2y ago

How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

ploum.net How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.

This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance

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Basically the sequence of events as claimed by the author is that:
XMPP, niche, small circles
Google launches Talk that was XMPP compatible
Millions joined Talk that could coop XMPP in theory
The coop worked only sparingly and was unidirectional, i.e. Talk to XMPP ✅ but XMPP to Talk ❌
Talk sucked up existing XMPP users as it was obviously a better option (bandwagon effect + unidirectional "compatibility" with XMPP)
Talk defederated
This demonstrated exactly the importance of reciprocity. If they play dirty, kick them out asap.
- Facebook messenger did the same . You used to be able to talk to fb users via google chat all from pidgin or another xmpp client. They are a hostile actor on the web who have already proven themselves untrustworthy. Let's not forget the Snowden docs or Cambridge Analytica
  
  Meanwhile, meta is about to join the fediverse and do it all again.
- the thing is that we know that they will play dirty; all corporations play dirty, that's the only way they get that big
- Seems like just another reason why defederation should be completely removed from the protocol. It's way too easy to abuse and force centralisation.
  There are other far less destructive and abusable ways of dealing with spam and content moderation.
  I maintain that it's better to give the users the control, and allow them to decide which instances, communities, and users they want to be exposed to. Bottom up moderation, instead of top down.
  For example, instances can provide suggested 'block' lists (much like how an ad blocker works) and users can decide whether or not to apply those lists at their own discretion.
  By forcing federation, the network stays decentralized. Maintaining community blacklists that can be turned on or off by the individual user protects against heavy handed moderation and censorship, whilst also protecting users from being exposed to undesirable content.
  
  The case with XMPP is that Google Talk introduced addons and intricacies that were unique to them. So they could federate with you in full with additional bells and whistles while you were stuck in an eternal catch-up. They presented a better alternative regardless of the eventual defederation. Even if we have some viral clauses as in GPL in open-source software that ensures protocol compatible software to be compliant, we can only do that to a certain extent plus enforcement is always an issue. Who are going to spend the vast sum of money in court to defend the "federation"?
  This aside, enforcing federation alone does not ensure decentralization. These zero-marginal-cost fixed-cost-intensive businesses of the internet has a tendency to centralize as serving one more seat costs no penny plus one more seat diluates the fixed cost altogether.
  
  I may misunderstand how the fediverse and the software works but my understanding is content such as images gets copied over to federated servers and so it seems to me like the ability to defederate would be a requirement in order for servers to stay in compliance with the law and be able to limit various illegal and morally horrible materials from being copied onto their server and network.
  Given that (unless I'm wrong about how this works or there's another way around it I'm not thinking of), at the end of the day is it really possible to not have the ability to defederate? There will be times when it would be needed it seems to me. Or for malicious bot servers, nazis, etc. — lots of potential reasons a full defederation would be desired or required.
  
  The Beehaw devs are feeling the need to defederate right now due to that being the viable strategy for scaling their mod efforts. What would the solution be if they could not defederate?

Great post by Ploum. Really sheds some light on how vicious these things can be and how federation will have to really push for openness and freedom.

