Talk:Comparison of software and protocols for distributed social networking

Where is blueSky's ATProtocol?

About to migrate section "Comparison of projects" of article "Distributed social network" Toni Stoev (talk) 01:05, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

SparkleShare?

Could someone explain why SparkleShare is listed here? It's not really "social networking", it's Git-based, Dropbox-like file sharing and collaboration. Sixthhokage1 (talk) 16:45, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Yep - I second the above. Suggest it's deleted in a couple of weeks if no-one justifies it's presence.Iamsorandom (talk) 13:48, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Fixed. -bkil (talk) 01:35, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Appleseed?

The Appleseed project website seems to be down - and moreover, it is redirecting to this wikipedia page. Does anyone know any more about this? Has the project folded?Iamsorandom (talk) 13:48, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Fixed. -bkil (talk) 01:35, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Diaspora X²

this is a dead link (camped domain) i have no clue how to mark it otherwise i would. kthxbai Keastes ^know _thyself 18:56, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

According to this Checklinks tutorial; "Parking links should be removed." Slatedorg (talk) 22:33, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

MediaGoblin?

Hi, I was wondering if MediaGoblin should be included on this list. Esn (talk) 21:43, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

not yet. They're considering implementing ActivityPub, but no solid plans yet. See: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/mediagoblin-2020-02-15 --Danylstrype (talk) 04:06, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

ownCloud

I have re-introduced the ownCloud project, which now supports federation, after previously removing it from the distributed social network article. Toni Stoev (talk) 14:27, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

How is OwnCloud/NextCloud considered a distributed social networking service? I see lots of unrelated software listed here. Could we perhaps create a separate page for listing miscellaneous federated software? -bkil (talk) 20:57, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

Fixed. -bkil (talk) 01:35, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

How to mark dead projects?

By clicking through the list of projects, I realized that many of them where dead or stale. Does anyone disagree to split the list into two sections? One would be "active projects" and the other "inactive projects". The second section would be for projects where the project page and repository isn't reachable anymore and/or the last activity (blog post, commit, ...) had been done two years ago. Daris (talk) 13:08, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

• Please feel strongly encouraged to do this. Strongly agreed with splitting out dead projects into their own section and table. Bonus points if you can somehow find / cite a date of death for each (or note as apparently dead circa YYYY. date of last activity is a reasonable approximation if you have that, for projects that have no known active deployments. If someone is still running it, even without any code updates, it's not quite dead yet.). Thanks. Tantek (talk) 22:48, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

I moved a few more. Actually, I think we may consider removing some older ones altogether if they were never considered notable . -bkil (talk) 01:35, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

External links modified

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• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20111117051110/http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/download/ to http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/download/
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20111207030005/http://appleseedproject.org/login/ to http://appleseedproject.org/login/
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20160324055909/https://buddycloud.org/ to http://buddycloud.org/
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20111123144951/http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/diaspora-x-now-running-buddycloud-channels-and-xmpp to http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/diaspora-x-now-running-buddycloud-channels-and-xmpp
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• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20111110125550/http://noserub.com/ to http://noserub.com/
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• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130807123254/http://friendsinfeed.com/ to https://friendsinfeed.com/
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130807123314/http://choicesocial.net/ to https://choicesocial.net/
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130807123339/http://distribsocial.net/ to https://distribsocial.net/

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rename page?

In network terminology, "distributed" usually refers to pure P2P software where every node is both a client and a server. Scuttlebutt and Jami are examples of this. Most of the projects in these tables are for creating federations of servers, like email. Can I suggest changing "distributed" to "decentralized"? I also suggest have separate tables for federated social network projects, and actual distributed/ P2P ones. --Danylstrype (talk) 04:10, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

I think that decentralized and distributed are pretty closely related concepts. They also use it together in the definition of a distributed social network. I agree that the wording is a bit blurry this way, because P2P (or serverless, end-to-end, friend-to-friend, participatory, networks of equals) variants should deserve a category of their own and it has its merits (like much lower barrier to entry and better protection against pseudo-centralization in the end). Also, I think it could be sufficiently explained in the column "Software Type" if it was cleaned up. P2P and server-client are already existing terms there. -bkil (talk) 22:16, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

I agree, they are related concepts.

