Over the past week, I’ve been spending a lot of time playing with Laconi.ca, an open source microblogging platform.

One of the things most interesting about Laconi.ca is the ability of servers to share content with one another. The mothership laconi.ca server is identi.ca. I’ve set up my account there to subscribe to accounts on other servers. In addition, I’ve set up my own laconi.ca server and subscribe to identi.ca from that server.

Word of warning. The ability to subscribe to and from different servers is still fairly unreliable. Many of my attempts to do remote subscriptions failed. In fact, the only way I managed to subscribe to my server was to turn on debug mode in hopes of figuring out why subscriptions were failing. It figures that subscriptions worked when I had debug on.

Anyway, here is the quick way of subscribing to a remote server. When you find a person on a server that you want to follow, make sure you are not logged into that server. If you are logged in, it will subscribe your local id to the user you want to subscribe to. When you are logged out, click on the name of the person you wish to subscribe to, and click on the subscribe button. You will be asked to enter a profile URL. Enter your profile from the server you want to subscribe from. As an example, my profile on identi.ca is http://identi.ca/ahynes1 on Orient Lodge it is http://micro.orient-lodge.com/ahynes1 If you aren’t currently logged in on the remote server, it will ask you to login. Then, you will be asked to confirm the subscription request.

If this works properly, you should be subscribed to the remote user. As I noted, too often, it doesn’t work properly, but that is how you can test it.

To get a further sense of where things are, you can look at a person’s subscriptions and subscribers. If your browser displays link addresses, mouse over each avatar in the subscribers or subscriptions to see if any of them point to remote servers. Check out mine on identi.ca and you’ll see several remote subscriptions and subscribers.

Why is this important? There are a lot of nice things that remote subscriptions can do. One person is creating a sports oriented laconi.ca site. I could subscribe to his sports oriented messages there, from identi.ca On my own site, I could subscribe to a particular subset of people on the identi.ca server so, when I view my identi.ca feed, I see everyone I’ve subscribed to on identi.ca, but when I’m on my development site, I see only those messages related to development. I’m sure that many of you can come up with other interesting use cases for federate servers.

Well, that’s it for now, I’m about to hit the road for a week, and expect to have very limited access. I’ll be working more on this when I get back.