Open Social Networking

Today I've implemented "Log in with Facebook" support for my Siikir CMS (and as of now, it is only live on Siikir.com and not Kirsle.net; it probably won't be enabled on Kirsle.net because this is a sort of "single user" site).

So I've decided to post about a fleeting thought I once had, about where the Siikir CMS may end up one day (specifically, for Kirsle.net). Just to clarify, both siikir.com and kirsle.net run my Siikir code; they only differ in the pages and web design. The back end is kept in sync between the two.

I increasingly dislike Facebook, but I'm sorta stuck with it because it's the only way to keep in touch with certain people. There are a few open source, distributed social networking projects, such as Diaspora and GNU Social. The idea of these distributed networks is that anybody can set up their own Diaspora or GNU Social server, create their account on their own server (or let their friends or family create accounts), and they can still connect with millions of others who have accounts on various different servers.

They do this by utilizing open standards like OAuth and OpenID to share content between the servers. In theory, every Diaspora server should be able to communicate with every GNU Social server, even though the software is different, because they use the same protocols for sharing data.

I'm not interested in creating a social networking platform for the sake of creating a social networking platform. I'm more interested in finding something to replace Facebook for me. This is the primary goal of creating my Siikir CMS. I built it because I wanted to run Kirsle.net on it, and so Siikir supports web blogs, photo albums, messaging and commenting.

This way I can keep my blog and photo albums and things on Kirsle.net instead of on Facebook. But, I'm slowly adding Facebook integration into the Siikir CMS, so that eventually, I'll be able to post new photos on Kirsle.net and have my Facebook news feed automatically notify my friends to come and check them out. This is the short term goal; the long term goal is to implement OAuth and other standards so that Siikir can link with Diaspora and GNU Social servers.

In other words, Siikir may eventually grow up to be a distributed social network platform like Diaspora... even though that isn't really its goal.

(siikir.com will probably remain as an isolated island to itself, because it doesn't really fit the model of "general purpose social network." But if the Siikir code gets to this point, it will be released as an open source social networking platform)