Editing Ends and Means (section)

====Federated Social Web====
In the past few years, many initiatives have emerged that aim to build a social web built on open standards, where a federation of servers, rather than a single behemoth, stores user profiles. Notable efforts include [[GNU Social]], [[Friendika]], [[Buddycloud]] and [[Diaspora]]. Not all of these projects are interoperable as yet, but they are increasingly converging on a set of standards.

[[OStatus]] and [[XMPP]] have emerged as viable protocols in the space of status sharing and message passing. All of the networks mentioned above employ some combination of these two platforms.

Of note, however, is that ''all'' of the federated social platforms mentioned above, regardless of other design parameters, are intended to run on a ''server''. The ideas motivating these efforts are good ones: to encourage decentralization of infrastructure, and help people take some control of their own data. Yet, existing solutions have not accomplished this outcome, because the barriers to entry and technical knowledge required to operate today's servers are prohibitively high. Thus the need for [[FreedomNode|nodal computers]] to take part in the federated social web.