This is the original project listing page from the GNU Social discussion list, which somehow migrated over here.

Commodity webhosting approach

Pros
* Deployable on commodity webhosting.

Cons
Commodity webhosting often happens on virtual machine farms. Encryption, security and privacy are not safe on virtual machines.
A federation of such servers cannot handle as much traffic as applications using optimized protocols rather than HTTP.

StatusNet
Maturity: Production
Protocols: OStatus, OpenID, FOAF
Features: Microblogging
Privacy support: None

Crabgrass
Maturity: Production
Protocols: None
Features: Social networking with a focus on collaboration within and between groups. Wikis, task lists, asset management, photo galleries, decision making. AGPL, Ruby on Rails. Primary emphasis is on privacy.
Privacy support: Simple permissions

ownCloud
Maturity: Production
Protocols: WebDAV, Open Collaboration Services
Features: Cloudstorage and plugins for Photos, Media, RSS and more
Privacy support: yes

Diaspora
Maturity: Starting
Protocols: OAuth, OpenID planned
Features: Planned
Privacy support: Planned

Project Danube
Maturity: Alpha
Protocols: OAuth, OStatus, XDI
Features: Federated Social Web, Personal Data Ecosystem
Privacy support: Yes

Elgg
Maturity: Production
Protocols: FOAF, Pubsubhubub, REST API, Global Identifiers, RDFa, activitystrea.ms
Features: Profiles, microblogging, streams, groups, plugins
Privacy support: Excellent

Cyn.in
Maturity: Production
Features Profiles, streams, groups, wikis, blogs, event calendars, image/audio/video galleries, crowd rating and voting, people directory
* Privacy support: Profiles, customizable access control

Lorea
Maturity: Production
Protocols: Elgg supported federation technologies (openid, activitystrea.ms, pubsubhubbub), foaf+ssl working on: ostatus (60% production), xmpp/psyc (50% development), rdf+sparql (10% development)
Features: Same features as production elgg + group mailing lists, tasks, calendar, subgroups, tagclouds. Although, each network can decide which fuctionalities to include.
Privacy support: Excellent

Pinax
Maturity: Production
Protocols: OpenID
Features: Wiki, groups, forums, bookmarks
Privacy support: Seems basic

Open Atrium
Maturity: Production
Protocols: Planned?
Features: Blog, calendar, group collaboration, docs, case tracking
Privacy support: Seems basic

SMOB
Maturity: Production
Protocols: FOAF
Features: Microblogging
Privacy support: None

BuddyPress
Maturity: Production
Protocols: None
Features: Members, groups, blogs, forums
Privacy support: None

Daisychain
Maturity: Proof of concept
Features: Proof of concept
* Privacy Support: Proof of concept

Partuza
Maturity: Proof of concept
Protocols: OpenSocial
* Features: Profile

The Appleseed Project
Maturity: Alpha
Protocols:: Planned
* Features: Profiles, photos with tagging

Socknet
Maturity: Alpha
Protocols: OpenID
* Features: Messaging, gossip (?!)

Get6d
Maturity: Alpha
Protocol: 6d
* Features: None

Knowee
Maturity: Alpha
Protocols: OpenID, FOAF
* Features: Address book

Dutch
Maturity: Alpha
Protocols: OpenID
* Features: Group blogging

exo Social
Maturity: Alpha
Protocols: OpenID, OAuth, REST, RPC

Diso
Maturity: In development
Protocols: activitystrea.ms

Movim
Maturity: In development
Protocols: XMPP

Jappix
Maturity: Production
Protocols: XMPP
Features: Instant messaging, Groupchats, Presence, Activity, Mood, Tune, Geolocation, (soon Micrblogging and Activity stream), Profiles
Privacy support: Excellent

HelloWorld
Maturity: Brainstorming
Protocols: OpenID

OpenCollab
Maturity: Stable
Protocols: None
* Features: RPC-API, Applications, Blogging, Groups, Profiles, Jabber-Notification, Buddylist

