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# Tent
- URL: https://werd.io/tent/
- Published: 2012-08-22T22:01:12.000Z
- Updated: 2025-06-12T11:00:39.000Z
- Author: Ben Werdmuller
- Tags: Data control, #ben-684a32da145d7d001be71dae, Web, diaspora, distributed social networking, federated social networks, idno, ostatus, social web, status.net, statusnet, tent, tent.io, the social web, #Migrated-1749693130536, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2025-06-11 21:52

[Tent](http://tent.io/) appeared out of the blue today: a protocol and reference server implementation for individual-to-individual distributed social networking. Or to put it another way, *Tent is a way to host your own social data - posting and reading from as many apps as you want*. [Here's their announcement](http://tent.io/blog/introducing-tent), and [here's the GitHub repository](https://github.com/tent/tent.io).

The [Tent manifesto](http://tent.io/blog/the-tent-manifesto) is right-on:

> **Every user has the right to control their own data.**  
> This includes who can access the data they create and how that data is later used.  
>  
> **Every user has the right to choose and change their social services providers.**  
> This includes the right to negotiate reasonable terms of service collectively or individually.

Of course, this is hardly the first open source social networking product - and many people are [already asking why Tent doesn't use the OStatus protocol](https://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues/4). ([StatusNet](http://status.net/) also includes an individual installation mode.) These are valid questions, but while there's a slight air of [Not Invented Here Syndrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not%5Finvented%5Fhere), it's an elegant idea and [the API is very clean and simple](http://tent.io/docs), which means there's every chance an app ecosystem will emerge. If any one of those apps is simple and elegant, we may see a very different kind of social networking community begin to develop.

Even more interestingly, I also think there are real commercial implications for this protocol. More on those in another post. For now, my takeaway is: Tent has the *potential* to disrupt the entire social web.