Diaspora Protocol Specification

[Eric Woodward]

I apologize if has been asked and answered already. I have searched
high and low (albeit briefly) looking for a technical specification of
the Diaspora inter-node communication. No dice.

I would like to consider writing my own implementation of a Diaspora
node with a more limited feature set, and not use the open source
Rails application that is currently being constructed by the Diaspora
team.

Is the exchange "protocol" documented anywhere?

--ejw

Eric Woodward
http://twitter.com/ejwcom

[Michael Sofaer]

Hi,

We definitely need to write a formal spec, (actually, we will probably
write an acceptance spec you can run against a server,) but we aren't
there yet. We're still changing the protocol as we come across things
that we didn't think of. Stay tuned, though!

-Michael

[Eric Woodward]

Ok, thanks. Even an experimental version would be fine as well,
subject to change, perhaps some sections flagged as RCs, with others
outlined clearly as experimental. It would let those of us interested
in the project to proceed in parallel with a different implementation.
At the moment, we have to wait. It would let others than proceed in
different languages, such as Python of PHP.

I fear the same thing may happen with the exchange protocol that has
happened (in my opinion) with this first implementation in Rails: the
protocol gets critiqued and good suggestions made well after the team
has done a lot of work, only to then go back and change things because
of quality suggestions. It seems to me that it is pretty hard to
develop anything without a defined spec. In the end you end up doing
more work.

Just my 2c.

--ejw

Eric Woodward
http://twitter.com/ejwcom