One key difference between link aggregators (kbin/lemmy/reddit/digg) and microblogs (twitter/mastodon) on the one hand, vs social networks (facebook/myspace/diaspora/friendica) and instant messengers (aim/icq/xmpp/signal) on the other, is that the latter is highly dependent on your real-life social network, while the former is not. People using instant messengers and people on facebook want to use them to interact with their friends and family, so they have to use the platforms that those friends and family are on. On the other hand, people are happy to use link aggregators and microblogs as long as there are interesting people and communities to follow, even if they consist entirely of strangers.
Back in the early days of XMPP, when it was still known as "Jabber", I tried switching to it from AOL Instant Messenger. I told all of my contacts about it, and tried to get them to set up Jabber accounts. I was super excited that instant messaging was finally being standardized the way email was, and we wouldn't have to deal with AIM vs MSN messenger vs Yahoo messenger vs etc. I think I was also still bitter about being forced to switch from ICQ to AIM because all my friends had switched. I don't think I got a single person to start using Jabber, though. At one point I even declared that I was going to stop using AIM entirely, and that people would have to switch over so that we could keep talking to each other. Didn't work, of course. I just ended up not being able to talk to anyone until I finally went back to AIM.
A bunch of my friends use reddit, but we don't use the site to interact with each other in any meaningful way. This made switching to kbin really easy. Sure, I've told a few of them about it, but it doesn't really matter to me if they switch or not. As far as I'm aware, XMPP never really became it's own "thing" and experienced the kind of growth that the threadiverse has. Since we've passed the point of being self-sustaining, we can keep growing one user at a time, as individuals decide that they're tired of reddit and make the jump.
Because of this difference in dynamic, we're in a much better position against Meta than XMPP was against Google. The fact that we can even consider outright blocking Meta is a really good sign for us, regardless of whether we do so or not. Even if we do end up in a situation where 90% or even 99% of users are on Meta's platform, we can still refuse to allow them to compromise the ActivityPub protocol. Attempts to "embrace, extend, extinguish" will likely just result in non-blockading instances joining the anti-Meta blockade. With the connection to Meta severed, we'll just go back to enjoying the company of the 1 to 10% that remain, and that portion will likely be much larger than what we have now.
- You are spot on. The difference between the products/services/values offered by XMPP and AcitivtyPub based fediverse is a very crucial distinction.
  XMPP's value is derived from its connectivity. It is bandwagon effect at work. A single fax machine makes no sense but what about another one? Or another 100 ones? Now you have a positive network externality.
  The bulk of the AcitivtyPub based fediverse works very differently. The value is from the content, be it people shitposting or memes or cats. As people who frequent online forums and communities can tell, the majority of members are mere readers. They are content consumers. Content producers are often the minority. The reason why soneone will stick to a particular platform is because of the content and the expectation that more is coming.
- I'm not sure the distinction would make enough of a difference, and focusing only on XMPP might be doing yourself a disservice. There was nothing social about Office, but the OP points out how the same strategy worked there as well. Users, overall, tend to go where the other users are. Some people left Digg for Reddit because they were unhappy with Digg, but the vast majority simply followed because it was where the users (therefore activity) went. Reddit wasn't even the best of the many options at that time; what was important was the inflow of users. Once that kicks off, others tend to flock like moths to flame.
  As you point out, Reddit was not where you interacted socially, yet it became where you congregated because that was where everyone else was and therefore where the easiest access to content and engagement was. If a Meta product becomes the most popular way to consume ActivityPub content, and therefore becomes the primary Source for that content, independent servers will become barren with just a Meta Thanos-snap of disconnecting their API. They only need to implement Meta-only features that ActivityPub can't interact or compete with, and the largest portion of users will be drawn away from public servers to the "better" experience with more direct activity. (And that's without mentioning their ability to craft better messaging, build an easier on-boarding experience, and put their significant coffers to work on marketing.)
  Sure, there will still be ActivityPub platforms in the aftermath. Openoffice/Libreoffice still exists, XMPP clients and servers still exist, there are still plenty of forums and even BBS systems. But, there is a reason why none of those things are the overwhelmingly "popular" option, and the strategy they will employ to make sure that happens is the focus of the article, not so much XMPP.
- As someone who is on just about every social media and aggregator site there is, I find myself gravitating toward sites that allow for as much interaction (or little) as I would like. My friends and I communicate through Facebook messenger, which obviously requires FB, but I use a browser/app called Ferdium, which lets me open messenger directly without the annoyance of opening the Facebook app itself. But each site has its own specialization that it does rather well. I mean, look at Discord's little communities, which are really designed to support the gaming community, and say, Instagram, which does photos very well. I get that companies would like the One Site to Rule Them All, but I look at it like I would at McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts. McDonald's caters to one of my tastes, and Dunks does the other. Like your example with AIM I've largely given up with trying to get my friends to sign up for services. I'm older, and remember AOL when it was just starting out and even remember Compuserve when it was little more than a list server.
- This is a really good call out. I've been thinking about this article since I read it earlier today, and I never thought about the distinction between user groups and how people used xmpp vs how people use a activitypub Lemmy/kbin.
  I think you are spot on.
  Which actually makes me think that mastodon might have a little to worry about since its less anonymous and who you follow actually matters. And there is more interaction between (not anonymous) people.
  My friends are like your friends in that we all use reddit, but never even share our usernames with each other.
  
  I'm sorry I accidentally down voted your post
  I'm on a new app and don't know how to fix it.
  My apologies

Can anyone with expertise explain the structural difference between Matrix and XMPP?

An excellent read. My synopsis is that if any big corporations joined the Fediverse they would fracture it, and that no matter what Meta, Reddit, Google, etc. would never want to see a decentralized platform succeed.
Pretty much the Fediverse needs to never let a big company tie into it. Our group needs to work at growing but at a sustainable rate.
- @MyMulligan @jherazob I disagree.
  I think the key thing is to just make sure that you don't use non #FOSS clients. #GoogleTalk started as a client for #XMPP, people migrated to it, and then #Google dropped support for #XMPP. If so many people didn't use #GoogleTalk, the #XMPP network would have remained unimpeded.
  
