NoseRub

» see noserub.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

NoseRub appeared in 2007 and described itself, on its own homepage, with unusual honesty: "NoseRub wants to be an inspiration, protocol and implementation of a decentralized social network. Sounds geeky? It sure is..." It was the work of Dirk Olbertz, written in PHP against MySQL, released under the MIT license, and shipped as a sample application you were expected to install on your own hosting.

The architecture was assembled out of things that already existed rather than invented from nothing. OpenID handled who you were and RSS carried what you had been doing, and the protocol's job was to keep your contacts' profiles synchronized with yours without a company in the middle holding the list. In September 2007 the download on the front page read "NoseRub 0.2 alpha". By the last working capture of the site, in December 2011, it had reached 0.8.2.

Around it was a small scene that mostly spoke German and English and met at BarCamps. The site's news column links to recorded BarCamp sessions, to a document called A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web, and to an account wizard that could import your existing contacts. The W3C's Federated Social Web Incubator Group listed NoseRub among the platforms worth knowing about, which is roughly the peak of its institutional recognition.

~ the case file ~

~ before the fediverse ~

Everything NoseRub was arguing for in 2007 is now settled doctrine among a few million people. Your identity belongs on a server you choose, and the network is an agreement between hosts rather than a company. Mastodon shipped that idea in 2016 and the W3C made ActivityPub a recommendation in 2018, nine and eleven years after a one-man PHP project had written down most of the requirements.

Being that early is usually fatal and it was here. In 2007 the problem federation solves had not happened yet, because Facebook was still pleasant and nobody had been locked out of anything they cared about. Olbertz was building an escape route from a building that was not on fire.

~ the default page ~

There is no announcement to quote, which is normal for software that ends by one person stopping. The site served its ordinary front page on 2 December 2011, and by 25 February 2012 noserub.com was answering with a redirect to cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi, the page a cPanel server shows when nothing is installed on it. That is as clear a death certificate as this category produces. The domain went to 404s in 2014 and is now an Indonesian gambling site.

In Turkey in those years the social network question was being settled by hi5 and then very quickly by Facebook, and the idea that you might run your own node of anything was not a conversation happening outside a handful of mailing lists. I was an engineering student turning into an engineer, on TTNet, with a Facebook account like everybody else. The federated web stayed a European hobbyist concern for another decade after NoseRub's host went back to its factory settings.

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