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Pretty huge news for the #Diaspora project:
Our federation protocol just got bigger and better! - The diaspora* Project
tl;dr: The next major version of diaspora* (0.7.0.0) will include a new major version (0.2.0) of diaspora*’s federation protocol. The release of this version demonstrates that the ‘cleaning’ phase has been finished and that the community is now able to develop this protocol further.
Under an AGPL 3.0 licence and proven by many years of production, the protocol and its implementation are both reliable and robust. We encourage projects seeking to create the federated social web to take an interest in this protocol, and we will push its wider adoption by providing support and an automatic tool to test its implementation in other languages. Apart from the reference implementation in Ruby, there are currently two implementations in PHP, one in Python and one in Go, which are at various stages of development.
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But the most important innovation is the introduction of the concept of account migration, which will make it possible for users to move their account entirely to a different diaspora* server while keeping their contacts, messages, comments... One of the headline promises of the diaspora* project was to give complete power to the user by enabling them to move from one pod to another at will. Thanks to the release of version 0.2.0 of the protocol, this is now closer than ever to becoming a reality!
Is this imminent or still a ways off?
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Seems imminent. I've been actively getting Github notifications on this stuff, and it seems like this has been in active development for quite a while. There are now pods that run an incompatible protocol with PHP Diaspora, although a solution is in the works and has my complete confidence.
On the one hand, I'm super happy that federation ended up getting put into a gem. This will hopefully provide a less rigid structure for further federation development, which we had stumbled over for a long time.
A well-documented gem could hold potential for other Rails apps to adopt - given the right training materials, it could be possible to make Rails apps use it and technically be compatible with the federation. The idea of the protocol actually being extended to provide new fixtures or features is interesting, too.
Diaspora is far from perfect, but the protocol has been a common glue tying the overall federation together. Improving it might facilitate certain shortcomings, and in time it may even take examples from Zot or ActivityPub or even Tent, for their different approaches to problems.
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@dsh why is there a link to https://deadsuperhero.com/search?tag=Diaspora at the end of this post? And it looks like the data there are not public.
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Hubzilla normally links tags at the source. Diaspora links them at the destination; which totally messes up tags that were linked at the source and leads to disparities in tag content which tends to favour large sites over smaller sites. I forgot about this issue during the re-write when implementing the V2 federation protocol and the new markdown library. Will sort it out tomorrow.