Blogging via XMPP

Amazing modern way of federated blogging

Internet used to be

• consisting of number disjointed websites
• fault tolerant
• indexed by several search engines which were competiting by pulling info periodically from each site waiting for updates
• each publisher owned their information

Internet now

• mostly consists of big Internet services which control big part of World's information
• information is being posted several times to each of those to cover bigger audience
• users are limited with those services' policies
• the services themselves are being manipulated by governments

So?

• equal access to information is not guaranteed
• users have to have accounts on each service to be able to use them
• the sites purposely make it impossible to check news without visiting sites
• have to share information that we probably don't want to
• actually don't own our info!
• WEIRD?!

Do we have a superhero?!

YES!

XMPP & PubSub/PEP

• XMPP is well-known stable, many-times-implemented federated network
• which puts security into the main corner
• and is highly accessible from any perspective
• PubSub is a well-known design pattern which makes it not necessary to poll for changes
• C-C-C-COMBO!

Blogs

• use PEP which turns each XMPP user into a PubSub service to store user posts
• other users can subscribe to that service to receive updates
• you also can ask the service to show you the posts
• you have wide abilities to control permissions and even allow others to post to your blog

Comments

• blogs are not interested without feedback from readers
• need to store comments
• can use generic PubSub node for that aim, linking each post to it's own thread
• thanks to XMPP's federation you don't need to register on all the blog services anymore, just use your JID to identify!

Federation? Too old.

Give us decentralization!

• look at this as the protocol, not the implementation
• the same clients will be able to work on every provider which uses the protocol
• underlaying protocol can be completely decentralized!

but this is the far far future.

Which can become true only if you help!

WE NEED HELP!

What can you do?

• read XEP-277
• help with new XEPs
  • XEP-315: Recipient Server Filtration
  • Privileged Entity
  • Namespace Delegation
• help to solve current PubSub spec problems

Follow these on standards@ ML!

And give us your opinion!

XEP-0277: Microblogging over PEP

• the main one
• defines a way of putting blog in your PEP
• rocks the world!

XEP-0351: Recipient Server-side Filtration

• with current scheme of entity capabilities negotiating:
  • one-way presence subscription doesn't work
• solution?
  • send all the events to receiving server and let it decide!
• backwards compatible
• implementations WANTED.

Namespace Delegation

• some services are reserved to server
• delegate these services to external entity
• decentralise
• quick developing cycle
• server agnostic implementations

Privileged Entity

• give server-like permissions
• with namespace delegation, allow to implement PEP
• roster management

Current PubSub problems

• http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/PubSubIssues
• Bloated XEP-0060
• Small incosistencies in XEP-0060
• What else?

I want to try!

Implementations

• LiJ (Live Jabber)
• Jappix
• Movim
• Salut à Toi (aka SàT)

LiJ (Live Jabber)

• CLI-based gateway for clients without native support
  • uses XHTML-IM for pretty output if available
• Web aggregator (http://b.habahaba.im)
• Gateways to other platforms
• Habahaba (without blogging yet)

LiJ

Jappix

• popular web client
• BOSH/Javascript based

Movim (My Open Virtual Identity Manager)

• web client
• PHP/Javascript
• use microblog to show RSS/Atom feeds

Salut à Toi

• Multi-frontends Multi-purpose client
• mainly Python
• special use of publisher roster

Aggregators

• aggregators are the services that are subscribed to everyone
  • and receive updates realtime
  • and can provide extra feeds in the same format by specific criterias
  • and there can be unlimited number of such aggregators
  • diversity!