i agree with URL being the GID, but not sure why it needs to be whirlpooled, can the callback URL be the same?
might want to look at GnuPG, the requests can be signed and responses verified and there is a good keyring mechanism which i don't believe is implemented in SSH. i think what you describe requires that the server have knowledge of the public key, and what happens in a security breach - is there a revocation mechanism?
pgp - it's possible that 'user jay' can send a request (and get a response) providing only the keyid of a publicly posted key, ie, in a directory. just a thought.

If my expectations are the same as the idea behind it, the "post language detector" sounds to be a feature I was always wondering why does there not exist such a function.
I don't know if I have enough knowledge to work on this part and free time is also not so much, but I would be interested.
Let me know how far it is and where I could find the relevant code and I will take a look on this. But first I need to finish the libravatar addon still.

We've got a library in library/langdet which recognises 50-60 languages.

That's what we have at the moment. One would need to run this on posts that are imported or created here and it needs a column in the item table to store the results (an array of probabilities).

Then we would need a member setting to store what languages we are OK seeing, and something added to the network search to provide an ability to filter others out of the conversation (or translate them).

Currently translation is an issue. Google is no longer possible, bing is but could expose your conversations to monitoring, and the best open source translator I've found doesn't support German - which might not bother you, but affects most other Friendica folks since we have a large number of German members with unreadable (to me) conversations. I think German was in beta (unsupported) in that project - but I'll have to dig it up again. Perhaps the situation has improved.

Sounds like a lot of heavy lifting...wow.

Really great to read that post @Mike . It's good to see all the things that have to go on in order to make this all work. I like the invited/needed involvement of the people. It truly is becoming a community project and has grown in leaps and bounds even just since I've jumped on board! Very wonderful!

woot woot, HFD (still another 2 hours to go here )

We need Happy Feet to use Friendica! (Or at least the scientists over there...)

lots and lots of

Thanks for Friendica @Mike

Happy ~friendica Day @Mike for you and a (for now) for me.

Thank you all for the hard work you are putting into this project

!

Yes, Happy Friendica Day to all of you! It's great to be part of this.

:cool

I this project!

@Mike You too mate: for you for me

: ]

So it is some kind of #friendicaday today? May 15 it is? i gotta take that date into my calendar and recall it next year then... ;)

@Woop Yes indeed, take a look at the stuff on @Friendica Day ...

Next YEAR? I hope the next one will be in a few months' time...

For Friendica Day I have started setting a new public server at http://geek.tf

.tf is the Internet country code top-level domain for the French Southern and Antarctic Lands

Registration will soon be open to all, including non-Antarcticans.
The server is located in Milan, Italy.

@Keith Fernie That's about the limit of my own Antarctic ambitions. The Alps more or less stop a few miles earlier in Como - and so, if I have my way, do I.

@Woop, this is the post from @Mike which started the idea. So who knows how often it may be...

Okay, so... how is a friendica day settled? If it is not annual....

We could always piggy back off other days.

International Towel Day (hurry up, you've only got ten days - but smiley_pack really needs a towel smiley if you're stuck for an idea), and Sys Admin Appreciation Day would be good candidates.

Happy Friendica-Day to all!!!

Congrats to all.

*blink*

i dunno where s/he is getting that yahoo code, but i don't see it anywhere.

ytimg = youtube image server

I think this is the code (hosted on YouTube's site) that enables embedding. It would be great if YouTube/Google agreed to respect users' freedoms.

(Licensing is only part of that puzzle.)

ok, well, i didn't see any reference to that in my git source tree.

probably part of an rss feed, or some fb post someone re-shared or some crap...

:headbang

My guess is that @tony baldwin 's got this one right.

David Benfell tagged Mike's status with #GPLtroll

what are the features / points in that these both are differentiating then ?

is there a different focus on content and/or usergroup?

All in good time, but in a nutshell:

• Much higher efficiency.
  
  
• Facebook? Hasta la vista babee.
  

great, i am really curious to see it

It will support ZOT2? (btw, happy birthday )

It is zot2. Building up a lot of design specs at the moment. Some highlights - structurally an inherited object architecture (especially with regard to "people"), most communications in json, pdo DB abstraction, and smarty. Ajax loading of everything but the initial conversation highlights. Endless scroll (but on request - not attached to scrollbars). This saves us a very expensive query to get the total number of items.

Things that will not be popular with some Friendica folks (but will be a big part of scalability) - no polled resources. zip, zilch, nada. Valid SSL cert is required, period. Not a lot of encryption because assuming SSL we don't need to encrypt everything twice. We also won't be wasting any effort trying to federate with anybody. (Red and Friendica will federate).

At the moment I'm aiming for zero XML. The content markup language will be HTML with a couple of minor exceptions - a special tag for embeds which is interpreted at the receiving end because embeds can't be html-purified, and a marker for zid (auth required) and zrl (identification has benefits) links.

Basically it will be a streamlined decentralised message system with very low overhead. Not a Swiss Army knife.

