Re: [Social-discuss] Yet another idea on a free social network

[Lucas Stadler]

> Having a URI like this does not create the same kind of dependence that
> a service like Facebook does now, the main difference being that with
> this sort of scheme, the user can *very* easily switch providers,
> because the handle is just a convenient way of redirecting requests to
> you (your server?).
I just meant that if your URI belongs to facebook, i.e. the domain 'on'
which you have the URI as in http://facebook.com/~me the huge part belongs
facebook and I have to trust them to always keep this thing.
But as pointed out somewhere else in this thread there are services like
http://foaf.me which should be community controlled.

Someone else mentioned 'dyndns'. I think that this means Dynamic DNS, but
I am not quite sure how I as a domain owner can use this to make my domain
always point at my current IP address.
(This is also one of my reasons to prefer p2p...)
 
> It's good to support both, but I think that the direct, P2P approach
> might be a better one for two reasons that I can think of at the moment:
> 
> 1. Some (most?) ISPs prohibit the running of webservers by their
> customers, but very few block/modify P2P traffic.
> 2. I have the feeling that it would be much easier to implement and use
> the P2P approach than the "everyone has a webserver" approach.
I think that it depends on the system. But if we would use the HTTP/Webserver
approach we could also just extend existing systems such as elgg with RDF and
some of the things which are on the GNUSocial ideas list.
But I do not think that this is a good thing as GNUSocial could simply define
a protocol for a p2p social network (in particular a protocol for DHT, possibly
even inside some new kind of URIs :) and then start implementing different
clients.
Though when looking at the GNUSocial ideas page, it is not decided which
approach to choose. They have listed quite a few, but I do not know if it is
planned to choose one of them and how to decide...