Oh boy. I forgot decentralized would have some API connotations — my thinking was more along the lines of crowd-funded, "power to the people" kind of thing. If we're paying for it, we dictate how it works. Sorry about that.

seagreen• 14 years ago

I think it's less of a "build a replacement for twitter" kind of thing and more along the lines of "build another twitter, but better." So it's a difference of degree, not kind.

This sucks. A distributed social network would be incredibly cool. On the other hand we've known we've needed one for a long time but nobody can seem to build on that catches on. Maybe there's a reason for that.

Here's a question for the app.net leadership. If app.net ever became successful, and someone came along with a real distributed social network and tried to Padlister your Craigslist, what would you do? Does your commitment to open APIs extend that far?

This post sounds more negative than I intended. Marginal improvement is still improvement! I'm actually starting to get kind of excited to see what happens.

msbarnett• 14 years ago

Eh, I'd really rather fund a non-abusive twitter clone than a "trying to be all things to all people" emailinotificatallistifederated whatnot.

There's an awful lot to be said for the focus of doing just one thing, well. I've never once thought to myself that the thing that Twitter really needed was complex ACL settings.

mbreese3• 14 years ago

> we're funding an extensible piece of the next phase of the Internet — something decentralized

Unless there exists the ability for people to have their own App.net servers written in their own languages, then this is not decentralized. The recent trends towards web-app silos for our data is relatively new in the history of the Internet. If you want something decentralized, you need multiple clients and servers. You need the ability to set it up on your own hardware. You need the ability to make a new implementation if you don't like the old one. You don't need a single company running everything.

fields• 14 years ago

I posted a long-ish piece on this yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4369373

Todd• 14 years ago

This is definitely a move in the right direction. These are some of the same protocols that the Diaspora* folks have settled on. It will be interesting to see the degree of compatibility they can achieve in federating.

riffic• 14 years ago

OStatus?

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

I have never heard of any of these. Isn't email good enough? We're just transmitting text from 1 person's monitor to another, not curing cancer here (not being cynical, but with ALL the press/commotion over this, you'd think he was doing something very ambitious)

andrew_simone• 14 years ago

because he is doing something very ambitious. if you don't understand why, that's fine, but don't dismiss it on that account.

bslatkin• 14 years ago

As a contributor to PubSubHubbub, OStatus, and friends, I am extremely happy to see this. The protocols themselves aren't the important bits (though I like them); what matters is the commitment to meaningful syndication in and out of the platform.

brajkovic2• 14 years ago

I hate to be that guy, but who gives a crap? I don't know of anyone who actually uses any of the first 3 protocols listed here. RSS is somewhat useful, but when would I not want to use a dedicated client or some client library?

I'm not a backer but I'd rather they spend time developing their MVP and building infrastructure so they don't have the same issues that were so pervasive in Twitter's early years (Fail Whale every hour, anyone?).

icebraining3• 14 years ago

Atom is widely used (when you see "RSS", it's often Atom). And in any case, outputting the data in an extra format takes barely any time.

As for PubSubHubBub, all they have to do is add a tag to the feed with the Hub's url and send a POST request to the Hub when the feed has updates; that's it.

For the effort is takes (or should take, assuming they have a decent architecture), and the advantage of being automatically compatible with a bunch of existing applications, it'd seem strange not to do it.

brajkovic2• 14 years ago

What existing applications besides RSS readers? Who uses PubSub and Webfinger, and why would I want to use Atom/RSS for this type of service?

I don't see the point in this trying to be everything to everyone sort of deal.

cmelbye• 14 years ago

It's a step towards federation and open access to your posts. Why wouldn't you want these protocols? Who wants to be locked down into one system? If that's what you want, use Twitter.

mcantelon• 14 years ago

At a high level, how's this different from what Diaspora was trying to do (other than having a clearer funding model)?

dkasper• 14 years ago

Not a decentralized system for one.

jmathai• 14 years ago

Or open source.

I'm not an open source zealot but I've been saying from the beginning that it's the one piece that's missing here.

markkat• 14 years ago

Honestly I just want to see this funded because I want to see how it plays out.

Steko• 14 years ago

Looks like the deadline is going to be tight.

Here's hoping that sometime Sunday night circa 11:55pm Larry Paige hits pause on the Gangnam Style/Kanye remix he's been marathoning, Chromes his way to app.net and kicks in the last 75 grand to fully fund it. Like a boss.

daveasaurus• 14 years ago

From their site:

> App.net will only be funded if at least $500,000 is pledged by MONDAY, AUGUST 13 at 11:59PM PDT.

Why is this? They aren't going through Kickstarter, it's their own fundraising system and a deadline chosen by the App.net folks themselves. It's just an arbitrarily chosen deadline? A self imposed constraint that they can seemingly modify at will?

mbreese3• 14 years ago

It could also be that they are holding people's money (or rather, credit card info). And if they don't make their pledge goals, they can't collect that money.

They made their own rules, but now they have to stick to them.

kennywinker• 14 years ago

I find myself more and more hoping app.net DOESN'T get funded. I want the messaging-platform successor to twitter to be an open, distributed platform, not a single-provider closed platform.

I like what they're planning to build, I just want that to be a layer built on the open internet...

wamatt2• 14 years ago

hmm yeah. I mean I donated, but at the same time, I feel the whole app.net thing == dalton and his emotions.

The video is "I, I, me, me". And less about "we".

Decentralised would be awesome, with some sort of non-profit organisation accepting donations and paying bills.

mbreese3• 14 years ago

Who needs a non-profit accepting donations? You don't see a foundation setup to support SMTP. The best solution for a decentralized approach would be a new protocol (and don't call something that communicates with HTTP a new protocol).

It could be all decentralized in the same way that email is - with DNS records. And once the protocol is defined, there could be many implementations. What would be needed is:

    1) a server to server protocol (SMTP)
    2) a client to server protocol (perhaps a web interface would suffice, but really a client protocol would be better). (IMAP/POP3)
    3) Implementations of a server and a client (and a web interface for the server). (sendmail, mutt/thunderbird/etc...)

Who's up for it? Yes, I know that's a lot... I'm just tired of seeing people propose a federated version of Twitter and end up going nowhere with a complicated set of specs that are damn near impossible to implement. You aren't going to convince the Google's, Yahoo's, and Microsoft's of the world to support Diaspora. And that's who you need to convince - major email providers. They are the the most familiar with providing free email/identities to millions of people.

App.net to support activitystrea.ms, pubsubhubbub, Webfinger, feeds

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