Surf Wiki
Save to docs
general/microblogging-software

From Surf Wiki (app.surf) — the open knowledge base

OStatus

Open microblogging protocol

Open microblogging protocol

OStatus is an open standard for decentralized social networking, allowing users on one service to send and receive status updates with users from another. The standard describes how a suite of various standards, including Atom, Activity Streams, WebSub, Salmon, and WebFinger, can be used together, which enables different microblogging server implementations to communicate status updates between their users back-and-forth, in near real-time.

History

OStatus federation was first possible between servers running StatusNet, such as Status.net and Identi.ca, although Identi.ca later switched to pump.io. As of June 2013, a number of other microblogging applications and content management systems had announced that they intended to implement the standard. That same month, it was announced StatusNet would be merged into the GNU social project along with Free Social, a similar application itself forked from StatusNet.

Following the first official release of GNU Social, a number of microblogging sites running StatusNet and Free Social began to transition to it to receive new updates to the software. But frustrations with the technology underpinning GNU Social and its complexity led a number of new server packages that aimed to be compatible with GNU Social using OStatus to shift focus to ActivityPub, including Mastodon, Pleroma and postActiv, a fork of GNU social.

Standards work

In January 2012, a W3C Community Group was opened to maintain and further develop the OStatus standard. However, this was eclipsed by the work of the W3C Federated Social Web Working Group, launched in July 2014. This working group focused on creating a newer standard, called ActivityPub, which expanded on the protocols and design used in pump.io, which has since been standardized as a successor to OStatus.

Projects using OStatus

Current

  • GNU social (formerly StatusNet)

Former

  • Friendica
  • Mastodon
  • Pleroma

References

References

  1. Jackson, Joab. (28 July 2010). "Could open source tools make Facebook the next AOL?".
  2. "StatusNet Cloud Service Opens To The Public – Black Web".
  3. "Group Redent Plugin for Status.net / Identi.ca – Dave Hall Consulting".
  4. "StatusNet, Identi.ca, and transitioning to pump.io [LWN.net]".
  5. "Platforms – Federated Social Web Incubator Group".
  6. "Remove Salmon and PubSubHubbub by Gargron · Pull Request #11205 · tootsuite/mastodon".
  7. Tilley, Sean. (24 April 2018). "Blushy-Crushy Fediverse Idol: A Chat with Lain about Pleroma".
  8. [http://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/ OStatus Community Group] W3C
  9. (21 July 2014). "Social networking built into the Web? W3C gives it a go".
  10. "Victory for libre networks: ActivityPub is now a W3C recommended standard — Free Software Foundation — working together for free software".
  11. "Sandstorm And The Social Web".
  12. Tilley, Sean. (10 October 2017). "Got Zot — Mike Macgirvin".
  13. tobiasd. (1 January 2025). "Friendica 2024.12 released".
Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

microblogging-software communications-protocols software-that-federates-via-ostatus
Want to explore this topic further?

Ask Mako anything about OStatus — get instant answers, deeper analysis, and related topics.

Research with Mako

Free with your Surf account

Content sourced from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This content may have been generated or modified by AI. CloudSurf Software LLC is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of AI-generated content. Always verify important information from primary sources.

Report