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The Global Multimedia Protocols Group (GMPG) was founded in March 2003 by Tantek Çelik, Eric A. Meyer, and Matt Mullenweg. The group has developed methods to represent human relationships using XHTML called XHTML Friends Network (XFN) and XHTML Meta Data Profiles (XMDP), for use in weblogs.
Tantek Çelik is a Turkish-American computer scientist, currently the Web standards lead at Mozilla Corporation. Çelik was previously the chief technologist at Technorati. He worked on microformats and is one of the principal editors of several Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) specifications. He is author of HTML5 Now: A Step-by-Step Video Tutorial for Getting Started Today (ISBN 978-0-321-71991-1).
Microformats (μF) are predefined HTML markup created to serve as descriptive and consistent metadata about elements, designating them as representing a certain type of data. They allow software to process the information reliably by having set classes refer to a specific type of data rather than being arbitrary.
BarCamp is an international network of user-generated conferences primarily focused on technology and the web. They are open, participatory workshop-events, the content of which is provided by participants. The first BarCamps focused on early stage web applications, and were related to open-source technologies, social software, and open data formats.
Microblogging is a form of blogging using short posts without titles known as microposts. Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links", which may be the major reason for their popularity. Some popular social networks such as X (Twitter), Threads, Tumblr, Mastodon, Bluesky and Instagram can be viewed as collections of microblogs.
GNU social is a free and open-source microblogging social networking service that implements the OStatus and ActivityPub standards for interoperability between installations. While offering similar functionality to social networks such as Twitter, GNU social seeks to provide the ability for open and federated communication between different microblogging communities, known as 'instances'. Both enterprises and individuals can install and control their own instances and user data.
A distributed social network is a network wherein all participating social networking services can communicate with each other through a unified communication protocol. Users that reside on a compatible service can interact with any user from any compatible service without having to log on to the origin's website. From a societal perspective, one may compare this concept to that of social media being a public utility. Federated social networks contrast with social network aggregation services, which are used to manage accounts and activities across multiple discrete social networks that cannot communicate with each other. A popular example for a federated social network is the fediverse, with more niche examples such as IndieWeb complementing the network.
OStatus is an open standard for decentralized social networking, allowing users on one service to send and receive status updates with users from another. The standard describes how a suite of various standards, including Atom, Activity Streams, WebSub, Salmon, and WebFinger, can be used together, which enables different microblogging server implementations to communicate status updates between their users back-and-forth, in near real-time.
The following is a comparison of both software and protocols that are used for distributed social networking.
Twister is a decentralized and experimental peer-to-peer microblogging program which uses end-to-end encryption to safeguard communications. Based on BitTorrent and Bitcoin-like protocols, it has been likened to a distributed version of Twitter.
pump.io is a software package containing a social networking service and communication protocol that can be used as a federated social network. Started by Evan Prodromou, it is a follow-up to his previous microblogging software StatusNet and its OStatus protocol. It is designed to be more lightweight and usable for general activity streams instead of the predecessor's focus on microblogging timelines, with its goal being to achieve "most of what people want from a social network".
IndieWebCamp is a technology BarCamp that was founded in Portland, Oregon and has since been held all over the world, including at the offices of the New York Times and in Brighton, England. It describes itself as a 2-day creator camp focused on growing the independent web, and spawned the IndieWeb movement.
The Fediverse is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other using a common protocol. Users of different websites can send and receive status updates, multimedia files and other data across the network. The term Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Micro.blog is a microblogging and social networking service created by Manton Reece. It is the first large multi-user social media service to support the Webmention and Micropub standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium, and is part of the Fediverse, supporting ActivityPub.
Micropub (MP) is a W3C Recommendation that describes a client–server protocol based on HTTP to create, update, and delete posts on servers using web or native app clients. Micropub was originally developed in the IndieWebCamp community, contributed to W3C, and published as a W3C working draft on January 28, 2016.
ActivityPub is a protocol and open standard for decentralized social networking. It provides a client-to-server (C2S) API for creating and modifying content, as well as a federated server-to-server (S2S) protocol for delivering notifications and content to other servers. ActivityPub has become the main standard used in the fediverse, a popular network used for social networking that consists of software such as Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.
IndieAuth is an open standard decentralized authentication protocol that uses OAuth 2.0 and enables services to verify the identity of a user represented by a URL, as well as to obtain an access token, that can be used to access resources under the control of the user.
Irina Bolychevsky is a British activist and data specialist, focused on Open Data, decentralized technologies, and technical standards. She is currently director of standards and interoperability at the NHSX of the United Kingdom Government. She has been part of large organizations in those fields, including the Open Knowledge Foundation, the World Wide Web Consortium, and the Open Data Institute, and worked for the UK, Dubai and UAE government administrations. She co-founded Redecentralize.org, an advocacy group promoting decentralized technologies.
Bluesky is a microblogging social media service. Users can share short posts containing text, images, and videos. It is owned by Bluesky Social PBC, a benefit corporation based in the United States.
Nostr is an open protocol for decentralized message transmission, with the intention to be able to resist internet censorship while maintaining session integrity. The protocol achieves decentralization through users publishing content via a cryptographic key pair to various "relays", a WebSocket server which produces an activity stream of received content from users that subscribe to it. This allows the network to verify users and achieve account portability on Nostr, as users have to sign all posts using their key pair to utilize its identity. This requires users maintaining personal copies of their keys to have complete control over its identity, however services using Nostr can "remember" a private key for repeated use.
References
- ↑ "Founders". IndieWebCamp. Retrieved 2 April 2015.
- ↑ Ben Werdmuller: The IndieWeb as a minimally viable social web ecosystem W3C, 2013
- ↑ Klint Finley: Meet the Hackers Who Want to Jailbreak the Internet Wired, 2013
- ↑ Dan Gillmor: Welcome to the Indie Web Movement Slate, 2014
- ↑ Aldrich, Chris. "Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet". A List Apart. Retrieved 2023-01-14.
- ↑ Reece, Manton. "Webmention". Indie Microblogging (book). Manton Reece. Retrieved 2023-01-14.
- 1 2 Reece, Manton. "Microformats". Indie Microblogging (book). Manton Reece. Retrieved 2023-01-14.
- ↑ Reece, Manton. "IndieWeb". Indie Microblogging (book). Manton Reece. Retrieved 2023-01-14.
- ↑ Çelik, Tantek; Case, Amber; Parecki, Aaron; Beasley, Crystal; Marks, Kevin. "IndieWeb: Key Principles". indieweb.org. IndieWeb. Retrieved 2023-01-14.
- ↑ Reece, Manton. "Owning your content". Indie Microblogging (book). Manton Reece. Retrieved 2023-01-14.
- ↑ Reece, Manton. "Building Blocks". Indie Microblogging (book). Manton Reece. Retrieved 2023-01-14.
- ↑ Reece, Manton. "Permanence". Indie Microblogging (book). Manton Reece. Retrieved 2023-01-14.
- ↑ Reece, Manton. "Silos". Indie Microblogging (book). Manton Reece. Retrieved 2023-01-14.
- ↑ Reece, Manton. "Cross-posting". Indie Microblogging (book). Retrieved 2023-01-14.
