Integrate an open social network into KDE SC

[Niels Ole Salscheider]

CC'ing kde-telepathy at kde.org
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Hello,

while it is "cool" from a technical point of view to see some efforts to 
integrate Facebook & Co. into KDE SC, I think that we, as a community around 
free software, should try to integrate a social network built around open 
standards, too.

Given the recent move of discussions to Google+ in the open source community, 
there seems to be a demand for social networks (even though I am happy with 
mailing lists, blogs and IRC). But after all, Google+ is not much better than 
Facebook: Google might be friendlier towards the open source world but it is a 
closed network built around proprietary technologies after all.

Unfortunately, there are not any good alternatives. While there are many small 
projects trying to solve this issue, none of these is big enough to gain 
momentum and become a real competitor to Facebook & Co.

Because of that, I want to propose to push for a social network based on XMPP 
(maybe reusing the efforts done by OneSocialWeb) and integrate it well into KDE 
SC (really well, not just the obvious stuff). The reason why it should use XMPP 
is that there are already many mail providers offering XMPP based chat services 
and I bet that these providers would like to offer social network extensions, 
too, if there was an easy way. Each provider alone does not have a big market 
share; but considering that about half of my friends that are not open source 
related use an email provider that offers XMPP (GMX, web.de, 1&1, Google Mail, 
...), the complete network could have enough members to gain momentum.

Of course, this will not happen if we do not work together with other 
projects: We need to get together with the OneSocialWeb team so that they 
finish their XEPs (maybe even help them and make suggestions how to improve the 
drafts). We also need the important XMPP servers (ejabberd, ...) to support it 
and to find a project that wants to improve the web interface OSW started to 
implement. Meanwhile we should implement the draft in KDE SC, too (this might 
actually be an unique selling point for both, KDE SC (5) and XMPP/OSW).

I know there might be reservation to put effort into such a project until the 
standards are finished and there are enough users. But if we do not show 
commitment and work simultaneously on this, each project will just wait for 
the others to take a step and nothing will ever happen.
I cannot promise that this will work out but I think that it is our only 
chance to build a real alternative to the closed social networks. And I am 
confident that we could win quite an amount of users, at least in the open 
source community and from the mail providers already offering XMPP.

What do you think?

Regards,

Ole
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