I fell victim to one of the classic blunders...

Nope, I didn't get involved in a land war in Asia, but I did let yet another exciting thought exercise trick me into picking up a coding project I don't have time for. Happenstance was supposed to be just a reflection on whether the perceived benefits of central control could be achieved in a decentralized, distributed and federated status network.

And boy, is designing the next twitter the new hawtness right now. But while the exercise was quite interesting and I have answered the question of "is it possible" to my own satisfaction, I just don't have the energy or clout to implement and evangelize it given the other projects I'm already on and are giving me the evil eye over this distraction. So, rather than letting it linger, i'm just gonna admit that I'm going to stop working on the reference implemenation of Happenstance.

What to take away from Happenstance

Before I turn my attention back to the work I've been neglecting, I do want to touch on the lessons I feel I took away from the exercise

Subscription isn't a problem

Following is already well established in RSS and PuSH solves the delivery of content in a near-realtime fashion. OStatus does a fine job of formalizing the existing infrastructure in a way to track other people's updates. And a feed having a URI, gives it a canonical name, so in the most basic extend the question of origin is solved as well. You could make the claim that this solves all the issues of distributed, federated and decentralized. But it really doesn't, it just tells you where to get things.

Trusted delivery of adhoc messaging is the problem

What makes twitter, and by extension every walled garden, valueable is not the publishing of content, but the trusted aggregation of content that you are interested in. This is both the subscription of feeds and the delivery of what's generally called mentions now.

Mentions are like emails you are CC'ed on by virtue of your name occuring in the message. But unlike email, the keeper of the walled garden instills the trust that we've all lost in email authenticity due to the ease of faking the origin. Sure Twitter has a spam problem, but you never doubt the origin of the message. You just don't care about certain messages arriving at all.

The way we read our timeline, we don't wonder if the content is faked, we trust that what is in our timeline is at least from the claimed sources. With aggregating distributed feeds you do trust that you only get messages that came from a feed you've personally validated, but the moment you add the capability to receive adhoc messages, everything message has to become suspect.

Signed content

This is why i spent more time on the message-, name server- and meta-data signing than anything else on Happenstance. In the end, you are accumulating a store of messages that represents your own copy of messages passed around that may or may not have come directly from a trusted canonical uri. And for that network to be as valuable as twitter, the ability for your reader to authenticate the content as originating from where it claims to come from will make the difference between a valueable resource and the next spam haven that people abandon for the safety of the walled gardens.

And that's the one thing i've not seen anyone else address: Everyone is talking about all these competitors to twitter being able to interchange messages, which of course they must since none can rival the reach twitter has on its own. But none of the existing and proposed mechanisms address the issue of trust in content of a remote origin. Hopefully my exposition of the Happenstance design will at least inspire the emerging standard for status distribution to avoid the pitfalls that turned email into more spam than actual discourse.