The design center is 10-20k users on a low-end VPS, and a half million or more on heavy metal. This means nothing can be wasteful or inefficient.

I might actually go for this.

#lang-de
Jetzt bin ich ein Wenig verwirrt.
Die ganze Zeit reden und schreiben wir über das dezentrales soziales Netzwerk Friendica und nun ist es nur ein Tool?
Hat das System nicht das Zeug für ein soziales Netzwerk?

#lang-en
Now I am a little confused.
We talk and write all the time about the distributed social network Friendica and now it's just a tool?
Is this System not good enough for a social network?


@Mike has a new visions?

@Mike, are there zot2 specs online?

I am present too and will support the new project Red as a server admin and translator.

@Fabio Comuni - I'm working on specs as I start collecting some of the tools I know will be required.

At the moment I'm leaning towards ActivityStreams JSON under SSL as a transmission format, but may be modifying this to look more like Facebook's JSON API - it's a much more efficient data representation than ActivityStreams.

I'm also still trying to define a "global unique person identifier" to provide location independence.

@Alex - No I don't view Friendica as a social network. It contains all the things that make up social networks, but goes a bit beyond that concept. I don't even like the expression "social network" but that's what people want to hear.

I'm thinking of Red as something to say "yes, we have a social network - or you can use Friendica if you want something that goes beyond social networking".

After we prototype some of the new concepts I'd like to migrate some of the efficiencies back to Friendica. It will never reach the same efficiencies, but it would be nice if it scaled a bit better. I'm thinking of Friendica mostly as a personal server with a lot of versatility, and Red as something that can be deployed at a higher scale, but with less versatility.

I will also support the project as server admin and translator.

I think it's clear that we need this. Helping @Thomas Willingham finish the public/community server how-to, it's becoming clear to me that we would currently have difficulty even catering for an entire school or a really big church congregation. I don't really like the idea of servers getting much larger than that. But stripping down Friendica proper (as we are essentially advocating in the how-to) to accomodate a larger number of users isn't really ideal either: it's too confusing to newheres. They read about all the magic and then get relatively little of it on a public site. A clearer distinction between join-up and host-your-own Friendica would be useful.

And to be technically precise "La Red".

"The Network".

Interesting. I'm currently trying to find out if I like that plan or not.

On the one hand, it's a good thing to start from scratch to make everything as fast as possible (and also have other, more reliable database backends in mind, maybe), unhindered by legacy code.

On the other hand, I'm one of those who won't like the "no polling" aspect, having just migrated all my RSS feeds over to Friendica. (And I'd like to have all the speed and other exciting new possibilties, anyway, as early as possible, of course. )

I'll probably set up a Friendica Red test node as soon as it's available, but use my current node for day-to-day communication.

@zottel I think the most important arguments are:

a) It makes it easier to say we have a network (Red) - and then to explain what Friendica (proper) does over and above standard accounts on that network (many people still assume that we have no network of our own).

b) It makes big community servers far more feasible, and public servers too.

c) It can actually attract people to Friendica proper - the personal/small group server that does far more than a Red account.

What I don't like, to be honest, is that people will be able to set up VERY large servers. But I can't see a way around it. A more efficient, but less powerful alternative platform will automatically lead to that. Whether it actually happens is another matter, of course. Much depends on the server landscape Red starts out with.

hm? I use #friendica as a network (eventhough there are only few people I know here :D ) But those Swiss Army Knife functions kind of help people to change...

Me too am a bit unsure about a few things. For me Friendica is indeed not "a social network" per se, but a tool that enables creating that network. The simple fact that my node speaks to other nodes implies a network, and because we use to to socialise... : ]
In that sense the social network is not the node, but the nodes interconnected.

It's true that an optimised version with ~15k users on a single low end VPS sounds great with performance numbers, this will make it easier for people to add "La Red" to their server/hosting without affecting anything else.. if they have as many users as now. However, this does seem to tend towards semi-centralisation. This could be a bit of a scary bit for some of us.

I'm sure there are many things I didn't get about the new platform, so I guess I will just wait and see, test and perhaps install it. I do like the JSON thing. What does scare me is the Valid SSL thing, I am not sure what I think as "valid" seems to be a relative term that depends on your Browser/OS/Server.

All that being said, I'm pretty sure I will be amazed and marvelled by La Red.

@Martin Farrent Hm.
a) Do we need a separate project only for that?
b) Do we want those big servers?
c) Why do we need the stripped-down Red server for that?

In my eyes, Red does make sense, but not for the reasons you stated.

Reasons I'd see would be more like

d) starting from scratch without legacy code,
e) testing and stabilizing completely new concepts like zot2 and JSON communication without having to do that in standard Friendica (and then porting them back), or
f) ok, be prepared if at some point the need for really big servers for the masses arises.

Reality check. Chevrolet makes family cars and they make pickup trucks. A family car is designed for one market segment and to serve the needs of that market segment. A pickup truck is made for a different purpose entirely.

