P2P GNU Social
= The GNU Social P2P effort attempts to create a distributed, privacy-enhanced and privacy-enforcing, user-controlled social network.
URL = http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social/P2P
Description
Ted Smith:
"For the past few weeks, Miron Cuperman and I have been thinking about how to do social networking in a p2p and privacy-enhanced way. We've come up with some code and documents that describe a distributed social networking system that is able to make and enforce strong guarantees about user privacy while still providing usability in the same vein as traditional, centralized or hub-and-spoke services. We've collected this into an effort to build a P2P GNU Social.
The GNU Social P2P effort attempts to create a distributed, privacy-enhanced and privacy-enforcing, user-controlled social network.
The goals of the P2P effort include:
- User Control - The user can run their own node on their own machine
with maximal ease of use and maintenance - it shouldn't take a sysadmin to be social
- Privacy controls are not merely stated, but are enforced by strong
cryptography and time-tested protocols. All user data, including the social graph, is private by default.
- Transparent developer access to other social networking systems,
including OStatus - the modular transport/translation system of the P2P GNU Social will ensure that from the point of view of the end-user and developer, there is only One Big Network.
- Modularity - Components in the node stack should be separated such
that it is simple to add and remove components. A full, working GNU Social P2P node will be composed of several different individual programs, and several different user interfaces. A strong client-side API should enable developers to integrate P2P GNU Social into all relevant existing desktop applications.
- Composition - Whenever possible, P2P GNU Social will borrow/loot from
existing Free protocols and implementations, though all code written by us will be licensed under the AGPL."
Status
Ted Smith:
"We need people to help make this system a reality, by hacking on it and fleshing out the protocol. Some things that people could get started with include transport layers or translators for pre-existing networks, and building user interfaces, ranging from a basic prototype to integration with existing "social desktop" initiatives and mobile devices.
We'd like to emphasize that this is **NOT** a fork of the mainline GNU Social. StatusNet GNU Social and P2P GNU Social fulfill different niches in the social networking space and should interoperate fully. If you have to choose on one implementation to work on, it's probably better for you to work on StatusNet GNU Social - there's more maturity and it'll be possible to create free social networking systems faster. We expect that P2P GNU Social will be more of a "research" effort - a vanguard into privacy-enhanced social networking - which other social networking systems, including and especially StatusNet GNU Social, will be able to learn and build from. We have signed copyright assignment papers with the FSF and expect contributors to do so as well.
We hope that many of the questions people have about how the network works and how it guarantees privacy can be answered by our design documents on groups.fsf.org, but please feel free to ask further questions."
More Information
- To learn more about the P2P GNU Social design and structure, visit
<http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social/P2P>.
- Currently, we have a
prototype for the GNU Social "core", written in Java, hosted on Gitorious here: <http://gitorious.org/social-p2p/core>.
- We also have our
own mailing list at <http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/social-p2p> and an IRC channel at <irc://irc.freenode.net/social-p2p>.