Just wrote a little bit about The Fediverse, The Federation, and their possible future together. #federation
https://medium.com/we-distribute/a-quick-guide-to-the-free-network-c069309f334
@deadsuperhero "In 2012, the Friendica project broke ground by reverse-engineering the Diaspora communication protocol and writing a PHP implementation library from scratch..."
Why was that necessary? Isn't Diaspora Free Software?
@escapist Sure it is, but Diaspora is written in Ruby and uses Rails. Friendica uses PHP. At the time, the Diaspora protocol had extremely poor documentation, and the method for signing was not even explained.
At the time, Mike Macgirvin wanted to make a developmental inroad towards cross-platform federation, and developed the library himself as a protocol plugin for Friendica's system.
@deadsuperhero Ah, the bane of software development strikes again. 🤣 Thanks for the explanation!
@escapist No worries! It was actually a milestone development at the time, and drove several development decisions for Hubzilla and Friendica, which can both be described as being protocol-agnostic.
The nice thing is that there's now an implementation for Diaspora federation in Ruby, PHP, and Python, and those libraries can be used to build other federated apps.