  At this point it wouldn't matter, all they need to do is to mess with the protocol and it'd achieve the same thing, Meta and everything in it's sphere would "work well", but connecting with true ActivityPub servers would work just glitchy enough to annoy their users and point the fingers towards our side, just like it happened with XMPP
- I don't think Google cares if the Fediverse succeeds or not. All they care about is that it can be indexed and people will be able to show Google ads on their instances.
  Google doesn't have a Reddit equivalent or even any other social network competitor (anymore; they killed them all). They explicitly chose to exit that entire concept of products.
  The only reason XMPP mattered to Google at the time was they were trying to compete with Apple for messaging on mobile devices. XMPP meant that Android devices using Google Hangouts/Chat/Gmail could chat with users on other platforms/services while Apple's chat app could only do SMS.
  I guess what I'm saying is that Google is mostly irrelevant from the perspective of the Fediverse other than the fact that it can index and maybe give priority to discussions of certain products/topics like it does with Reddit currently.
  
  The threat right now is from Meta, that is eyeing the fediverse, not Google.
  For anyone paying attention, I'm going to sound like a broken record here, but it bears repeating: business models that treat the user as the product--to be sold, not catered to--is a cancer on the internet.
  This ought to be a wakeup call in 2023. If you aren't the paying customer/supporter, you are less than dirt on the underside of the boot of the big tech firms. You are cattle, in a factory farm, to be treated like shit, only to be slaughtered for profit at the next opportunity.
  Attitude's like "I don't care about ads" and "my data is worthless to me, so why not trade it in" all mask the more fundamental problem that is that you are being held in a cage full of shit, when in reality you could be roaming free in a pasture.
- We can't effectively block corporate injections, unfortunately. The admins of large hub instances are just of the opinion that bigger is better, and that more is more. They've been excited by the prospect of, I don't know, legitimacy or something, for a while now.
  The result is going to be the network... not fracturing, per-se, but significantly restructuring itself. Big instances will get sucked into Big Social's halo, and be like the suburbs to Meta's or Tumblr's metropolitan centres. Smaller instances will end up as the exurbs. Content will flow quickly between metro and suburban spaces, and trickle across suburban spaces between the metro and exurban spaces. And which Fedivesre site you choose to use will end up mattering even more than it does now.
  Right now, there's speculative reason to believe that Meta's offering up incentives to big instance admins. Those incentives will ultimately result in Meta owning them by proxy. They'll be client kingdoms, to mix metaphors, working on Meta's behalf, but getting relatively little in return for it.
  I think Reddit moderators probably have a good idea about how they'll ultimately end up feeling.
  
  The thing is that Meta and Reddit are masters of social manipulation through their algorithms. They know what low common denominators get the most engagement. I blame FB for a big number of echo Chambers and that just fed people their own negativity right back, made them spiral into a bad place mentally.
  If they have any ability to post to the Fediverse or to track things they'll do it all over again.
  It's the halcyon days of the Fediverse. Negativity on my feed is nonexistent. There's discussion. There's respect for differences. I know things will change with time but it's important that the big instances never work as proxies for big tech. It's important that big tech doesn't get a seat at the table. Voices should remain individual and not some mouthpiece to an industry that wants centralized control.
  
  Exactly right. Human greed doesn’t only come from money.
  “It will be free advertisement and will help the project grow!”
  “Look how many people are using my server. MY server. I’m popular now!”
  And the more obvious, “If I make my server big enough, maybe I can cash out by being bought by this big company!”
  In the end and from whatever the source, that bus always ends up in the same place once they convince themselves to get on it.

Okay, this is a good article. I was on the fence about Meta, wondering how they'd cause any damage, and this article cleared that up for me.
- Same. I was familiar with "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" but somehow still didn't get it until Ploum explained it to me slowly.

The X in Xmpp is for extensible. I find issue that a protocol that is supposed to be extensible was killed by being extended.

Excellent read. Have just re-posted this on 'key, thanks for sharing this.
I agree that Meta is doing something very dangerous to the fediverse... hope they could be stopped in their tracks.

In short: Embrace, start pushing the service, driving users to it. Expand: add non standard extentions, locking users onto your quasi-compatable version. Extingish: break compatibility entirely, preventing users from swiching to the fully open version.

