[Kde-pim] Integrate an open social network into KDE SC

[David Narvaez]

2011/12/11 Niels Ole Salscheider <niels_ole at salscheider-online.de>:
> CC'ing kde-telepathy at kde.org
> --------------------------------------------------
>
> 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,

A couple of clarifications:

- Facebook chat is based on XMPP (and is the only reason I use it)
- GTalk is also based on XMPP and even though I know little about
Google+ I assume they use XMPP too

A way to provide support to an open social network would be to check
what can we support from Diaspora, but chat-wise, I think we have that
out of the box as I think Diaspora uses XMPP too. PIM-wise, we could
check what do we need to import contacts from Diaspora, StatusNet,
elgg and any other free-something we can think of.

David E. Narváez