On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 9:22 AM, Blaine Cook <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On 28 May 2010, at 22:50, Ted Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Fri, 2010-05-28 at 18:45 +0200, Dan Brickley wrote: > > I don't think OStatus can be used for this, because to me, it seems that > > OStatus depends on HTTP as a transport protocol. It might be possible to > > hack in a peer-to-peer network, but it would take a lot of work - > > probably more work than just finding those social networking primitives > > would. > > In terms of actual deployments, so-called "pure" P2P networks are just > a transport layer plus a DHT for DNS-independent routing, and a heap > of code for getting around the fact that most users live behind NAT > firewalls. > > If you can offer users the ability to serve HTTP requests this way, > then they can absolutely host their own nodes (e.g., with Tor hidden > services). Users with public facing servers can host their own nodes > with no problems whatsoever. > It turns out this isn't really that hard to do, you just need someone with a visible IP to run a reverse proxy for you. Combine this with a dynamic DNS system, and the proxies themselves can be organized in a 'cooperative' p2p-like structure. Getting this to work is my project for the summer, and I am quite excited about the possibility of every single device out there, be it server or laptop or mobile phone, becoming a potential publisher of content on the web instead of merely a consumer. However, I am a little more concerned with the usability side of things - I took a look at StatusNet the other day, and was frightened off by the gigantic list of dependencies. That either has to be reduced dramatically or the complexity hidden somehow, for average-Joe to be able to run his own node in a distributed social network. But on the other hand, it's probably too early to worry about that. Get it working first, then get it working well? -- Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson [email protected] http://bre.klaki.net/ Use http://bre.klaki.net/bre/contact.shtml to bypass my spam filters. .oOo.oOo. PGP: 02764305, B7A3AB89 .oOo.oOo.