Both have steering wheels and brakes and you can drive both of them on the same road. However, if you're taking the family to a formal dinner, the pickup truck is not the best vehicle. And if you're hauling lumber, the family car is useless.

Count me in. But, would it be possible to include message encryption, perhaps as an option? A less expensive elliptical encryption using dsa-el gamal, so key sizes can be smaller than 1024? Don't know if that'll actually make a difference performance-wise, however.

@zottel I don't want to see really big sites either, but:

a) The current code base won't really even cater for an entire school without pretty expensive resources.

b) Mega-sites can be avoided if there are plenty of servers from the outset and installation isn't too difficult.

c) The current way of creating public sites is wasteful: using software designed to be full of features and then switching them all off.

personally i think it sounds promising.

the two things i'm reticent about is "valid ssl" - like someone else said, that's highly dependent on current situations with CAs, etc, and we've talked to death about it, so i won't get into it here .

the other thing is this would tend towards larger servers (larger meaning larger user base here). for pure "decentralisation" (i'm still trying to come up with a new word for that, i don't like it much, it implies you're already centralised, and trying to migrate away from that), friendica is the way to go, definitely.

what la red sounds like more is some place a group of people can interact together on the same server (or cluster, or some other grouping of servers perhaps), like elgg does it, which is a different focus.

friendica is more of a personal or family (or other household level) thing. and like others have said, it's a swiss army knife. you have tools, they work well for what they're designed to do, but you wouldn't use it to chop wood or do any fine wood carving. you need a real axe or a real chisel to do that (the car analogy is similar ).

i installed elgg here on the main site, but i would install la red instead . if you want help @Mike with say theming, or basic coding, i'm here. i'm assuming it'll be a FOSS/OSI compatible license?

Valid SSL is a real concern, mostly because that very own definition varies from one browser to another. My desktop browser recognizes StartSSL free certs without problem, but some Android browsers don't.

Not to mention that without Server Name Indication (which rules out at least IE on Win XP, and pre-3.0 Androids), people can't VHost SSL and use an actual IP address for each name served.

Maybe one could come up with some way to propagate certs/CAs to other instances of the federation, Web of Trust style?

Yes, SSL again : ]
I've had a go at trying to find another way around it: http://manurevah.com/blah/en/p/SSL-Without-Built-In-Browser-Certificates
So have others, like Convergence, but I still think DNS could be a neat way (and convergence like system could validate that for more trust).

La Red requiring "valid SSL", could it still communicate with Friendica nodes that are self signed or signed by unrecognised CAs ?

(maybe i should have kept my big trap shut WRT SSL...)

SSL is a sensitive subject, @Simon :)

I think this sounds like a fantastic idea. Being able to have a sleek, stylized, 'does all the things the BIG GUY' can do, but CAN be decentralized. More people can try it out because there will would theoretically be more accessible nodes due to the ability of having a larger user base.
I personally love having all my 'stuff' in one spot but still find myself going to G+ and FB sometimes as well.

@Birch Wind I don't necessarily think more people would try it out, because it's not going to have all the power of a personal Friendica node. You're right to say that more people COULD try it out, because it will lift some of the performance restrictions the public servers are experiencing.

Where it will really come into its own, in my opinion, is the field of community servers for churches, schools etc. Right now, it would take a lot of tweaking and cash to set up a Friendica server for 600 students. Personally, I wouldn't really like to see servers get much larger than that... though they probably will at colleges, unis etc.

I am wondering about something, because in my personal case I don't really connect to other networks. I can see the point in trying to connect/federate with open platforms, such as statusnet/diaspora/etc, but I see zero point in connect to FB/google/twitter other than convincing reluctant users (which I get of course). Any which way, there are nodes out there that don't need to connect to a million different protocols.

So if La Red is like Friendica but with less connectors than I'd be total "go" on that. But I am guessing it's more subtle.. .

@Mike You're killing me, what exactly is La Red ? :D :D :D (kidding, take it easy).

@Martin Farrent , I'm just guessing that if Red comes out sounding more like a Social Network, and less like a 'geek's paradise', it attracts more people that really are JUST wanting a simple, effective, useful alternative to FB/G+. Friendica isn't really an 'alternative' as much as it is something totally different.
Once you're using friendica for a while, or if you are already geek-minded Friendica is a walk in the park, but to those who have no tech interest and just want a decent solid alternative to their current platform, Red could be exactly what the doctor ordered.

Friendica minus connectors would probably a big enough change in itself.

As Friendica continues to develop, the difference between "social network" and "communication tool" is just going to get bigger and bigger. May as well split the two up now before the social network gets lost underneath all the other stuff Friendica can do.

Though, I too suspect it'll be more subtle than that.

La RED - a larger federated s.network, a network without connectors with FB TWITTER etc. .. (only friendica), and especially with the chance to host on each node a large number of people, like up to 20000 for each node without any kind of problem, I think that's what Mike wants to say

I don't know, we keep turning around that idea, but how can we be sure. Meanwhile Mike is probably sleeping on "down under" clock.. .

/troll -> I need to get some air, I'm starting to feel like one of those people who hang on every word of this turtlenecked new balance wearing guy, waiting for him to tell me what it is I was looking for all my life.
: ]

A big thing for me is that Friendica in its present form had a heavier footprint than it seemed like it should and I wasn't using all the features anyway. Moreover, some of those features are going away anyway through absolutely no fault of @Mike 's. I already have a StartSSL cert (class 2) which no browser I've used on Android has given me any trouble with so that's not an objection.

The more I think about it, the single most important thing about Red (to me) would be the ability to set up community servers at low cost and with fewer worries / less expertise. Personal and small-group Friendica servers are zero-maintenance magic. But community servers for schools, universities etc. need a leaner platform in order to scale. And - somewhat overlooked in this thread - they also need migration functions (which seem to be part of Red's very foundation).

great news what do you think about crowd-funding some design/UI specialists?

There seems to be a lot of consternation around SSL. At the moment nothing is written in stone, and any decision can be reversed. That said - here's where the thought trail leads...


- If you are operating a community site with more than one person, you have to have SSL. You'd be an idiot not to.

- If you don't want to annoy your members and all their friends with popup "get me out of here" warnings, you're going to have a browser recognised cert.

These are things that we can take for granted if running a server for a community.

- If all your traffic is being encrypted, why the heck would you need to encrypt it again? It's simply wasteful.

- If you're worried about a rogue government intercepting the SSL and decrypting it, adding another layer of encryption using the exact same technology is going to be an improvement exactly how?

bah, mr logical (heh heh heh)

@Mike the technology (SSL) isn't as important as the authority of certificates. Having my self-signed cert recognized by all my users could be done in a simple way (think : small group, family or corporation). Having it recognized by all their contacts' servers is virtually impossible, though. Even for vendor-issued cert, it takes a very good vendor to achieve this.

Having it recognized by all their contacts' servers is virtually impossible, though.

Bingo. If you've got a site for a hundred people and they're each connected to 30 other people, that's 3000 people that are going to get annoyed and complain to me. They won't complain to you because their browser is telling them that you can't be trusted. So as always it's all my fault and I have to fix it - which is what I'm doing.

Frankly I don't care who signs your cert.

A valid, non-self-signed SSL cert (e.g. StartSSL) being an absolute requirement for La Red would instantly kill off any chances of success for low-cost to no-cost home hosting, though. I just found out the hard way that StartSSL class 1 certificates do not work with dynamic DNS subdomains (or subdomains at all), they only work with second-level domains that you own yourself. So you either have to pay for your own second-level domain (or even webspace, regardless of any server-like device already running at your place, the preferred device to host distributed social networks on), or you have to pay even more for an SSL cert for a subdomain. But you cannot host La Red on, say, a NAS or a plug server connected to the 'Net via dynamic DNS.

Here's the deal - if we were as big as Facebook (or even within a couple of orders of magnitude), we could insist that the certificate infrastructure be fixed - and it would probably happen. Until such time as it is fixed, we will have to do one of

• copy all remote content (including images/attachments/media) to our own system or
  
• view the content on your own system using links to the remote content
  

The first one doesn't scale as you'll require infinite hard disk. The second one will fail because people will quickly get fed up with dismissing 30 warnings every time they open their network page.

If one of you that are so amandant about using self-signed certificates wants to figure out how to make them secure and keep the browser from issuing warnings (and also fix the CA system), go for it. I'm behind you all the way. I don't see this happening any time soon.

From a project perspective, we're going with option 2 so as not to exhaust hard disk any faster than we do already, and so that we can best control access to our photo/media/etc at the source. Assuming that option 2 is the goal, we can either

• require valid certs
  
• annoy everybody with popups
  
• split the network into people who are OK being annoyed and people that aren't
  

Have I missed anything?

Top user complaints for Friendica - Diaspora doesn't work, Facebook's API is buggy.

Top admin complaint for Friendica - the CA system is FUBAR.

I think it's great that the only things we've got left to complain about are things that are beyond Friendica's control.

But we can have an ideological network that makes everybody cross, and nobody uses, or we can have a network that pragmatically uses things like CA SSL (and Facebook, Twitter, Diaspora, etc in the case of standard Friendica), which people will actually use.

Abinoam Jr tagged Mike's status with #friendica_red

I'm trying to think #lared as www.blogger.com (for the bloggers). If I like it and want more than what it offers I'll have to host myself a wordpress or even a complete cms like joomla or drupal (friendica proper). Today we have the "more" (the joomla equivalent) that is Friendica. But, with current scalability problems, it's impossible to have something like www.blogger.com.

@Mike is that the idea?

I will be on my Friendica (proper). Yes... www.blogger.com options around were not enough for me (I want joomla!!!).

