[Social-p2p] P2P XMPP

[Dan Brickley]

Hi folks

Great to see this initiative; it nicely complements the
StatusNet-based codebase.

I wanted to float a technical possibility. There are already a few
mentions of XMPP in the documentation, and in parallel other Social
Web efforts are taking XMPP quite seriously. However XMPP as normally
deployed typically depends on something playing a 'server' role. While
there might be scenarios in which decentralised peers do more of that
work, I'd like also to draw attention to "XEP-0174: Serverless
Messaging".

>From http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0174.html --

 "This specification defines how to communicate over local or
wide-area networks using the principles of zero-configuration
networking for endpoint discovery and the syntax of XML streams and
XMPP messaging for real-time communication. This method uses DNS-based
Service Discovery and Multicast DNS to discover entities that support
the protocol, including their IP addresses and preferred ports. Any
two entities can then negotiate a serverless connection using XML
streams in order to exchange XMPP message and IQ stanzas."

There are two pieces to this; discovery and messaging. The XEP-0174
assumption seems to be that the nodes are talking directly on some
local network, but there's no huge reason they couldn't be linked
through the public network (even, with some tricks, behind
NAT/firewall). I think the general precedent here is quite interesting
--- that XMPP-based conversations can be conducted between independent
parties *directly* rather than always through server-mediated means.
In a GNU Social P2P context, I'd suggest considering this as an
abstraction for the messages that pass between peers, since it could
allow developers to get a quick understanding of what's going on,
re-use work on extension markup, and give a model for
application-level protocol extensions. GNU Social P2P could use
different mechanics for discovery and comms than XEP-0174, but still
adopt this general principle of using/extending XMPP for P2P work.

Thinking out loud,

cheers,

Dan