Recently, there has been a discussion on the Laconica mailing list about how to make remote subscriptions easier. Remote subscriptions are crucial to federation and an important part of what make Laconi.ca so interesting. People discussed how to make remote subscriptions easier which brings up the question of what the different use cases really are.

Let me start off by explaining what remote subscriptions are, how they related to the larger microblogging world and how they work with Laconi.ca. From their I will suggest some use cases and ideas about how remote subscriptions could be handled better.

Essentially a remote subscription is when you use one microblogging service and within that service, subscribe to people in another service. Right now, anyone can set up their own Laconi.ca server and subscribe to people on other Laconica servers. Ideally, they could subscribe to people on any microblogging service, if that service supported appropriate standards, such as the Open Micro Blogging protocol.

What sort of use cases might this create? Well, currently, I have an id on Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, Jaiku, Identica and several other Laconica based servers, and so on. It is sort of like the old days before email systems were interconnected and I had email addresses on many different email systems.

However, I hope the day will come when these service all get connected together and I can choose whichever service I like best and bring in messages from my friends on other services. With that, I would end up having one microblogging profile, which would be how to find me on the service I use. Then, people could subscribe to that profile from any other service they are on.

Currently, Laconica allows you to visit someone’s profile on a Laconica based site, and subscribe to their profile. If you are logged into the server, they assume that you want a regular subscription, very similar to how you would follow people on any of the existing microblogging sites. However, if you aren’t logged in, it assumes that you want to do a remote subscription. It asks for your profile on the remote service and then subscribes your remote profile to the profile that you are visiting.

It seems pretty straight forward, although until you get a sense for it, it can be confusing, especially if you have set up accounts on many different services and you are logged into the server you want to do a remote subscription to. However, as remote subscriptions become more stable and more common place, I expect that people will stop having as many accounts and this will be less of a problem.

Instead, one may think of their Micro Blogging Profile in a manner similar to how they think about their OpenID profile. As a matter of fact, this would be a nice extension to Laconica. Instead of putting in a Micro Blogging Profile for a remote subscription, it would be nice if I could put in my OpenID and then have Laconica use OpenID’s attribute exchange to find my default micro blogging profile and use that for the remote subscription.

However, we are probably a long way away from enough people using OpenID and enough OpenID services supporting attribute exchange for this to be a good near term solution. So, we may want to look at other solutions.

To do this, we need to look at how people find others to subscribe to. One is that they get messages via email when someone subscribes to them. I’m not sure if this works properly for remote subscriptions. That is an area that I need to test. When I get an email like that, I go check out their profile and decide if I want to subscribe. If so, I subscribe directly if they are on the same server as I am on, and if not, I subscribe remotely.

Early on, people asked about customizing the email message that people receive. For example, it would be nice to add a ‘subscribe’ link. Right now, if you try to subscribe remotely to me, you are brought to this link:
http://identi.ca/main/remote?nickname=ahynes1.

If a subscribe link was added to an email, your profile could be added as a parameter, e.g.
http://identi.ca/main/remote?nickname=ahynes1&profile=http://example.com/you.

Then, if you click on it, your profile would already be filled in and you could simply accept the remote subscription.

Another way that people sometimes subscribe to others is by ‘snowballing’. That is when you go through a list of other people’s subscribers, subscriptions, or even the notices that are in the persons feed.

As an example, if you look at my subscriptions you will see that I’m subscribed to http://whojusttweeted.com/jay. For people that are logged in, adding a parameter the link to pass their profile to the remote site, thereby making it easier to remote subscribe might help things out a bit.

However, currently the link goes to a person’s profile, and not their remote subscription page. So, to get this to work, you might have to pass the remote profile, if it is received from the profile page to the remote subscription page. It is a little more work, but not bad.

So, these are a few ideas and use cases of how remote subscriptions could be improved, thereby strengthening federation on Laconica. So, what do you think? Do these make sense? If so, any thoughts on how best to tackle it? It seems as if tweaking the gallery program to adjust the links would be the easiest starting point.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.