So, "la red" for me personally is a "downgrade". But, I would be glad to host a "la red" node !!! Yes, of course.
I didn't invited lots of people or made my friendica server public just because I would not have the conditions to maintain it if it grows!!! So, if I had "la red" today it would be surely open (and advertised).

Centralization is like salt on diet. It's bad when it's too much salt. But no salt at all is bad also. We cannot make confusion with "overcentralization" and things like hosting a single church or school on a node.

So, be welcome "la red". (Just don't let Friendica die).

i'm viewing it similarly, la red and friendica. "different strokes for different folks", and even different tools for different jobs, for the same person/people.

it's like using a screwdriver to bang in a nail. you can do it, but it works better with a hammer.

Hopefully, Debian (and by extension Ubuntu) will have updated some of their software by that time.

Their current Apache is 2.2.8, which does not support ssl-enabled name-based vhosts with mod_ssl. (mod_gnutls is said to work.)

@foonetic (lnxwalt) I'm running Debian, stable only, and it features Apache 2.2.16, and name-based vhosts with mod_ssl do work. This is Debian Squeeze, though, not Lenny.

This shouldn't be a problem anymore, @foonetic : Debian Squeeze has Apache 2.2.16, whose mod_ssl deals perfectly with SNI.

@zottel @olivier

Ah, then I just need to update to a newer version of the distro. I already planned to do this, so now I'll just go ahead.

I am not going to insist on anything because you're right on the practical aspects (besides the fact that I haven't coded anything on Friendica).

Small (and last) note though, on my personal website I have enabled Gravatar avatars in a way that doesn't make visitors connect directly to Gravatar, it doesn't store remote content locally either, it's a bit of curl/sessions that behaves like a proxy. I find it good for multiple reasons, one being that the user doesn't have to trust various unknown websites and their certificates and all that goes with it as well as other privacy and censorship related concerns. I think it works a bit like the Friendica plugin, privacy image cache.
I am not even sure this would be very efficient on the server's resources.

Regardless, I am not asking you (@Mike to make anything "this way" or "that way", so please don't take my comments the wrong way. I think the practical aspect you are concerned with is indeed very important if you want to scale up and I respect that. So voila, that's it from me on this SSL business in regards to La Red. I'll still test it and probably deploy it, talk about it, etc etc and such.. :].

@zottel Are there advantages in running mod_gnutls over mod_ssl?

@Arto I don't know. I never used mod_gnutls, I only wanted to tell foonetix that with current Debian, the newer Apache with mod_ssl is available.

congrats

Thanks for all your hard work, Mike.

Great news!

Great, Mike! I updated my node on http://www.best-friends.tk/ and everything seems to work :)

As @Giaco_Pastorius said : dancing little color characters.

More seriously, congrats Mike, the work being done here is still impressive and inspirating.

Thank you for friendship, playfulness, inventiveness and Friendica!

#Gràcies @Mike i a tots els que ho feu possible. Una aferrada pes coll!!

Thank you ALL !!! You ALL are doing this great thing called Friendica! @Mike has the power to congregate good people altogether. I was impressed with the speed of development of Friendica since it was basically @Mike with the help of @Tobias Diekershoff and @Fabio Comuni and some others (at the code base). I'm seeing the development speeding up every day with the coming of good people into the project and seeing @Mike giving everybody the opportunity to collaborate with any possible way. Congratulations to all!

Yes, that's it. And it's why I don't see that Friendica or DIaspora will be much more than a haven for a few within the next few years.

Don't misunderstand me, it's very good to try to change that, and I want to play my part in this. But I don't think the masses will ever leave Facebook. Not until there's some kind of technology change that makes Facebook "the old stuff nobody uses anymore".

And no, I don't mean something similar to Facebook by that, like our platforms more or less are. I mean something completely different that I can't imagine right now.

I'm personally not so sure, @zottel

Facebook's profit margins aren't hot. While the company remained private, that didn't matter - a profit is a profit. But with the IPO, there's going to be market pressure on Zuckerberg to increase those margins (or risk share-price disaster).

As far as I can see, he can then only opt for one of two evils:

a) Make ads more conspicious and piss users off.

b) Milk the data cow a lot more aggressively and risk a scandal that dwarfs those he has survived to date.

And no, I don't mean something similar to Facebook by that, like our platforms more or less are. I mean something completely different that I can't imagine right now.

That's more or less the vision of the D*Inc-guys... they are want to restructure the "flow" how users interact by there ui-changes... see what attention pinterest raised, and , imo their new profile-view looks very similar to it...

but i share martins comment and the more users zuckerberg loses, the more the free decentralised web wins.

My fear is that people are so glued to Facebook that even the most disgusting scandal would only make people demand that this should not happen again, nothing more.

first thing, when scandals happen, is hopefully that ppl start to question for alternatives... that happened back 2010, where the D*-hype started

@Thomas Bierey I think Diaspora Inc. has got it wrong if they think that Facebook is going to be replaced by the "next big (different)thing" any time soon. From all I can tell, people are currently very happy with Facebook and the way it works - albeit sometimes worried about the privacy problem. In that respect, I think @zottel 's last comment is correct.

