Dave Winer posts about twitter and the free internet, at the centre is the pithy quote, “If there’s a platform vendor, it’s not the Internet; If there is no platform vendor, it is.”. He identifies the need for a vendor free messaging service and asks for some help. Personally I use wordpress, RSS and planet to stream out my messages, long and short and this blog is an attempt to locate my short messages and less formed thoughts in one place and format. I am obviously not necessarily so successful on the short bit.
One insight I can offer is that last year, I looked at pump.io and made some notes. I was interested in a messaging solution that wasn’t SMTP, was open source and could/would be encrypted on the wire. pump.io was the successor of Laconica, a product colleagues at Sun had used to build an internal micro blog service. Last year I got diverted by docker and building a test platform. I have probably solved my functional needs initially by using ello, and latterly by establishing this blog. I plan to return to pump.io in the very near future, I wonder if it’s part of the answer to Dave Winer’s question.