Freer Than a Bird

I’ve been trying to catch up on old FLOSS Weekly episodes, listening to them while I’m cooking, mostly. Podcasts are so incredibly convenient to listen to while your hands and eyes are busy and you can’t do anything else. Thanks be to God!

Anyway, in the one I just listened to, they interviewed this guy that made an open-source Twitter clone called identi.ca. Well, actually, that's just the flagship implementation of the laconi.ca software, which is open-source and written in PHP.

This means anyone can run their own microblogging server. But the real innovation here is that all those servers can communicate to each other and exchange “tweets” (or whatever the messages are called in this system), thus making this a decentralized system.

In short: Say goodbye to the proprietary shackles of Twitter, and say hello to decentralized freedom-y goodness!

This would mean that there’s no single server that could go down and interrupt everybody’s tweeting, as is known to happen with Twitter. And of course the inter-server communication is all done via an open standard specified in the OpenMicroBlogging protocol.

So even though the only people excited at this point will be those who are hip to the free software jive, I thought it would be good to post about it since I’m still finishing the engine for this blog and I need to test how it handles more tha...