[Chester LUG] https://identi.ca

[Ben Arnold]

Evening,


What an excellent idea for an "alternative" Christmas meal (not because
I'm still not hungry) - big thanks to all organisers, hosts & company.

There was a whiff of interest in "that other Twitter type thing that's
not" so if thy dear reader is interested, allow me to explain (bore) a
couple of the best things IMHO.

GNU Social (formerly StatusNet, formerly Laconi.ca) is a decentralised
(the site code can handle multiple sites) and federated (one/multiple
networks communicating by a common message protocol). The most populous
instance was Identi.ca; it migrated to a new 'engine' PumpIO, powered by
ActivityStreams, which is also a decentralised and federated protocol.

What I actually love about it: ActivityStreams means that not just notes
can be posted. The primary feed (the main column) is indeed only notes
and images as they're *super* easy to display fully (no reason why any
other activity can be put there if the site/instance knows how to). The
Meanwhile (secondary) column is all the other activities; seldom have I
see anything other than wrote/favourited/deleted a note/image/comment,
but some more involved community members post other activities. Either
way, posts use the "actor verb object" pattern:
  Actor  Verb     Object       DisplayText
  Robin  write    a note       "Robin wrote a note"
  Les    post     a picture    "Les posted "River Dee in snow""
  Stuart shutdown 10.40.21.123 "10.40.21.123 went down"
  Ben    travel   2C42         "Ben travelled from Chester to Sandhills"

The display text is a arbitrary HTML string, so "note" could hyperlink
to the note itself, "10.40.21.123" may not hyperlink to that server but
perhaps the company service status page, and "Chester to Liverpool" may
hyperlink to the journey status on National Rail / Realtime Trains. Hush
but I'm in the middle of making a webapp to make it really easy to post
any activity I think useful (expanding my current Ruby scripts).

There is even more to this that I won't go into now; for example that
private messages are possible as they are just notes with only one
recipient, so only the creator and recipient can see and reply to it.
Public and "only Followers" posts use special recipients that the PumpIO
engine identifies and delivers accordingly. Nifty.

Hopefully there's something there of interest, or at least shows why I
like it.


Happy New Year and the other thing,
Ben

--
Ben Arnold
Liverpool, UK

Free Software Foundation (Europe)
e: benarnold at fsfe.org | ben at seawolfsanctuary.com
w: seawolfsanctuary.com | chat: benarnold at jabber.fsfe.org