OStatus is an

open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a prerequisite to use open license, non-discrimination and extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in the development. There is no single definition ...

for federated

microblogging Microblogging is a form of social network that permits only short posts. They "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links",. Retrieved June 5, 2014 which may be the major reason for ...

, allowing users on one website to send and receive status updates with users on another website. The standard describes how a suite of

open protocol Open or OPEN may refer to: Music * Open (band), Australian pop/rock band * The Open (band), English indie rock band * ''Open'' (Blues Image album), 1969 * ''Open'' (Gotthard album), 1999 * ''Open'' (Cowboy Junkies album), 2001 * ''Open'' (YF ...

s, including

Atom Every atom is composed of a nucleus and one or more electrons bound to the nucleus. The nucleus is made of one or more protons and a number of neutrons. Only the most common variety of hydrogen has no neutrons. Every solid, liquid, gas, and ...

, Activity Streams,

WebSub WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub) is an open protocol for distributed publish–subscribe communication on the Internet. Initially designed to extend the Atom (and RSS) protocols for data feeds, the protocol can be applied to any data type (e.g. HTM ...

Salmon Salmon () is the common name for several list of commercially important fish species, commercially important species of euryhaline ray-finned fish from the family (biology), family Salmonidae, which are native to tributary, tributaries of the ...

, and

WebFinger WebFinger is a Communications protocol, protocol specified by the Internet Engineering Task Force IETF that allows for discovery of information about people and things identified by a URI. Information about a person might be discovered via an acct ...

, can be used together, which enables different microblogging server implementations to route status updates between their

user Ancient Egyptian roles * User (ancient Egyptian official), an ancient Egyptian nomarch (governor) of the Eighth Dynasty * Useramen, an ancient Egyptian vizier also called "User" Other uses * User (computing), a person (or software) using an ...

s back-and-forth, in near real-time.

History

OStatus federation was first possible between StatusNet installations, such as Status.net and Identi.ca, although Identi.ca later switched to

pump.io Pump.io (pronounced "pump eye-oh") is a general-purpose activity streams engine that can be used as a federated social networking protocol which "does most of what people really want from a social network". Started by Evan Prodromou, it is a fo ...

. As of June 2013, a number of other

applications and

content management systems A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content (content management).''Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy''. Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning. New ...

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. 6 Following the first official release of GNU Social, a number of microblogging sites running StatusNet and Free Social began to transition to it. But frustrations with the technology underpinning GNU Social led to a number of new server packages that aimed to be compatible with GNU Social using OStatus, including

Mastodon A mastodon ( 'breast' + 'tooth') is any proboscidean belonging to the extinct genus ''Mammut'' (family Mammutidae). Mastodons inhabited North and Central America during the late Miocene or late Pliocene up to their extinction at the end of th ...

(until October 2019), Pleroma, and postActiv.

Standards work

In January 2012, a

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...

Community Group was opened to maintain and further develop the OStatus standard. However, this was eclipsed by the work of the

Federated Social Web Working Group, launched in July 2014. This working group focused on creating a newer standard, called

ActivityPub ActivityPub is an open, decentralized social networking protocol based on Pump.io's ActivityPump protocol. It provides a client/server API for creating, updating, and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for deliver ...

, based on the protocols used in

, which has been standardized as a successor to OStatus.

Projects using OStatus

Current

Projects in active development using OStatus for federation. *

Friendica Friendica (formerly Friendika, originally Mistpark) is a free and open-source software distributed social network. It forms one part of the Fediverse, an interconnected and decentralized network of independently operated servers. Features Friendi ...

* GNU social (formerly StatusNet)

References

{{Reflist

External links