Note: This discussion was imported from Loomio. Click here to view the original discussion.
Proposal: creating Federation working group
I would like to invite interested people to create a working group focused on Federation. Myself and I believe many people would like to develop nodes which can participate in diaspora federation but using other software then currently in focus Ruby on Rails reference implementation.
So far I only know about Friandica having capacity of federating with diaspora-rails and I also would like to investigate federating public content with OStatus nodes running StatusNet, rStatus and more emerging software implementing OStatus stack.
I see work on it not separate but distinct from work on current reference implementation, which motivates me to propose crating such working group and invite people interested to participate in it. I also hope that we will coordinate our federation efforts with other initiatives including community group at W3C: http://www.w3.org/community/fedsocweb/
Also many of protocols used in diaspora stay under active development and introduce new changes which I hope we can follow and keep up with implementing.
Outcome: N/A
Votes:
- Yes: 12
- Abstain: 0
- No: 0
- Block: 0
Note: This proposal was imported from Loomio. Vote details, some comments and metadata were not imported. Click here to view the proposal with all details on Loomio.
I just joined. Federation is exactly the topic that made me want to get invited onto Loomio.
I think there are some hurdles to keep in mind:
-
A lot of different projects right now have different ways of federating. Friendica uses Zot, StatusNet uses OStatus, and BuddyCloud uses Activity Streams over XMPP. They’re all probably going to use their own federation protocols for at least a while, rather than working to standardize on one. So, this means we’ll probably have to think of ways to translate each other’s protocols. Perhaps we could set up different kinds of backends for our federation system to make use of in the interim.
-
We can have the best federation spec on the planet, but that’s only half the issue. We also need to improve how our pods receive and broadcast user data and content. Maxwell explained it in this sense, and I think it’s an accurate statement: “You can know how to speak many different languages, but if your vocal chords aren’t very developed, you’re going to run into problems.”
So, we need to not only think about how Diaspora could federate with other platforms, or even other pods, but we need to think about how D* handles incoming and outgoing federated data.
Sean makes an important point - federation is broken on D* not because of language but ability (afaik). Still it’s important to make sure we have the best language and that we have a group who is interested in working on improving the language with other parties as well.
Ps. Support for the group is quite strong. I’d say strong enough to already create it? 
Consider it done. Motion passed!
Motion passed!
That laxatives are working then, Sean? (sorry)
Goob, let’s use common sense here…
Did this working group happen? I also created a discussion about what federation protocol we use here: https://www.loomio.org/discussions/6233
The working group is here, in the aptly named subgroup Federation Discussions : https://www.loomio.org/groups/259
@mawnt1as the current work on the federation as a separate layer in diaspora can be followed on github
FYI I contacted the MediaGobblin team to join this discussion and to work together at tis complex topic, so hopefully it will become a wider use:
http://issues.mediagoblin.org/ticket/803
YACY also contacted, but they are a bit more in P2P
http://forum.yacy-websuche.de/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=4833
Nevertheless I guess they already have a lot experience in DC protocol design 
Can we move this thread to https://www.loomio.org/g/7hU5fK8O/diaspora-community-federation-discussion group?
Doesn’t make much sense to me, this is a meta proposal for creating that group, so back then the group didn’t exist.