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Comment by technomancy | Hacker News Reader

> "There should be a federated, distributed, open-source protocol that will replace Twitter and Facebook and let our data be free!"

> no average user wants that. Really, they don't. If you haven't seen Diaspora's Easy 25 Step Quick Start Guide, you should take a look. Is your mom going to do all that?

I really wish people would stop repeating this straw-man. XMPP is a federated, distributed system, and my mom can use it fine without setting up her own servers. Is it that hard to understand how the same thing would apply to status updates?

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... XMPP is a federated, distributed system

I'm surprised nobody in this thread has mentioned SMTP. It's even more widely used than XMPP, and it's a great example of a federated system (as well as the big issue one has to deal with with open, anonymous federated systems: abuse/spam).

Setting up a SMTP (or XMPP) server is not easy, but no "average user" is going to do that. They'll use their ISP, or Gmail, or their work e-mail.

Yes. Pointing out that Diaspora is hard to set up is like complaining that nobody could compile Mozilla before its public release.

Check out status.net and the most popular instance of it: identi.ca, the web ui isn't pretty but a refresh is coming with the 1.0 release and I use a CLI client to connect to it anyway.

the worst thing about it is that it maintains API compatibility with Twitter.

I don't know about this. I presume you mean she's using something like Google Talk, built on XMPP? While that's true, I'm not sure it has the same requirements. Twitter works because there's no fragmentation - everyone you care about is in one place. A system of loosely federated systems would lose a lot of the "authoritative source" value it seems. Of course, I could be wrong here, that's only an initial reaction, so feel free to correct me!

(I presume on Google Talk it's only commonly possible to speak to other people on Google Talk? I presume you could change the server config or set up your own XMPP servers, etc, but does anyone?)

No, you can chat with people across servers, thus the federation. Somebody using jabber.org can talk to somebody using gmail.com.

There are even bridge transports to let jabber users talk to ICQ users and Facebook users. It's quite extensible. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber

Hmmm, thanks for the information on that, it makes sense :) It still seems like some of the authoritative aspects of Twitter which provide value would be lost, but I am grateful for the clarification on that.

http://buddycloud.com/ are doing pretty much just that, with added geolocation and stuff. But basically you can use their channel server as a distributed federated Twitter replacement.

There is the Salmon protocol: http://www.salmon-protocol.org/ as well.

It is not impossible. It really needs to be done. Oh, and Twitter will be the next AOL once something like this working well

"Next AOL" sounds like a pretty excellent outcome. I'm not being snarky; I'm suggesting you reexamine the stakeholders priorities. Nerd cred ranks pretty far down the list in most real businesses.

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