But the part that defines whether it is P2P or server->client is really a mess. If all clients act as servers, it is not a server->client structure. And having a decentralized structure between servers is different from a P2P structure.

And what I really miss is a column to distinguish alternatives that depend on the Internet, do not depend on it, and that can work with or without the Internet. CanalRetro (talk) 11:42, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Needs Cleaning Up

Each entry is written to a different standard. For example, under "Privacy Support" for Element it says "Yes. e2ee in Personal message by default. e2ee must be enabled for group chat", for Mastodon it says "Yes", and for Zap it says "Extensive". --Hiveir (talk) 01:29, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

I edited that column to instruct editors to be specific in naming the relevant tech :-) SilentAshes (talk) 16:44, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Why is Element/Matrix considered a social networking service?

I don't find it fitting the definition of social networking service. -bkil (talk) 22:04, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

Fixed along with a few others. -bkil (talk) 01:35, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

I've run a closed membership social network on Matrix for about 5 years.

User content: yes

Images/Audio/Video/Text/HTML/Markdown/Telephony/Topic specific rooms/Use groups: All yes

It adds the benefit of integrating with most other platforms.

So, I would like to ask Which line of the definition you link to does Matrix not meet? JayMoog (talk) 13:38, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Matrix does not connect a user's profile with those of other individuals ("follow" or "friend") in a similar way as social networking services: You can open a chat with anyone (thereby create a connection), but that fact is not visible to anyone else. Matrix also does not really offer a user profile.

Matrix mostly is a (group) chat or communication system. Of course you can use any protocol that is capable of communication for anything else, but doesn't make it a goal of the project. Any software that uses Matrix and has social networking as it's main purpose would certainly, but Matrix, the protocol itself, does not. AlpacaWiki (talk) 19:48, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

Comparison of software and protocols versus comparison of services

This article is about comparing instances of software and comparing instances of protocols, both sets related to respective software and/or protocol projects. For comparison of federated social networking services, possibly other articles can be used, like the List of social networking services (Comparison of social networking websites). Toni Stoev (talk) 07:55, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Q: bot to auto-populate fields?

I just finished adding Mobilizon manually to the table of projects. It took over an hour on my phone. Given the common/typical availability of machine-readable (or fuzzy-guessing) data for “X uses A, B for Y, Z” (e.g. License used, ProgrammingLanguage(s), etc.)…

… Couldn’t a(n existing?) Bot be utilized for aiding editors (of this and similar Pages/Tables)?

Maybe somebody can reply here with a known-relevant/useful Bot??? SilentAshes (talk) 16:38, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

@SilentAshes – Mobile user here… This should not have taken an hour… :-P

I'm aware of no on-wiki Bot which can currently do this automagically. We have some roaming about doing programmatic alterations to templates or other forms of rigidly structured data (these also frequently have problems, and are tested for weeks or months prior to rollout) but nothing of the sort you suggest. To not royally bork things, you'd ideally need a specific bot for each specific data type – which would have to hit ever-evolving targets, and would consume significantly more man-hours than just manually adjusting some fields in a table.

Maybe a better solution is to refactor the structure, layout, and content of entries here. -- dsprc ^[talk] 09:05, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Indiscriminate list and inclusion criteria

Comparison articles are WP:SAL. We need articles to preexist, or for citations to WP:RS which can vouch each entry meets baseline WP:GNG for inclusion – linking a random homepage, source code repository, etc is not sufficient.

As of this writing, there is a whole lot of trash on the page not meeting global upstream inclusion criteria… §Projects and §Dead are about to get significantly smaller… Please use the interim to cite RS, write those stub parent articles, and do other cleanup to ensure your preferred entries remain. Thank you, and Happy Trails! -- dsprc ^[talk] 08:47, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

GotoSocial ?

I guess it should be listed: https://gotosocial.org/ Strk (talk) 12:01, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Bluesky and AT protocol?

Does Bluesky qualify to be included in this comparison? Venudxb (talk) 10:14, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

Separate protocols from software

Protocols and software projects each need their own set of tables. Possible even separate pages. Danylstrype (talk) 14:55, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

This list in general needs a massive cleanup, but I think it's better to have both protocols and software on the same page, as there's much less protocols compared to the amount of software that is built for them. LemurianPatriot (talk) 16:54, 9 September 2024 (UTC)