Bing AI summary:
The blog post "How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)" by Ploum discusses how the GAFAM empire controls the internet in 2023, except for a few small villages that resist the oppression and form the "Fediverse"¹. The Fediverse gains fame and attention through debates around Twitter and Reddit¹. The post also discusses how capitalists are against competition and how Facebook has been careful to kill every competition by buying companies that could become competitors¹. However, the Fediverse cannot be bought because it is an informal group of servers discussing through a protocol (ActivityPub) and running different software¹. The post also discusses how Google made XMPP irrelevant by joining the XMPP federation¹.
Source: Conversation with Bing, 6/23/2023
(1) How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse). https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html.
(2) How To Kill Poa Annua (Annual Bluegrass): Your Step-By-Step Guide. https://www.domyown.com/how-to-kill-poa-annua-grass-a-572.html.
(3) How to Kill Clover in Your Lawn | Scotts. https://scotts.com/en-us/how-to/how-to-kill-clover-in-your-lawn.html.
- Those sources... are... interesting...
  
  AI will replace all of us at our jobs.
  With Bermuda grass.

I red tha article and I think there is a problem in who it was managed at the time, if Google or Meta wants to join they should to us not us to them so if they break federation we should not care and continue implement our stuff, if something usable comes out of them joining we could use that but we are not their slaves, they are going to play in our home so we establish the rules.
Plus I think that if we don't become meta's costumer support and I don't think we will, we are not that dumb, meta joining the fediverse would only benefit us because we could see all the posts from Meta while being on a private add free server, people wouldn't have to choose between Instagram where all their friends are mad pixelfed ecc.
What do you guys think? Open to talk.
- if Google or Meta wants to join they should to us not us to them so if they break federation we should not care and continue implement our stuff
  As I understood the article, the danger is that large actors like these are too important too ignore. Too many users, too much content to neglect. So while in theory you are obviously right, in reality there will be a temptation to cater to their needs, because it seems so worthwhile.
  
  Form the hate I see here towards them I don't think anyone would do that, just my opinion tho. I think we would only benefit from it.

I hope people, especially instance owners and devs, listen to this warning.
- Unfortunately, the fact that lemmy isnt in the pact to not federate with meta means history will repeat itself
  Even then, i doubt theres enough strong willed people to actually resist big payouts in exchange for access to the federation. Its truly pathetic how people are easily convinced
  
  There's nothing "pathetic" about it. You'd have to be stupid not to take a good deal. That's like not scoring a goal while the goalie isn't paying attention, because you think it'd be unfair.
  Solving this problem isn't the responsibility of individuals and their "willpower", it's the responsibility of governments. It's their job to regulate markets and ensure fair competition. Getting mad at some sysadmin who accepts money from Meta might make you feel better inside, but it's not going to change anything. Do your research, write to your representatives, threaten to vote them out, and then actually show up on voting days.

What's missing from the article is an actual explanation of how Google "killed" xmpp. Did google force the independent XMPP client developers to not implement cool features or something? Is meta going to buy up and shut down all the independent mastodon instances?
If the problem is that Facebook might develop a superior UX, maybe the fediverse should work on a better UX instead of screaming about some scary boogeyman and how the users are too dumb to know any better?
- google added things that only they knew about, which broke the other XMPP apps, driving people to install google talk instead. Sure, eventually people figured their shenanigans out and their apps started working again but the damage was done. Repeat that a few times so that most people were using google talk, then flip the switch and everything that's not google talk was basically a ghost town. People don't stick around in ghost towns

Is there some way to work a limitation into a licence? Something around only being able to present federated content with included algorithms. That would instantly make it unattractive to all the big players who profit off their specific ad driven algorithmic feeds.
- Perhaps the various concensus theories and mechanisms that came out of crypto could somehow give inspiration on ideas to protect this service from the shitty financial actors that come in and ruin all of the good services.
  I'm not saying actually using crypto, just maybe some of their concensus mechanisms/ideas for preventing bad actors could be put in place.

I'm gonna throw this out there:
If Meta is going to join the fediverse (or implement something with activitypub) there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop them.
It's an open protocol. They can use it.
The only thing we can do is force them to follow the AGPL and/or fork the code if they get crazy with change requests.

Aye great read and very illuminating. We gotta protect the fediverse from corporate insidious destruction. This quote stood out to me:
And because there were far more Google talk users than "true XMPP" users, there was little room for "not caring about Google talk users". Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. And started a long quest to create a messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I lost count after that).
- But XMPP users were presumably still around and outlasted Google and their apps. We'll be the same even if Facebook churns the protocol, because the whole point of being on Mastodon or KBin is to not be on Facebook.
  
  you missed the point where the open source devs were in a constant race to adapt to all the google-"innovations" and actually troubleshoot on them which ends up demotivating

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