Decentralised social network built on top of email

Re:Decentralised social network built on top of email by _sh on Sunday July 15, 2012 @11:43PM (#4249211)

This is an interesting idea that uses email/IMAP as a transport for social message passing. It plays to the strengths of multipart email messages having a human-readable part that is as rich as possible for email client viewing (when users aren't in a social-aware application), and a machine readable part (JSON) for plugging in to the rest of the social infrastructure.

Here is their own summary of problems with this approach (from the article):

  * Not all users have a suitable email service (requires IMAP to support the
    “read it if you feel like it” model).

  * Servers tamper with messages as a normal part of existing infrastructure
    (especially mailing lists and spam filters).

  * Basic IMAP does not provide the full gamut of features required (some mail
    servers don't support all IMAP verbs).

  * Mail systems may have standard protocols, but individual implementations
    may have diﬀerent performance characteristics.

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Re:Decentralised social network built on top of email by alexanderh on Monday July 16, 2012 @03:03AM (#4249662)

Something like this doesn't NEED to work "ontop of" email though. It just needs to work LIKE email, and be decentralized, where anyone can run a "facebook like" social networking server that all know how to talk to eachother. I certainly do applaud efforts like Diaspora. If only they could actually take off. Maybe this approach of working "on top of" the existing email infrastructure will help adoption, IDK. But It seems like it will be equally as challenging to make popular. Might as well write a new protocol that is simply similar in its decentralized nature, so we dont have these issues.

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Re:Decentralised social network built on top of email by pfraze on Monday July 16, 2012 @09:23AM (#4250589)

Yeah, I think you could combine a number of existing services to make a network- email, twitter, HN, github, a linking service (this github profile = this twitter account) and an address book service would get you going for a dev network. The challenge would be to combine the data meaningfully, but I think the basics can be done. Plus, your address book amd email could be private services.

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Re:Decentralised social network built on top of email by icebraining on Monday July 16, 2012 @08:14AM (#4250350)

The protocols already exist, but who will run the servers?

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Re:Decentralised social network built on top of email by ryanhuff on Monday July 16, 2012 @11:06AM (#4250984)

Why not ISP's?

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Re:Decentralised social network built on top of email by icebraining on Monday July 16, 2012 @11:14AM (#4251017)

What's their incentive?

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Re:Decentralised social network built on top of email by dredmorbius on Monday July 16, 2012 @02:52AM (#4249633)

There are certain message formats which should not be tampered. PGP/MIME attachments (RFC 2015 / RFC 3156) for example, though many mime application attachments generally don't take well to being arbitrarily modified.

Doesn't mean it doesn't happen. But it shouldn't.

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Re:Decentralised social network built on top of email by mike-cardwell on Monday July 16, 2012 @07:24AM (#4250197)

Yeah. Try looking at an email before it goes into Microsoft Exchange via SMTP, then compare it to the same email that Exchange then goes on to expose via IMAP. They bare no resemblance.

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