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I've been working on a self-hosted (not federated) model for social media called Haven[1]. RSS (with HTTP basic auth) was the obvious answer for "how do I trac

by mawise 5y ago

I've been working on a self-hosted (not federated) model for social media called Haven[1]. RSS (with HTTP basic auth) was the obvious answer for "how do I track all of my friends' different sites?" It has the advantage that building an RSS reader into the system means you can follow other Havens and other websites in one place. [1]: https://havenweb.org/ https://havenweb.org/

nightpool 5y ago
It's interesting to me that you say "Not federated", because RSS has always seemed to me to be one of the best-adopted federated protocols, after SMTP and HTTP. Indeed, the first generation of federated social media protocols were originally based on souped-up RSS feeds (Atom) with an optional PubSub enhancement (Pubsubhubbub, later renamed to WebSub). So when you say "not federated", what exactly do you mean? If you're publishing to your own site, and other people are reading it on their own compatible sites, isn't that fundamentally a federated model?
- mawise 5y ago
  I'm trying to distinguish between Haven and Mastodon-type systems. "Federated" to me generally means you have many multi-user servers. With Haven, the server only hosts a single identity--yours, since you're the administrator/operator. I wouldn't describe a Wordpress blog with RSS as federated either.
  - nightpool 5y ago
    Mastodon runs just fine in single user mode—in fact, it's was one of our most popular options back in the beginning. I personally don't think of single user and multi-user mode as particularly different, and neither is "core" to the functionality of Mastodon—the core functionality is the ability to interface with other users, whether they're hosted on your server or elsewhere. In that sense, whether a server is single- or multi-user is really isomorphic to the way I think about Mastodon's user experience, most of the time.

by mawise 5y ago

nightpool 5y ago

It's interesting to me that you say "Not federated", because RSS has always seemed to me to be one of the best-adopted federated protocols, after SMTP and HTTP. Indeed, the first generation of federated social media protocols were originally based on souped-up RSS feeds (Atom) with an optional PubSub enhancement (Pubsubhubbub, later renamed to WebSub). So when you say "not federated", what exactly do you mean? If you're publishing to your own site, and other people are reading it on their own compatible sites, isn't that fundamentally a federated model?

mawise 5y ago
I'm trying to distinguish between Haven and Mastodon-type systems. "Federated" to me generally means you have many multi-user servers. With Haven, the server only hosts a single identity--yours, since you're the administrator/operator. I wouldn't describe a Wordpress blog with RSS as federated either.
- nightpool 5y ago
  Mastodon runs just fine in single user mode—in fact, it's was one of our most popular options back in the beginning. I personally don't think of single user and multi-user mode as particularly different, and neither is "core" to the functionality of Mastodon—the core functionality is the ability to interface with other users, whether they're hosted on your server or elsewhere. In that sense, whether a server is single- or multi-user is really isomorphic to the way I think about Mastodon's user experience, most of the time.