[HN Gopher] Cautionary tale about letting big companies on feder...
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Cautionary tale about letting big companies on federated
communication protocols
Author : Timothee
Score : 52 points
Date : 2023-12-15 15:11 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cloudisland.nz)
(TXT) w3m dump (cloudisland.nz)
| schmichael wrote:
| This is a risk with federated protocols regardless of who
| operates them. OP's suggestion of personally knowing all of the
| operators you interact with doesn't scale. As I've said in other
| discussions: scaling isn't required. You can intentionally choose
| to keep your community small, but you have to admit that's
| exclusionary. You're looking for a solution for your in group
| (since everyone is assumed to know their operator), and that's
| never going to scale to a large international audience.
|
| What Google has done with chat and a hundred other products is
| atrocious, but when it involves federation it's something any
| negligent, malicious, or just opinionated operator could do at
| any time. Mastodon is pretty full of instance blocking drama
| already.
|
| I hope a federated protocol can survive in a world of asymmetric
| operators. Email has done ... ok. Jabber less so. Here's hoping
| mastodon becomes a gold standard.
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| > I hope a federated protocol can survive in a world of
| asymmetric operators. Email has done ... ok.
|
| Email as a decentralized protocol is basically dead at this
| point. Not to mention extreme decline in usage from younger
| generations and to a lesser extent the whole population.
|
| Google can maybe take some of the blame for that, but they also
| likely extended the lifetime of email too through Gmail's
| relative ease of use (in the early days).
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| The killer of email, like with every method of communication
| that has gone mainstream and then declined, is spam.
|
| Not just spam as in fraudulent scams, though those are pretty
| bad.
|
| Not just spam from companies you've done business with and
| neglected to opt out of legal spam from, though it's
| exhausting.
|
| Once a communication protocol gets a reputation as a
| consistent way to reach someone, with some level of urgency,
| a certain subset of the population lowers their threshold for
| what constitutes urgency until the signal gets lost in the
| noise.
|
| Not sure how to fix it.
| pmontra wrote:
| Spam is a problem, chats are another one, IMHO a bigger
| one.
|
| Every message in a chat, whatever chat, is one less mail
| sent. That was true in the 80s / 90s with IRC and it's true
| with WhatsApp, Slack, etc now.
| schmichael wrote:
| > Email as a decentralized protocol is basically dead at this
| point.
|
| While I wouldn't consider it healthy, it is far from dead.
| Billions of emails are sent every day from untold numbers of
| operators, few of whom have a direct relationship with one
| another. Few systems can claim that level of use and
| distribution.
|
| Email users can choose from a number of free or paid
| providers. None of those providers had to request access to
| participate in the email network, such as requesting API keys
| from Twitter or Meta to participate on their platforms. This
| is not to say email is easy or without gatekeepers! This is
| only to say it's _possible_ for a determined and technically
| capable operator, whether an individual or an organization,
| to participate in the global email system without having to
| ask any one entity for permission.
|
| Again: I'm not trying to assert it's a particularly healthy
| federated ecosystem, but I would argue it's still a
| successful one.
| ItsABytecode wrote:
| I feel like "email is dead as a decentralized protocol" is
| paradoxically a meme among Gmail users. Counter-anecdote: I
| haven't touched Gmail in years and I still send and receive
| email fine
| kornhole wrote:
| It is a cautious tale we can hopefully relate to people before
| they jump on Threads and get locked in. Unfortunately those of
| us off the platforms have difficulty getting through to people
| on the platforms.
|
| It is very easy to run an individual or small Mastodon or other
| activity pub instance, but this is also not widely known. The
| problem with almost every free solution is that zero money is
| spent on marketing.
| glenstein wrote:
| > You can intentionally choose to keep your community small,
| but you have to admit that's exclusionary.
|
| I think there's another option here. Namely, that the intended
| "vibe" or usual experience for individual users is such that
| their experiences have that level of person-to-person
| familiarity.
|
| Also I feel like, in this passage you moved ambiguously from
| talking about protocols as a whole to a sense of "community"
| within the protocol, and its not clear to me whether its the
| protocol itself or a particular community that is confronting
| the issue of scaling or not scaling.
|
| The aspiration for an "old internet" vibe, that you might find
| in usenet, email, bulletin boards, or various forms of chat, or
| webrings, makes sense as an aspired-to "vibe" without
| committing oneself to a side on scaling or not scaling.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Old internet was exclusionary. It was small because no one
| was on the net in those days, and those that were, were
| wealthy enough to have a computer and internet access.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think that the internet has pretty clearly shown one thing:
| doing things that involves a very large crowd is extremely
| problematic, and in order for it to continue to function, it
| has to aim at the most common denominator (meaning be the most
| vanilla possible), has to remove most autonomy of the
| participants, and in the end, the assholes will ruin it all.
|
| I don't know if there's a solution to this problem. Perhaps
| having a large number of small "villages" is a more sustainable
| way.
| gumby wrote:
| Quite a few mastodon instances have done this in reverse already
| -- this is hardly a pathology specific to big companies (however
| odious I found Google's action to be).
| xnx wrote:
| Is this description accurate? I remember when Google Talk did
| XMPP, and know that stopped. Was it a gradual/unexplainable
| change?
| ryukafalz wrote:
| I remember this keenly and am just as salty about it as the
| author. It is accurate. This was the observed behavior as
| people's accounts were gradually migrated to Hangouts from
| Google Talk.
|
| I remember testing this myself - the Google Talk desktop app
| would still show conversations from XMPP contacts (and still
| worked for a time after you were migrated to Hangouts in
| Gmail), but the Hangouts pane in Gmail would not. Nonetheless,
| the Hangouts users would still appear online (I believe in
| "away" status) to the XMPP users.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Somehow, even with the embarrassment of (fragmented) IM riches,
| status as a service eludes us. I miss finger and ytalk.
| Animats wrote:
| Oh, I thought that was going to be about Google's takeover of
| USENET.
| marssaxman wrote:
| I had an experience like that, in the opposite direction. I had a
| lot of friends who signed up for Google Chat back in the early
| aughts, so I got myself an account and added it to my IM client,
| along with the other services I used.
|
| For a couple years, everything was great... but at some point,
| over the course of a few months I started to get this weird,
| uncomfortable feeling like maybe some of my friends were shunning
| or excluding me. I'd hear about events having happened which
| nobody had bothered inviting me to, or I'd email people and they
| wouldn't respond at all. Just odd.
|
| Well... eventually someone followed up with me to find out why I
| wasn't responding to _their_ emails, which I knew I had never
| received, and we worked out the mystery. Google, in their
| infinite wisdom, had decided to integrate Google Chat into GMail.
| As part of this process, they integrated the account databases
| (this was long before any such thing as a unified Google Account
| existed)... and as part of _that_ process, they created a new
| GMail account for every Google Chat user who didn 't already have
| one.
|
| And then, in a forehead-slapping bit of hubris, they
| automatically inserted that address into all of my GMail-using
| friends' address books, where it would pop up before my _actual_
| email address whenever someone typed my name in the "To" line,
| and voila: _months of messages_ were silently diverted into a
| spurious account I didn 't know about and never wanted.
|
| I have never used GMail, ever at all, but that zombie Google Talk
| address haunts my friends' address books to this day. Just a
| couple of weeks ago, a friend wondered why I hadn't responded to
| his holiday party invitation... sure enough, @gmail.com had
| swiped the message, and I'd never seen it.
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