But the vulnerability caused by the IPO won't just generate more privacy scandals. I'm guessing that Zuckerberg will also try the other strategy I cited and make ads more conspicuous (messing up people's nice new timelines). He'll probably attempt to balance and alternate the two approaches in order to keep the share price up, but damage will be done each time changes are made. And there are probably a number of other strategies up his sleeve that will come with their own disadvantages. In a nutshell: Facebook can probably only destroy itself right now, but there is a real chance that Facebook will eventually do just that.

By the time that happens, as @Bob Mottram has repeatedly argued in the past, Friendica needs to be known as the privacy and freedom-oriented platform of choice. That would be ideal. And if we keep in mind that people actually do like a lot of things about Facebook, while others need to be dumped or improved, we'll appeal to migrants that basically wish they could stay where they are. By contrast, what Diaspora is attempting is flawed in two ways: They don't actually offer real decentralisation or sustainable privacy. And they are developing an alternative concept of interaction that is paradoxically not entirely untested - it's just new to them, due to their age. Lots of elements have come and gone before, Usenet being just one example of how nice-seeming things can screw up rather badly.

Example: #diaspora is where the pederasts meet. No, there's nothing you could do about that if just a few trolls decided to make it seem that way. Won't happen? Wanna bet? #hashtags as used on Diaspora have all the weaknesses of Usenet groups - and you don't even get the equivalent of a kill file yet. But that (devastating trolling and flaming) is what destroyed Usenet. And it's also one of the reasons for Facebook's contact-based paradigm, which has proved a success. Only the other day, a Facebook friend of mine was celebrating the lack of disruption over there as compared to a newsgroup we both belonged to ten years ago - and everyone chimed in to agree.

@Martin Farrent I agree. Most #Facebook users are not looking for a replacement, even though nearly all of the ones I know complain about it incessantly.

However, I recall that just a few years ago, most people had never heard of Facebook. There were a lot of committed users of #MySpace (at least here in the US; I'm told other networks were popular elsewhere). FB came out of nowhere and zoomed past MySpace really quickly.

If and when Facebook makes its fatal mis-step, the network or networks that replace it will not get a lot of time to fiddle with posting. There won't be time to redefine what "own your own data" or "federation" means. And there won't be time for a lot of server outages.

On the more realistic side, I believe that providing a viable and decentralized alternative to #MyFaceSpaceBook has value in and of itself, even without some big payday down the road.

@foonetic (nternetx) That's why I reckon we'll be doing very well when we are known to (not used by) just five percent of the population. The figure is a little arbitrary, but you probably get my drift: If we have a good reputation among sufficient people, we'll be in just the right position when we're needed.

Saying (as Diaspora Inc. does) that freedom and privacy don't suffice as magnets is short-sighted. They don't currently suffice as arguments against the existing monopoly. But when that monopoly starts to topple, I don't think non-free and centralised alternatives will have very much of a chance. Awareness of the problems is too widespread for that, now. What people will take from Facebook and what they will tolerate in its successors are two very different things. So privacy/freedom isn't a dead argument at all. It's a dormant one, and possibly on the verge of waking up.

Also: Revolutionising UIs and 'the way we express ourselves' is a recipe for obscurity when people are actually quite contented with what they have. The reasons for Facebook's success are partly rooted in the reasons for past platforms' failure. Not knowing very much about what has gone wrong in the past rather obviously increases one's chances of repeating it all. You can end up with a revolution that is actually only a revival of a fiasco (and one that no one was asking for anyway).

It is also important to keep in mind that near-monopolies such as Facebook might not necessarily go away at all. Thus, not participating in Facebook's network becomes an important political move. So the political dimension of non-capitalist, decentralized software and services becomes more and more critical, as the rather strong tendency of such corporations to tend towards monopolies (as they buyout and out-compete each other) eventually generates strong opposition, and/or a series of crisis on the web and elsewhere.

Friendica and its community is a response to a previous such round of monopolization and its accompanying phenomena of centralization and authoritarianism (ex. Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Apple). And since the web is a rather new phenomena, authoritarian, repressive behavior in this realm has not as of yet generated a corresponding mass political response. This is why most of my friends have not moved to Friendica, even though most of them are politically active in areas outside of the web and technology. They haven't yet realized that what's happening in Greece (the terms of the bailout, the ongoing class struggle, etc.) is also happening on the web (Twitter self-censoring, governments demanding back doors, massive data mining to be used for political repression, etc.).

I think there is lot of wishful thinking here. Yes, people are aware of privacy problems, here in Germany even more than in most of the rest of the "western" countries, but they don't think it's a real problem, more like superficial.

