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That page isn't very in-depth (to put it mildly.. it doesn't even link to the homework, much less info like "here are the possible requests, here's what you reply to them", some kind of example exchange between servers, etc.),

Yeah--it's an extremely high-level overview, for the most part.

The paragraph at the top of the page (about how the first, and possibly most significant step is almost a no-op in most cases: PuSH-enabling your RSS/Atom feeds so that people can subscribe to you) is pretty valuable even by itself, though. I gathered that you were probably expecting even that to be a lot of effort--just like I had expected it to be.

and the links that *are* on it, are mostly 404:

You should at least implement the http://schemas.google.com/g/2010#updates-from Link to link to your activities feed.

404.

To make this work, you'll need to implement the http://ostatus.org/schema/1.0/subscribe WebFinger relationship (described in the OStatus protocol documents).

404.

Er..., oops. Yeah--it looks like things moved to different/better URLs and the links rotted; it'd be nice if someone had at least updated the links to point to the Wikipedia pages, e.g.:

• Salmon protocol
• Webfinger
• OStatus

It looks like the URLs that those links really *should* be pointing at are:

• http://webfinger.net/
• http://ostatus.org/specification
• http://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/

Sorry about that.

(I believe that those can all be found via the Wikipedia articles mentioned above, though)

The best (or at least easiest) way to get started is probably to get the StatusNet (PHP) or rstat.us (Ruby) code and start playing with it on a local server or a scratch domain â

I spoke to soon :/ (well, except for the list of OStatus sites, thanks again for that)

Start with `How to OStatus-enable Your Application'.

That page isn't very in-depth (to put it mildly.. it doesn't even link to the homework, much less info like "here are the possible requests, here's what you reply to them", some kind of example exchange between servers, etc.), and the links that *are* on it, are mostly 404:

You should at least implement the http://schemas.google.com/g/2010#updates-from Link to link to your activities feed.

404.

To make this work, you'll need to implement the http://ostatus.org/schema/1.0/subscribe WebFinger relationship (described in the OStatus protocol documents).

404.

1. What sites are out there that implement OStatus? I know of

http://rstat.us/
http://identi.ca/
http://status.net/

To start with, every site running StatusNet implements it. Here are a few lists of independent StatusNet sites:

• List of Independent StatusNet Instances
• List of Federated Users
• Another list of StatusNet sites, organised topically, also with links to some other lists

There's also an OStatus plug-in for WordPress, a set of OStatus-bridge apps for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

And there are plenty of other sites/platforms that support enough parts of the OStatus stack to be useful (like PuSH, which is the part that allows you to `follow' people on other sites); e.g.: even if your blog-platform doesn't support PuSH, you can run it through FeedBurner and that will make it PuSH-enabled (which is how I get notices from mimiandeunice.com in my StatusNet timeline, for example).

There are probably others that I haven't listed or that I don't know about; when I find new OStatus-related things, I bookmark them on my OStatus-compatible microblog.

2. What good and complete tutorials are there for implementing OSTatus? The ones I tried broke my brain. I want less theory and words, at least initially, and more (pseudo) code. Let's start simple: What do I need to do to make my CMS "folllowable" from the three sites above, for example?

Start with `How to OStatus-enable Your Application'.

These networks need to support http://ostatus.org/!

Diaspora, despite the rocky start, seems to be the most active project working on this. I hope it thrives.

*cough* Appleseed, StatusNet/Identica (which is an official StatusNet instance on the bleeding edge, popular among open-source types like myself).

Not to forget that StatusNet is one of the many social networks that supports the OStatus protocol, a way to follow people on different networks and websites.

It provides a set of APIs that can be used to federate social networks.

Not quite. I spoke with them when they ran an installfeast a few weeks ago, and they don't provide the APIs.

What they did is follow the OStatus recommendations, and then built their own undocumented APIs for items that are private. Yes, Diaspora is open-source, but their APIs beyond OStatus aren't documented enough to the point where someone else can build a compatible network.

For some context, OStatus is a recommendation to support a whole bunch of independently-developed protocols that lets you have a federated twitter where you don't know who's following you. There's no way to share private information when following OStatus.

So true. Here are some other (more mature) projects that DO put focus on protocols.

http://ostatus.org/
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/13/onesocialweb-were-ahead-of-diaspora-in-the-creation-of-an-open-facebook/

See also:
http://xmpp.org/xmpp-protocols/xmpp-core/

People don't seem to be aware that many, many people and projects have been working on Open Web solutions to this problem. See OStatus: http://ostatus.org/ and http://status.net/wiki/OStatus/Interop

Please don't leave out StatusNet. http://status.net/ and OStatus http://ostatus.org/ IRC: #statusnet on freenode It's an AGPL social networking platform, complete with a federated message bus built on Open Web standards that anyone can install and run on his/her own server or commodity hosting setup. No, it's not a 100% perfect replacement for Facebook as it stands (although a pretty good replacement for Twitter). But it could be. Why not build on the two years of work that's gone into it, instead of starting over from scratch, or trying to bolt on federation to a piece of software that was never designed to be distributed. The constant reinventing of the wheel is frustrating.