For everyone's information: GNU Social/OStatus is also known as the Google Buzz protocol stack. Weird twist of history how GNU ended up covertly becoming this federated protocol stack.
AFAIK GNU social's current codebase is a merge [1] between StatusNet and Free Social, with StatusNet previously known as Laconica [2] and developed by the same people behind Identi.ca [3], which itself was later re-made into pump.io [4]. The OStatus protocol, which is one of the several protocols used in GNU social, originated from the OpenMicroBlogging spec [5] promoted by the Identi.ca developers.
OStatus is an open standard for distributed status updates that references a suite of open protocols including Atom, Activity Streams, PubSubHubbub, Salmon, Webfinger,
As weird a twist of history as it was that GNU so readily adopted the Google Buzz protocol stack, it's far more bizarre how completely undocumented and unmentionable this legacy is.
It's a pity that Salmon is an awful practically SOAP-like opaque envelope, because I rather like everything else here. But stuffing really good content inside a base64 envelope is really not ok with me and my expectation that casually working with a format shouldn't make me want to claw my eyes out.