They don't like that Facebook knows so much about them, it gives them a rather creepy feeling, but they like the service, so "What the heck? What harm could Facebook ever do to me with all that knowledge? I'm no criminal, after all. Facebook is dangerous not because of what Facebook knows about me, but because of myself maybe telling too much to too many people, but hey, is that Facebook's fault?"

And that's not completely wrong, too, only short-sighted.

That's what's at the core of people using Facebook, and that's why I think that at this point, Diaspora Inc. is right: Privacy only will never be enough to lure people away from Facebook.

@Arto might have a point, though. It is interesting that many politically active people who agitate against corporations and state surveillance happily use Facebook. It's imaginable that many of those will leave Facebook during the next few years. But still, that's not "the masses" at all.

@zottel The "next big thing" (which is what Diaspora Inc. seems to be aiming for) generally requires that people are getting bored with the last big thing. I think that's about as likely to happen as search engines going out of fashion (in the forseeable future) - Facebook is just too mainstream for that, right now.

A "next big thing" for a given segment - like the younger, slightly anti-establishment crowd - might be possible. In that respect, Diaspora Inc. may be on the right track (but using the wrong ideas that have already failed in the past). But big things in that niche happen by coincidence, rather than design. Countless startups are trying to second-guess that chapter of the future.

I'm not convinced that privacy arguments won't start to move people fairly soon. When the stories become serious and viable (and they will), empathy and identification effects will set in. Something like: "Dad (60) couldn't visit daughter in USA because he was a communist at uni in 1972."

And don't forget the ads. On the surface, Facebook currently looks almost ad-free (they are so discrete). If that changes, you have uproar.

@Martin Farrent Sure. I don't believe there will be any "next big thing" that replaces Facebook within the next five years or so. Diaspora won't be it for sure.

Yes, I do think that Facebook will lose quite a number of users during the next few years due to what you say and maybe other points. But I don't think this will be anything only remotely resembling a "mass movement".

I hope that I'll be proven wrong, though.

@zottel .... aaaaah, but you're overlooking something. As a public company, Facebook can't afford to lose any business at all, lest share prices plunge. Thus, they can easily crash now, which was far less conceivable in the past. Whereas a 5C per user and year profit would have sufficed until now, even the $1.40 they report annually (iirc) doesn't look all that attractive and needs to be boosted fairly soon. If it drops significantly, Facebook becomes merely mortal.

We'll see. I hope you are right.

(By the same token, in Germany and Europe, ALDI thrives despite very low profit margins - but would probably vanish if it went public. In fact, ALDI thrives BECAUSE of very low profit margins, and I somehow suspect that Facebook is similar.)

Here's the way I look at it...

I created Friendica because I left Facebook two years ago and found there was nowhere viable to go. Most people think of computers as something that they click buttons and it does stuff. I look at them differently. If when I click buttons, it doesn't do what I want, I'll fix it so that it does. Censorship and espionage aren't things I want happening when I click buttons. That may be a good business plan, but it's broken software I don't want to use. The first thing I do is make it do what I want. That's what I've always done. Fortunately I'm capable of doing this. Otherwise I would be one of the spoon-fed masses that think being slaves to a global marketing machine is their fate and it can't be changed. It can be changed, but you've got to first decide that you won't accept anything less.

Even if Friendica never goes mainstream I have already accomplished what I set out to do - which was to provide a place to go for anybody else coming after me. I've also set a bar for cross service federation which is going to affect the future of social communications, hopefully in a positive way.

I got a message on FB from a friend today who couldn't decipher servers and PHP and it's all too much for him. He'll stay on Facebook. But that's OK. There are "simple" people for whom only "simple" solutions will work. All he wants to do is push buttons and have all his friends. That's as much thought as he's willing to give it. Facebook was made for people like him. They don't have to think.

All they have to do is submit to being scrutinised, and analysed, and poked and prodded and humiliated and force fed even more privacy invasions, and let Facebook sell the information and steal their online lives and all they think about and click on - and make bucketloads of money doing it.

These people will always exist, and they are the overwhelming majority.

But just because everybody else jumps off a cliff doesn't mean you have to do it too.

@Mike Exactly. Well said. Friendica is here, and Friendica is great. I'd like to see it spread, and it will.

But still, it's nowhere near being the new haven for the millions who are fleeing Facebook, because they don't, and IMHO in the near future they won't, too.

Friendica is wonderful as it is. Should we say awesome? > Currently, it's more a haven for people coming over from Diaspora than from Facebook. I hope that will change, and I do think it will at some point, but the question is when.

Just a thought, @Mike and @zottel : Who would have dreamt that we'd all be using unix - or something closely related - back in 2005? Yet we are: iOS, Android. Unthinking people don't necessarily have to be in unthinking places (which is not to praise Android or iOS).

Friendica has so much potential. It's so easy to extend, you make it do anything.

I have a dream, and in that dream, everything I do on the internet I do without ever leaving my own Friendica server. That's not necessarily anybody else's intent, just what I want from my server.

