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Thimbl
Thimbl is a free, open source and distributed micro-blogging project which you host at your own site. It uses the finger daemon to achieve this.
A technical overview of thimbl
Q: What is thimbl?
A: Think of thimbl as a free Twitter. It is P2P (peer-to-peer) - meaning that it is a network of peers, rather than a centralised service like Twitter. It is a set of "conventions" supported by
some tools. The tools aren't necessary (except for finger) for thimbl to work
- they just add convenience.
Q: Finger, what's that all about?
A: Finger is a daemon, like a web server. A web server serves HTML pages,
whilst fingerd - the finger daemon - serves information about the users on a
system.
Q: Do I need to set up the finger daemon in order to create blogs?
A: Yes. Without an active finger daemon, there is no way others can see your
blogs.
Q: Do I need to set up the finger daemon in order to read blogs?
A: No. All Operating Systems have finger (well, strictly speaking not ALL
of them, but certainly Windows, Linux, UNIX and UNIX-like systems has finger
on them). Finger is the base minimum you need to follow someone's blog.
Q: Is it possible to register into thimbl yet?
A: It is not necessary to register - there is no registration process.
Also on this site
Thimbl-CLI - a command-line interface for Thimbl, written by me.
Links to external sites
Appleseed - open source, fully distributed and decentralized social networking software. A Facebook clone.
Diaspora - "The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network. "
Facebook - Telekommunisten/Thimbl user page
finger dk@telekommunisten.org - useful address to finger if you want to see thimbl in action
github/telekommunisten/ - github of Telekommunisten, listing many repos apropos of thimbl
IRC #telnik at freenode.net - IRC channel where thimbl can be discussed.
Mailing List - place to ask questions about Thimbl.
OAuth - an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.
OStatus - OStatus is an open standard for distributed status updates. Our goal is a specification that allows different
messaging hubs to route status updates between users in near-real-time. How to OStatus-enable Your Application
P2P Foundation - Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices
thimbl - its main project page
tweepy - Twitter From the Command Line in Python Using OAuth
Author: Mark Carter
Created: 24-Oct-2010
Updated: 30-Nov-2010