OpenMicroBlogging

» see openmicroblogging.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Evan Prodromou launched identi.ca on 2 July 2008 and published the specification for the protocol underneath it five days later. The document is a plain Docutils page with a header block at the top: author Evan Prodromou of Control Yourself, Inc., revision 0.1.1, date 2008-07-07. Under copyright it says the company has waived every right it might have asserted over the document, listing them out to be sure. At that point the protocol had exactly one implementation.

The purpose line is one sentence: to allow users of one microblogging service to publish notices to users of another service, given the other users' permission. That was the entire ambition. OpenMicroBlogging did not try to be a social graph format or a federation standard in general, it tried to make a follow work across a server boundary, and it built that on OAuth 1.0 and YADIS by piggy-backing extra fields onto protocols that already existed.

Laconica was the reference implementation, renamed StatusNet at version 0.8.1 in August 2009. identi.ca was the first service to speak it. The one other installation anybody remembers is Leo Laporte's TWiT Army, and from March 2009 the two could find each other: you could search for a TWiT Army account from inside identi.ca and subscribe to it from your own account there. Two servers, talking. That was the demonstration, and at the time it was new.

~ the chronicle ~

~ listener and listenee ~

The spec's terminology section is the most revealing part of it. It defines "listener" as the person listening and "listenee" as the user sending notices, choosing a vocabulary that nobody else in the industry adopted, and then it lists two more terms: "microblogging service" and "user". Both are given the same definition, which is the word "undefined". The rest of it is similarly unguarded, and there are footnotes about whether a profile URL is stable enough to use as an identifier, working through the case where somebody changes their nickname from john to johnsmith and breaks every reference to them. One of the footnotes opens with IWBNI, a Usenet abbreviation for "it would be nice if", left in a protocol document as though the reader would obviously know it. The author was writing the implementation at the same time, in public, and the document reads that way throughout.

~ replaced by its own author ~

StatusNet 0.9.0 shipped on 3 March 2010 with a new protocol called OStatus, and support for OpenMicroBlogging was dropped not long after. There is no announcement to point at and no release note naming the removal, which is how a protocol with exactly one implementation dies: the implementation ships the replacement, and the old thing stops being spoken. The date on this grave is the release that superseded it, because no other date exists. OStatus kept the goal and threw out the mechanism: instead of OAuth and YADIS carrying custom fields, it assembled five existing standards into a stack, Atom and WebFinger among them, which could federate more than plaintext notices and which other people could implement without reading one author's mind.

Then OStatus was itself superseded. Prodromou moved identi.ca to pump.io in 2013 and broke his own federation graph doing it, the StatusNet community forked into GNU social, and the protocol work migrated to ActivityPub, which became a W3C recommendation in 2018 and is what Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse run on today. OpenMicroBlogging sits at the head of that chain, and it is the link most accounts of the fediverse skip over, because it was obsolete inside twenty months.

~ who lives at the address now ~

openmicroblogging.org returns 200. It is a WordPress site titled "Open Micro Blogging", and the article on the front page argues that the modern attention span is shrinking and that this has produced a dramatic rise in the microblogging medium. It goes on to say that people are less interested than ever in handing control of their content to centralized and closed platforms, which has led to the creation of open source microblogging platforms.

Every claim in it is true and every one of them was the founding argument of the thing that used to be at that address. The marketing copy is making the 2008 case on the 2008 domain, with no idea that the domain already tried.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »