| Communication protocol | |
 | |
| Purpose | Decentralized social networking |
|---|---|
| Influenced | ActivityPub |
| Website | www |
OStatus is anopen standard fordecentralized social networking, allowing users on one service to send and receivestatus updates with users from another.[1] The standard describes how a suite of various standards, includingAtom,Activity Streams,WebSub,Salmon, andWebFinger,[2] can be used together, which enables different microblogging server implementations to communicate status updates between theirusers back-and-forth, in near real-time.
OStatus federation was first possible between servers runningStatusNet, such as Status.net andIdenti.ca,[3] although Identi.ca later switched topump.io.[4] As of June 2013, a number of othermicroblogging applications andcontent management systems had announced that they intended to implement the standard.[5] That same month, it was announced StatusNet would be merged into the GNU social project along with Free Social, a similar application itself forked from StatusNet.
Following the first official release of GNU Social, a number of microblogging sites running StatusNet and Free Social began to transition to it to receive new updates to the software. But frustrations with the technology underpinning GNU Social and its complexity led a number of new server packages that aimed to be compatible with GNU Social using OStatus to shift focus toActivityPub, includingMastodon,[6]Pleroma[7] and postActiv, a fork of GNU social.
In January 2012, aW3C Community Group was opened to maintain and further develop the OStatus standard.[8] However, this was eclipsed by the work of theW3C Federated Social Web Working Group, launched in July 2014.[9] This working group focused on creating a newer standard, calledActivityPub, which expanded on the protocols and design used inpump.io, which has since been standardized as a successor to OStatus.[10][11]
we dropped the support of OStatus (the predecessor of ActivityPub) after evaluating the amount of active servers/contacts that are still only using this protocol, and deprecated the fancybox addon