Kopal
Maturity: In development
Protocols: Invented

RSSN
Maturity: Brainstorming
Protocol: In development

Noosfero
Maturity: Production
Protocol: Planned
Features: Content management, tagging, regular social networking stuff (friends, communities), blocks(“widgets”), blogging, RSS import, image gallery, categories, adding custom themes, news portal, i18n/l10n. Developed in Ruby/Rails, License AGPL3
Privacy support: Users can put their profiles (or communities) as private and them only their friends (or members) can see it

Friendika
Maturity: Production
Protocol: dfrn, atom, pubsubhubbub, salmon , activitystrea.ms, webfinger, openid
Features: transport encryption, privacy,security, photo albums, private mail, richtext status (any length), geotags, commodity hosting, more…
Privacy support: Excellent. Multiple profiles which can each be assigned to specific friends, full ACL implementation on all content. “group” pages provide a segmented community within the network where activity can only be seen by the group.

Suggested protocols: MINE Project, NoseRub, OpenSocial for apps.

Non-free software

• iSocial: supports OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, etc.
  
• Persona: Actually a paper discussing mechanisms; unclear whether authors would want to patent their processes

Federation of Servers approach

Pros
* Existing infrastructure of servers. Familiar traditional Internet architecture.

Cons
Still putting a certain degree of trust into servers, but we don’t want unencrypted trust networks stored on servers, and can we trust SSL keys to be safe on servers in future?
Even if we only let them see encrypted messages, we would still trust our servers to carry our social graph.

A way to solve this dilemma is to allow for more ‘'servers’‘ to run on the user’s computer – then it is fine if the server is involved in group encryption maths, storage of the web of trust and personal data of our friends or even private key encryption on the user’s behalf. Essentially bringing XMPP and PSYC into a more P2P mode of operation. This works with PSYC – for XMPP it may need some tweaking.

XMPP
Maturity: Production
Protocol: XMPP
Features: Instant messaging, supports extensions
Privacy support: Excellent

OneSocialWeb
Maturity: Beta
Protocol: XMPP
Features: Microblogging, profiles
Privacy support: Seems great

Google Wave
Maturity: Beta
Protocol: XMPP
Features: Messaging, microblogging, instant messaging
Privacy support: Seems great

Mycelia
Maturity: Development
Protocol: XMPP
* Features: Wiki, bookmarks

PSYC
Maturity: Production
Protocol: PSYC, XMPP, HTTP, IRC, FOAF
Features: [Conferencing](http://about.psyc.eu/Multicast Conferencing), messaging, microblogging, profiles, trust metrics
Privacy support: yes

Higgins
Maturity: Development
Protocol: XDI, RDF, ActivityStreams, PSHB
Features: “Personal Data Store” notion, optional active clients
Privacy support: Encrypted data values on PDS server (planned)

Peer-to-peer (P2P) / Distributed Hashtable (DHT) approach

Pros
* No doubt [http://wingolog.org/archives/2010/04/10/towards-a-gnu-autonomous-cloud peer-to-peer] is the approach that respects privacy the best, as it allows any social interaction to be end-to-end or group encrypted. Some technologies even make it hard to observe who is communicating with whom.

Cons
* Needs a special strategy for message delivery when a source goes ‘'offline’‘ (servers, DHT and/or group communication redundancy)

SecuShare
Maturity: Prototype
Protocol: PSYC over GnuNet, servers optional, no DHT needed
* Features: end-to-end encryption, high security, file exchange, chat, optional obfuscation

I2P
Maturity: Production
Protocol: custom P2P with untraceability
* Features: Pseudonymous Publication, IRC, Filesharing

Tahoe LAFS
Maturity: Production
Protocol: None
* Features: Filesharing

CSpace
Maturity: Production
Protocol: Invented
* Features: IM

Angelapp
Maturity: Beta
Protocol: None
* Features: Filesharing

RetroShare
Maturity: Beta
Protocol: Invented
* Features: Filesharing, chat, forums

