Diaspora merges Social Relay feature
Two years of discussion revolving around public post federation hit a new milestone yesterday, as a Pull Request by @Jason Robinson got merged into the main #Diaspora repository. The Social Relay feature will allow hosted relay servers to help the main network with sharing public contents across all pods.
A few concepts have been put together regarding how the relays work:- Social-Federation is a Python library that aims to abstract multiple federated social networking protocols under it. Currently it only supports the Diaspora protocol and only relevant parts of it. Fully implemented is parsing a status_message message which covers public posts.
- Social-Relay is a Python Flask application that will aim to cover this proposal, using the social-federation library. It handles public post receiving and storing to Redis. It is currently receiving all public posts from the pod iliketoast.net.
- Change to Diaspora deferred_dispatch worker to make public posts be sent out to a relay
The lack of public post federation in Diaspora is IMHO a make or break feature. The whole network is a little broken as small pods are cut of most of the posts on the network due to the way current federation works.
Here is my proposal for solving this issue, please see [wiki post here](https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Relay_servers_for_public_posts).
It is not a comprehensive solution that can just be implemented now. It is a high level suggestion for going forward with talking about such a feature.
