...from the folks of Friendica comes Red:
"Red is essentially a "personal CMS" linked to a decentralised permissions and communication platform. This creates a grid of small servers which link together to form a much larger system (much like the internet itself). This allows one to create services with social contexts and extensible permission controls which are all integrated together as if they were offered by a single large data provider - but without the inherent privacy problems and costs associated with centralisation. Privacy and access controls are instead maintained at the local level where they can be enforced by those who own the data being shared. Additionally, identities in Red are not tied to DNS endpoints and have some degree of mobility between providers.
For example, let's say "Iggy Normak" is a colleague of mine. I can create a web service called "Mike Macgirvin" which acts as a blog or social networking hub, and share files and data with Iggy. These are stored on my website, which is served by a small hosting provider (or perhaps running on an old PC in my garage). Iggy can access my private photos from anywhere on the web, while logged into any Red website (for instance, from Iggy's own business website) - without encountering any additional authentication dialogues. Nobody else is able to access these files and photos without my permission, even if they "guess the URL". This kind of decentralised access control is somewhat unique and opens up new possibilities for creating very large scale web services from smaller operators, providers, and website designers.
Red has somewhat limited functionality at the present time, and is being provided as a "developer preview". The communication layers, authentication and permission systems are all basically functional. Much development work remains. Red is free and open source distributed under the MIT license."
https://github.com/friendica/red
"Red is kind of like a decentralised social network (along the lines of identi.ca, Friendica, and Diaspora) , but we've thrown away the rule book. Red has no concept of "people" or "friends" or "social". Red is a means of creating channels which can communicate with each other and to allow other channels permission to do things (or not). These channels can look like people and they can look like friends and they can be social.
They can also look like a great many other things - forums, groups, clubs, online websites, photo archives and blogs, wikis, corporate and small business websites, etc. They are just channels - with permissions that extend far beyond a single website. You can make them into whatever you wish them to be. You can associate web resources and files to these channels or stick with basic communications. There are no inherent limits. There is no central authority telling you what you can and cannot do. Any filtering that happens is by your choice. Any setting of permissions is your choice and yours alone.
You aren't tied to a single hub/website. If your own site gets shut down due to hardware or management issues or political pressure, the communication layer allows you to pop up anywhere on the Internet and resume communicating with your friends, by inserting a thumb drive containing your vital identity details or importing your account from another server.
Your resources can be access controlled to allow or deny any person or group you wish - and these permissions work across the Red network no matter what provider hosts the actual content. Red "magic-auth" allows anybody from any Red site to be identified before allowing them to see your private photos, files, web-pages, profiles, conversations, whatever. To do this, you only login once to your own home hub. Everything else is, well - magic.
Red is free and open source and provided by volunteers who believe in freedom and despise corporations which think that privacy extortion is a business model. The name is derived from Spanish "la red" - e.g. "the network".
Welcome to "the network". Welcome to the free web. Welcome to the grid. Red has arrived."
Now, please somebody port this to ringojs.
29.4.2013, 23:41