http://rstat.us is dead. Long live rstat.us?

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http://rstat.us is dead. Long live rstat.us?

Hey everyone,

As you may have noticed, I have been a Bad Open Source Maintainer and I have not been doing even the minimum amount of maintenance on either the codebase or the main node living at http://rstat.us.

Wilkie has been poking around the code lately, and I'm encouraged because he's got his own node running.

Which brings me to the point of this email-- growing http://rstat.us was never the dream of this project, the dream was to have everyone owning and operating their own nodes that would talk to each other.

So unless someone speaks up and would like to take ownership of the domain and associated resources of rstat.us, I'm going to shut the main node down at the end of August.

Or perhaps put it in read-only mode to allow people to export their content, I'm not sure yet (that requires more work).

These are the big issues that are contributing to my demotivation and desire to shut the main node down right now:

• http://rstat.us has a huge spam problem and we have no system in place to deal with it.
• The OStatus standard has been largely abandoned by other projects, which leaves us with little or no interop except with other nodes running the rstat.us codebase.
• There is no support for changing the appearance of sites running the rstatus codebase, which I imagine is one of the first things someone would want to do running their own node.
• I tried getting rstat.us to work with mobile apps and failed.
• http://rstat.us needs some maintenance like renewing the SSL cert.

I don't really want to discuss potential solutions in this thread because I don't have the desire to implement any of them. If you do, please let me hand you the keys.

I originally sent this as an email to the librelist but it hasn't shown up on the archives yet so I'm not sure if librelist works anymore either.

Please comment here or email me, carol dot nichols at gmail.

My patchset does add an Administration section that can be the place for setting the node name, colors, etc. Whenever that gets reviewed at least. :) Note: we should move the developer specific parts of the README to a different file/place so it doesn't look so overwhelming.

You can deploy your own node (including single-account) on Heroku for $0 with 512MB (plenty) of db storage. That's a fantastic success.

OStatus is deprecated. I'm an invited expert on the https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg w3 Social Web Working Group and will implement the protocol which is designed there as part of the detached backend I've been working on. I will (soonish actually) start to replace rstat.us' backend with that one and hopefully bring in support for at least JSON AS 1.0 and JSON-LD/JRD support through that.

The main rstat.us node was never really important. We don't want to optimize the large node case, we want an easily deployable, simple solution for those in need of that. Generally speaking: non-US citizens, all revolutionaries and activists. So it is correct to lock down the main node. The main node is as easily defeated and useless as twitter wrt to those people.

Obviously, if nobody new wants to step up, I'll take the keys/domains and renew the cert.

Ok @wilkie, if you're willing, I'm happy to transfer stuff to you whenever. How long would you like to wait to see if there are other takers?

I'm glad you're taking on this work because I still think the idea behind rstatus is important, I'm just not motivated to work on the hard problems involved with implementing it right now :-/

Your end of August deadline seems fair.

!m @carols10cents @wilkie

toasts to r.status

I personally don't have time/brain for a project the size of r.status, so good luck @wilkie :P