We're very aware that we will be breaking interoperability with forks when we change the protocol, and there is a little bit of a worry that people won't keep t

We're very aware that we will be breaking interoperability with forks when we change the protocol, and there is a little bit of a worry that people won't keep their forks up to date and the protocol will fragment. I am optimistic that that won't happen, largely because the Diaspora product is the only part of the system actually visible to the outside world at the moment, and that gives us a pretty good way to draw a bright line between products that interoperate and products that don't. I don't think that the UI polling/refresh question affects the inter-server protocol. Your seed is not your browser, and it's seed-seed communication that's the part of the protocol that matters in the long run. Scaling is the pressure we're feeling most right now, and we're talking about how to deal with the issue of a distributed cluster with a coherent namespace. There are some interesting things about the Dynamo pattern that might be really useful to make this work. But without a running system with load and users and remote pods to connect to, it's very hard to figure out what you want. I think that were at the point where the protocol needs something of a refactor, and I will probably make a post about it on the Diaspora-dev google group soon. Maybe we'll get some good feedback and design help!