Hi all, I am a student and currently doing research in decentralised social networks. For my research I've some questions about GNU social and I hope the mailing list is the appropriate place for these questions.
The most important question about GNU-social is its current status. On Wikipedia it is noted that 1.1.2 is still an Alpha release and that 1.1.1 is the stable release. Let's assume that 1.1.1 is the current stable release and 1.1.2 is the "future" of GNU social. What will be the aim for GNU-social and how is privacy dealt with? With other implementations like Friendica/RedMatrix effort was put in the privacy of the users. That's why I was wondering what GNU-social will provide for it's users. Will private/direct messages be encrypted in some form (or do we rely on SSL/TLS if supported by the other end)? Will there be more advancements in federation support between different nodes? As far as I can see you can only message someone directly, from another node, when he/she is added to a group. Couldn't find the option to directly post to someone's "wall" when I visited his/her profile. More like the idea how Friendica/RedMatrix support seamless "roaming" of the profiles across nodes. What kind of advancements will be made to the user's profile? Will support be added to share your photos and conveniently access it from one place for example. How is performance and scalability be dealt with? Do we currently queue the messages and remove them if a node is considered "death" or when a user's profile is removed? Do we synchronise information every once in a while? How is consistency guaranteed when a node was down for maintenance and we want to keep information synchronised. Is there some kind of polling mechanism. If this isn't the appropriate place to discuss this please let me know. Although this information might be useful to be put in a document or something (i.e. FAQ). With kind regards, Wouter Miltenburg.
