| Communication protocol | |
 | |
| Purpose | Decentralized social networking |
|---|---|
| Influenced | ActivityPub |
| Website | www |
OStatus is an open standard for decentralized social networking, allowing users on one service to send and receive status updates with users from another.[1] The standard describes how a suite of various standards, including Atom, Activity Streams, WebSub, Salmon, and WebFinger,[2] can be used together, which enables different microblogging server implementations to communicate status updates between their users back-and-forth, in near real-time.
History
OStatus federation was first possible between servers running StatusNet, such as Status.net and Identi.ca,[3] although Identi.ca later switched to pump.io.[4] As of June 2013, a number of other microblogging applications and content management systems had announced that they intended to implement the standard.[5] That same month, it was announced StatusNet would be merged into the GNU social project along with Free Social, a similar application itself forked from StatusNet.
Following the first official release of GNU Social, a number of microblogging sites running StatusNet and Free Social began to transition to it to receive new updates to the software. But frustrations with the technology underpinning GNU Social and its complexity led a number of new server packages that aimed to be compatible with GNU Social using OStatus to shift focus to ActivityPub, including Mastodon,[6] Pleroma[7] and postActiv, a fork of GNU social.
Standards work
In January 2012, a W3C Community Group was opened to maintain and further develop the OStatus standard.[8] However, this was eclipsed by the work of the W3C Federated Social Web Working Group, launched in July 2014.[9] This working group focused on creating a newer standard, called ActivityPub, which expanded on the protocols and design used in pump.io, which has since been standardized as a successor to OStatus.[10][11]
Projects using OStatus
Current
- Friendica[12]
- GNU social (formerly StatusNet)
Former
See also
- OpenMicroBlogging – older federated microblogging specification, to be superseded by OStatus.
- Comparison of software and protocols for distributed social networking
- Comparison of microblogging and similar services
References
- ^ Jackson, Joab (28 July 2010). "Could open source tools make Facebook the next AOL?". computerworld.com.
- ^ "StatusNet Cloud Service Opens To The Public – Black Web". Archived from the original on 19 May 2017.
- ^ "Group Redent Plugin for Status.net / Identi.ca – Dave Hall Consulting". www.davehall.com.au.
- ^ "StatusNet, Identi.ca, and transitioning to pump.io [LWN.net]". lwn.net.
- ^ "Platforms – Federated Social Web Incubator Group". www.w3.org.
- ^ "Remove Salmon and PubSubHubbub by Gargron · Pull Request #11205 · tootsuite/mastodon". GitHub. Retrieved 4 October 2019.
- ^ Tilley, Sean (24 April 2018). "Blushy-Crushy Fediverse Idol: A Chat with Lain about Pleroma". medium.com.
- ^ OStatus Community Group W3C
- ^ "Social networking built into the Web? W3C gives it a go". cnet.com. 21 July 2014.
- ^ "Victory for libre networks: ActivityPub is now a W3C recommended standard — Free Software Foundation — working together for free software". www.fsf.org.
- ^ "Sandstorm And The Social Web". zenhack.net. Archived from the original on 30 October 2020. Retrieved 26 April 2017.
- ^ Tilley, Sean (10 October 2017). "Got Zot — Mike Macgirvin". medium.com.