Is there a better decentralized “Like” than status.net?
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:category: computer
:tags: OwnCloud, xmpp
:date: 2011-05-31T18:27:28

So, I was reading through my daily avalanche of blogposts and emails and
various links from various sources, and I was thinking about my current
obsession: decentralized clouds. And on each webpage I read (for example
on `this beautiful article from
Slate <http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/slates_10th_anniversary/2006/06/watching_the_couples_go_by.html>`__)
I saw “Like” button. Of course, given it comes from Facebook, “Like”
button is `an evil scheme to collect
information <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20006532-38.html>`__ to
be sold later. So, the fact I cannot be tempted into pressing it is one
of nice consequences (originally unintended) of me not having a Facebook
account at all.

However, looking at those pages today I felt very strongly need for
something like “Like” button. Something to say to my friends (however we
define them) “Hey, this is a great reading, go and read it! What do you
think?”. When thinking about it, I’ve made an inventory of resources I
have. Email and plain Jabber are out (it is not cool IMHO to spam
everybody in my address book or roster), Facebook (where I don’t even
have an account) and Twitter (where `I am present at least
read-only <https://twitter.com/mcepl>`__) are too centralized to support
them wholeheartedly. So the only thing which remains are decentralized
social networks like Status.net (mostly
`identi.ca <https://identi.ca/mcepl>`__),
`OneSocialWeb <xmpp:mcepl@betavine.net>`__, or
`Diaspora <https://joindiaspora.com/people/37070>`__. Unfortunately,
from these only status.net looks like having real life so far.
Fortunately, it shouldn't matter that much, because if Diaspora and
`OneSocialWeb <http://onesocialweb.org/>`__ (and
`GNU/Social <http://foocorp.org/projects/social/>`__, and
`Appleseed <http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/>`__, and …) all
follow unified standards (which I am not sure they do) it wouldn’t
matter that much which implementation of protocols you use.

Given this inventory, I am afraid status.net is the only currently
available solution with substantial following, so I will concentrate on
it. So, I have sent my links and comments to identi.ca with a bit of
comment, and started to think how better status.net could be if it
actually expected to be used for like-equivalent functionality. For
example, it would be nice to get all links (or only links from today)
mentioning some particular URL (after expansion of all shortening URLs,
of course) with notices mentioning to collect crowd opinion on it. I
guess this is something similar to `Gina
Trapani <http://smarterware.org/>`__\ ’s `Think
Up <http://thinkupapp.com/>`__. (few moments later) No, it isn’t. I
didn’t mean purely data mining thing.

Anybody any thoughts in this direction of decentralized “Like”? (of
course, it would be also nice to have some tool, perhaps Firefox
extension?, to send commented link from the page which I actually read).

While looking for the resources for this post, I found
`freelish.us <http://freelish.us/>`__. I am not sure whether this is
what I want … for example I am not sure whether it shares roster with my
identi.ca account. What I really don’t want is to build my roster again
from scratch. I should research what it is about.