Being someone who is actively thinking about a solution and someone who is somewhat disappointed in ff sale if it ends ff. The issue with self hosting is aggregation and discussions. Yes it would be pretty easy to import all data but where will the discussions, likes, discovery and sharing take place? Blogs are great but unless you have decent traffic no one will see this stuff and discuss it. Maybe the answer is a site that acts an aweful like technorati but also enables discussion. I am working on something that involves microformats and ping... - Darren Stuart from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Short answer: Yes. - Gina

As Dennis said, Opera seems to be working on a browser-based implementation of distributed social networking. I think Mozilla Snowl is also a step in this direction. I imagine Google Gears might be a plausible means to store data in the browser as well. I'm pretty sure that identi.ca has an open source self-hosted option and so does Reddit. These are steps in the right direction. However, in order to really take off, someone will have to devise a simple, user-friendly system. Probably a modular one. It should be manageable through one central dashboard. Even FriendFeed, Twitter and Facebook features are a bit too complicated for the average person to wrap their head around. It needs to be something that can be shown and explained in everyday terms. - thegeniusfiles from FriendFeed MT Plugin

The future of social networking is git-based. I'm just not sure how, yet. - Panayotis Vryonis

Nice post Marshall. I sure hope this gets a movement going but I'm not holding my breath. There's some pretty big hurdles to overcome. P.s. I like your use of Thomas' Lifestream screenshot for the post. I'm guessing you saw that in my latest custom Lifestream gallery post yes? :) - Mark Krynsky

or emacs. META-X-POST-KITTEN-PICTURE - mikepk

i have outlined how distributed options could work in old threads here - after all, irc, laconi.ca/identi.ca, newsgroups and jabber all work perfectly well in a distributed manner - transparent to the users but sharing/splitting the load across dozens or hundreds of machines. Protocols like that give people the option to host their own, use something provided by their ISP or local providers, and yet interact with everyone. - Iphigenie

In a comment i made over on dave winer's scripting.com, i referrer to a rrw post from a while back regarding standardizing url structure: http://www.scripting.com/stories... http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive... I was always fond of that concept and it seems apropos here and now. Many ideas will be discussed in the coming months as this topic is reignited with new vigor. And the conversation is not for everyone. My wife uses twitter and facebook and tumblr in conjunction with her b&m retail store. she is not concerned with the discourse of federating the social web. she is not going to seek out software to install and run etc (thats what i am for ;) but despite the lack of concern for many people... we technologists who are interested in the social web and content creation/publishing (this all also relates to publishing video, audio, photos, words, works.. not just morsels of scattered thought output) need to be interested and need to discuss and innovate and federate and balance the ecosystem so that companies like twitter and facebook can co-exist with open (really open) distributed (really distributed) platforms. the next 5 years will lead us to streamlining our online presence while hopefully not letting it NEED to be under the control of any one bigco. we may even end up with a government issued digital id that resolves to a domain name that branches out to our various forms of contact and content (a service paid by our taxes). companies (looking to profit) and governments and freedom of choice for digital services are part of this discussion. sull - sull from FriendFeed MT Plugin

YES - Dobromir Hadzhiev

We will all be assimilated in the wave.. ;) - Andy Ciordia