Friendica
A distributed social network is an Internet social network service that is decentralised and distributed across different providers. The emphasis of the distribution is on portability, interoperability and federation capability. It contrasts with social network aggregation services, which are used to manage accounts and activities across multiple discrete social networks.
Open standards such as OAuth authorisation, OpenID authentication, OStatus federation, XRD metadata discovery, the Portable Contacts protocol, the Wave Federation Protocol, OpenSocial widget APIs, microformats like XFN and hCard, and Atom web feeds—increasingly referred to together as the Open Stack — are often cited as enabling technologies for distributed social networking.
A few social networking service providers have used the term more broadly to describe provider-specific services that are distributable across different websites, typically through added widgets or plug-ins. Through the add-ons, the social network functionality is implemented on users' websites.
Installation
 | We've tried very hard to ensure that Friendika will run on commodity hosting
platforms - such as those used to host Wordpress blogs and Drupal websites. But be aware that Friendika is more than a simple web application. It is a complex communications system which more closely resembles an email server than a web server. For reliability and performance, messages are delivered in the background and are queued for later delivery when sites are down. This kind of functionality requires a bit more of the host system than the typical blog. Not every PHP/MySQL hosting provider will be able to support Friendika. Many will. But please review the requirements and confirm these with your hosting provider prior to installation. Before you begin: Choose a domain name or subdomain name for your server. Put some thought into this - because changing it is currently not-supported. Things will break, and some of your friends may have difficulty communicating with you. We plan to address this limitation in a future release. Also decide if you wish to connect with members of the Diaspora network, as this will impact the installation requirements. Decide if you will use SSL and obtain an SSL cert. Communications with the Diaspora network MAY require both SSL AND an SSL cert signed by a CA which is recognised by the major browsers. Friendika will work with self-signed certs but Diaspora communication may not. For best results, install your cert PRIOR to installing Friendika and when visiting your site for the initial installation in step 5, please use the https: link. (Use the http: or non-SSL link if your cert is self-signed). |
| — Friendika team |
Privacy
| When we started building Friendika a year ago, there were no computer protocols for privacy-aware social networking on the web. A group of people were trying to build social networking on the "open stack" - which is a set of protocols originally conceived to add capabilities to blogs. But these didn't have any way of handling privacy. Also around that time, the Diaspora project started their own work on a privacy-aware social network and as best as can be determined - tried to find a way to secure the open stack. This protocol has never been formally published.
We set out to build a privacy enhanced social network, and decided that the unique requirements of a decentralised conversational network coupled with privacy issues surrounding member profiles necessitated a new mode of privacy-enhanced communication - and hence a new protocol. We created DFRN to address the short-comings of existing systems. DFRN works well - but since we started with nothing, we over-engineered the privacy capabilities. This is OK, because it's much better to over-engineer them than to under-engineer them - as we saw happening in similar projects. But we've now had a year to work with DFRN, and we feel we can do it better. We can also do it a lot simpler - which makes it easy for other projects to integrate. Currently Friendika has communication links with many networks, but no other networks have secure communication links with Friendika. We've got a rather high barrier to entry, and that is mostly due to the difficulty in implementing the somewhat unwieldy DFRN protocol. Enter Zot]! |
| — So what is all this talk about "Zot!"? |
