It seems that the pendulum as swung and that a lot of people are now worried about the silos in which we stored and built our online lives for the last couple years. We had app.net, and we now have tent.io.
It starts to feel like someone is simply trying to own the concept of decentralized open social network… I get it, everybody wants a wikipedia page with their name on it as the father/mother of this brand new world. Heck, you could say I write that because I want my own fame… but please, if you think about the goal, then, you quickly realize that it won’t happen if all these indie social network are not working together.
There IS an open stack. It’s used by status.net and Diaspora and a few other indie platforms. It’s also used partially with PubSubHubbub by Tumblr, Wordpress, Typepad, but also Getglue, Flickr, Picasa, Youtube… and many many other web services.
It’d be nice to have an indie social network in which I could also consume data from my friends over on these platforms. If I ever use Tent.io, it’s likely that I’ll want to interract with more people than just the other tent users. Actually, I don’t want anyone to care much about where I’m consuming their content. That’s what federation is all about: not forcing me to chose between the platform or my friends.
The open stack is not perfect (nowhere near that actually), but it’s there, and have already started to be implemented here and there. It would probably be easier to convince the services who have partially done it to go further than start from scracth with something else…
Help us make this stack better, rather than trying to get your name written on yet another approach. The open web is not about you (or me), it’s about moving forward.
Also, read Dave Winer’s piece about protocols. He’s spot on.
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