The Circle
Maturity: Ceased development
Protocol: Invented
* Features: IM, IRC

Sydnie
Maturity: Alpha
Protocol: None
* Features: Forums

Netsukuku
Maturity: Not in production
Protocol: Netsukuku protocol suite
* Features: Wifi mesh network

Peerscape
Maturity: Production
Protocol: None
* Features: Filesharing, chat

Freenet
Maturity: Production
Protocol: custom P2P with untraceability
* Features: Pseudonymous Publication, Filesharing

Friend2Friend
Maturity: ?
Protocol: P2P XML
* Features: ?

Safebook
Maturity: ?
Protocol: custom P2P with obfuscation
* Features: ?

versionvega
Maturity: ?
Protocol: FreePastry P2P
* Features: ?

==== Non-free P2P networks ====

LifeSocial
Maturity: Proof of concept
Features: Profiles, photos, etc.

PeerSoN
Maturity: Brainstorming
Features: Collaboration, file sharing

Opera Unite
Maturity: Production
Features: Photos, wall, music and filesharing. Capability for groups or global news pages is quite limited

Osiris
Maturity: Production
Features: Forums (Developers have announced that they will open the source code soon).

Social desktop applications

Pros
allows for end-to-end encryption for people and groups, without browser
heavy integration in the computer desktop experience
* allows for much richer interactions beyond traditional social networks (like file sharing)

Cons
* could be done in an unsafe client/server way, so be careful to get it right! ‘'Get it right’‘ probably means to do it in a P2P way (see section above)

Nepomuk for KDE
Maturity: Beta?
Features: Metadata sharing

Social Desktop for KDE
Maturity: shipping
Features: Authentication to issue tracking services, KDE forums, news feed

In-browser profile + certificates approach

Pros:
Authenticate at any website using a secure profile stored in the browser.
Profile is always stored locally; external websites can’t fake it.
** The statements above indicate a lack of understanding of how FOAF+SSL operates. FOAF+SSL securely includes a link to a profile in requests made by the browser. The profile itself can be hosted on commodity web hosting. Some browsers are now starting to bundle web servers, so in that case, the profile can be stored in the browser (I believe Melvin Carvalho has experimented this way), but that’s not the usual situation.

Cons:
Adds a layer of complexity without solving the problem, since creating a forum/microblogging still requires some kind of hosting.
You need to surf to web sites to pick up profiles and information waiting for you, there is no real-time notification stream.
* You cannot do group encryption.

Protocols:
* [http://esw.w3.org/foaf%2Bssl FOAF+SSL] for RESTful p2p authentication – libraries in php, java, perl, python, and Apache module available.

Projects:
No browsers implement FOAF+SSL so no projects have been initiated
The statement above indicates a lack of understanding of how FOAF+SSL operates. Browsers don’t need to do anything to support it; FOAF+SSL leverages the HTTPS support that already exists in browsers. (That said, many browsers could benefit by improving the user experience of their certificate management dialogue boxes!) FOAF+SSL thus already works in all major browsers and has since day one; more details.
* Lorea project already supports foaf+ssl

Distributed Node Architecture

This architecture entails separating an end-user’s GNU Social node into five components. [[User:Teddks/Social|See here]] for more. This essentially brings all of the approaches (and thus existing solutions) mentioned above into a big picture and defines a framework for them to interact.

Pros
Allows end-to-end encryption for people and groups and anything else
Allows the use of arbitrarily many transport protocols such as HTTP, XMPP, or PSYC for relaying data between nodes
“Future proofs” by defining protocols between components and not making assumption about the structure of other aspects of the node
Allows users to access the same account using different client programs (web browser, dedicated app, MeMenu, etc.)

Cons
* Possibility of over-design

Projects
* Distnode