mikesofaer

We're very aware that we will be breaking interoperability with forks when we change the protocol, and there is a little bit of a worry that people won't keep their forks up to date and the protocol will fragment. I am optimistic that that won't happen, largely because the Diaspora product is the only part of the system actually visible to the outside world at the moment, and that gives us a pretty good way to draw a bright line between products that interoperate and products that don't.

I don't think that the UI polling/refresh question affects the inter-server protocol. Your seed is not your browser, and it's seed-seed communication that's the part of the protocol that matters in the long run.

Scaling is the pressure we're feeling most right now, and we're talking about how to deal with the issue of a distributed cluster with a coherent namespace. There are some interesting things about the Dynamo pattern that might be really useful to make this work. But without a running system with load and users and remote pods to connect to, it's very hard to figure out what you want.

I think that were at the point where the protocol needs something of a refactor, and I will probably make a post about it on the Diaspora-dev google group soon. Maybe we'll get some good feedback and design help!

I don't agree that it makes sense to "design a protocol" before building the application. You can try to imagine what you want the protocol to look like at the end of the day, but you are likely to get it wrong if you don't have an application that's actually using it. It's important to keep your eyes open and try to avoid going down blind alleys, but there's not much value in building infrastructure before it's needed.

The questions raised in that post are good, and we intend to address them as they become relevant to what we have build. Discovery, namespacing and routing are areas where we are starting to feel tension on in the product, and will probably be tackled quite soon. The point about affecting interface design is good, but we look at it the other way. We want our interface design to drive the protocol design, so we want to make protocol choices as late as is reasonable.

Finally, it's fantastic that people are reading and forking the code. The more people out there trying things, the better.