This is a sobering and important read for all of us who care deeply about the future of democracy, free speech and power – that is: the future of the internet – and think that federation is the way to go to secure it.
He has some very compelling arguments for why it's not. At the same time his reassurance that it's not even needed doesn't seem very sound.
So, then, what is the solution?
Please read and think carefully about this. https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
@forteller a different reading of the same social relations. https://medium.com/tootsuite/replacing-the-pillars-of-the-internet-235836580a0e when you look at them side by side you see that they are pushing different "political/social" agendas. This has been labeled for 100's of years as ideology and much coherent stuff has been written on this subject, worth a look https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology
Of course both views have limited and blatantly wrong assumptions threading through them. This is very human.
"replacing the pillars of the internet" as he says in the article the #openweb has always been peer to peer. So stepping away from the #dotcon or #closedweb would be a less snappy but more truthy title.
The other one is more honest in its viewpoint #encyrpionist and control. This is a clear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism view point.
Tsatnosk
@forteller I've read that post before; I wasn't convinced then, and I wasn't convinced now.
Federated servers aren't limited to supporting only one protocol forever and ever. Protocols can be upgraded based on proven capabilities; Mastodon did this when adding ActivityPub support in 1.6, and then deprecating private messaging over OStatus in 2.0.
And if he's right and the federated approach turns out to be a hindrance?
Then we fast forward to the end goal that is peer2peer networks.
@forteller @david_ross
that's old, and Daniel Gultsch (the author of Conversations XMPP client) wrote a nice response https://gultsch.de/objection.html
Yes, smtp is bad and because of its ubiquity is difficult to upgrade and/or replace. Not impossible, though, it has been done several times already, and if people stop trying to lock users into their solutions and instead worry about enabling communication, we can do it again. And yes, xmpp never took off, is sortof overengineered, and tries to do too much...
But on the other hand, a federated (or p2p) system would perhaps not have been taken down by a DDOS attack like signal suffered the other day. We would not have to trust servers we can not inspect or an operator in a country known for privacy abuse and secret courts. We could run the software wherever we wanted, not only on whatever signal thinks you should run.
@forteller interesting read of vertical/horizontal thinking dressed up in the language of tech https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ #ideology matters as we all have a "world view" coherent or incoherent that shapes every choice we make. And the tech we use everyday is a product of a very small number of people's ideology... this is currently a HUGE problem.