So far, that largely means sticking stuff I use in iframes, and using RSS to bypass censorship. There's no reason that shouldn't mean a built in proxy, or wget-ing (or otherwise) arbitrary code and parsing it natively, or whatever. Like the tagline "The internet is our social network". We're in the infancy of that, but I think the future of that that is this 'something completely different that we can't even imagine' that Zottel points to at the beginning of this thread.

omg...

Most of these guys come from either the "city" or the "flats" and winding mountain roads are seen as an adventure.

It's just too bad most of these guys never learned common sense before setting out on their adventure.

I just really hate passing the ambulances and knowing from a quick glance that the rider is deceased.

I hate that feeling, too. You get it in the mountains when you hear a chopper. In the winter, it's usually just a skier with a broken leg. But in the summer, it's haunting because you know that something much worse is likely to have happened - people who go out in sandals, no food, no warm clothing... the weather changes and some don't come back.

I live about a block from the hospital in my town. In the summer, the rafting and hiking accidents keep the choppers going over my house almost daily.

I used to live across from a hospital and a quarter-mile down the highway from a fire station. I dreaded party weekends. Incredibly, most of the crashes happened in the 1/4 mile between hospital and fire station.

i live 4 blocks (2 of them long, and a park is one of those) and across the street from a fire station. also have 4 bars - and 1 resto-bar - within a 5 block radius. luckily 2 of them are pubs/brasseries, so they tend to be quiet.

it's still pretty quiet around here, so we don't many crazies thinking a street is a drag race track. downtown it's much nuttier and dangerous....

10-4 dude. i'll do the wrapper thing, since it's done elsewhere in the code base.

i added a comment in theme.php:

/* If you borrow any of these functions, make sure to * RENAME your functions, otherwise both themes get conflicts, * and the friendica instance will get HTTP 500 errors. * To paraphrase Mike: "Might wish to wrap * function_name with "if(! function_exists('function_name')) ... " * or rename to prefix1_function_name (prefix2_function_name), etc. */

sry.. that was mine

No blame. We just want to figure out how to prevent it.

jep, thx... just a bit angry about myself... will fixed it in a minute

@Thomas Bierey While you're at it - do you think you could provide a link to http://friendica.com/resources in the NewHere section of Diabook? People aren't finding the how-to's there as often as they should.

done

How many @Paul Taylor are there ? I remember being friend with one but this seems to be different instance?

There's three of this one. I think that's because the #eggcount is rising - he needs more manpower nowadays.

@martin

You do not be so bad with him. If I am not mistaken in other accounts he was as a client on a foreign server. Now it has mounted its own server with an instance of Friendica.
The real question is. Why are Pol Taylor in Xerta a town near Rasquera. is a town that will soon change the name to Santa Maria. If you want know more ask him. You really know Paul Taylor.

... at least he doesn't have a split personality here. Like on SN: #countsegssoneplace #cusseselsewhere

Last I heard it wasn't going to happen. I will ask more next time in the village (and I have friends up there who deserve a visit soon). Things are pretty desperate round here, that's the truth.

Hmmm. Let me know if that happens - a vacation to the Els Mussols hacienda might definitely be in order...

The growing of weed in Spain is not a new phenomenon. #justsaying

I am reliably informed it happens in other places too: In pictures: Global marijuana march.

I spent some time in Andalucia and the people there said it was legal to grow a plant for personal use only. Does this vary province to province?

As far as I know if it's for personal consumption is not punished. I do not know the amounts.
In Rasquera will grow weed for a "colectivo", not for sale. It is the way to skirt the law. in spanish "hecha la ley, hecha la trampa"
In this case (perhaps is the unique) the law is the same in all autonomus government , in brief for all country.

Even in the state of California in the so-called land of the free, growing a single cannabis plant w/out govt permission (medical marijuana card, etc) is a felony. Unreal.

But last I heard, there was another attempt to legalize marijuana in California in the signature-gathering stage. I was surprised when the last attempt failed: it must have been very poorly drafted to have even frightened off the Emerald Triangle.

A cook I vaguely used to know got sentenced to counselling here... but that was for eight kilos(!) of home grown.

I think the previous attempt in California threatened the medical maryjane business here.

Here in CT, USA, the State "decriminalized" weed last year, so possession under 4oz only cares an infraction, small fine for first offense. Subsequent offenses are misdemeanors. Possession over 4oz still carries all criminal charges, including possession with intent to distribute.
I got nabbed with less than a gram the day after I graduated from U-Conn, back in 1996, payed a $250 fine and got out of jail (did not pass go, did not collect $200), so, afaik, I'm still open game with any amount (haven't possessed any since, oh, about 1996, anyway).
Now, just this past week the State legalized prescription/medical marijuana.

@martin cops usually give the weight of the plants as fresh weight (sometimes even with the pot). Once dry the plant that gives a 5%-10% of fresh weight. It is more meritorious catch someone by 8kg than 800-400g

lol that's pretty funny

hehe

ouch!