I don't think it was a good idea for instance admins to agree to talk to Meta under a nondisclosure agreement, but that DOESN'T make it an excuse for people to go and harass those admins. If anything they're the victims of Meta IMO, and a lot of them may still be in favor of blocking Meta regardless of whether they agreed to the meeting or not. I think we have to stick together in situations like this and act accordingly, keep in mind that "divide and conquer" is a proven strategy.
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Rokosun
in reply to Rokosun • • •So the way to move forward would be to create a system which doesn't have these flaws, and the only way to do that is to somehow get rid of the power difference between the one who can run servers and the one who can't.
Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? (Or, “Why every toot is also a potential denial of service attack”)
Aral BalkanAlexio likes this.
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Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
in reply to Rokosun • • •I mean, not necessarily *literally*. But if you can participate without having to set up *or* join a server, that'd be grand, no?
Aral Balkan
in reply to Jens Finkhäuser 🌻 • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •https://www.theregister.com/2007/08/20/skype_outage_post-mortem/
What happened is that Skype used a so-called hybrid p2p network, where they bootstrapped everything off two supernodes, servers they were running themselves. But because they were no longer contacted, they got shut down. Patch Tuesday meant thousands of nodes trying to re-join the network and not finding supernodes.
I know this, because at the time I was working at Joost, which used the same tech, in the p2p team.
Patch Tuesday update triggered Skype outage
John Leyden (The Register)Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
in reply to Jens Finkhäuser 🌻 • • •The TL;DR of the story is, a fully server-less system can work very well, for years even, until a bunch of nodes disappear at the same time.
But the good news is that the only "servers" it needs to keep running under those circumstances are quite simple, and don't need to know much about anything. Add one, remove one, it...
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
in reply to Jens Finkhäuser 🌻 • • •So having *that* kind of server simple to run, simple enough for a bunch of folk to do in their spare time, is a big deal, because then you're pretty much where you need to be: resilience without the single point of failure/control.
Simon Lucy
in reply to Jens Finkhäuser 🌻 • • •Another way to express that is that it's all in queues, the queues can be replicated and it's all pub/sub.
It's convenient to sink it to particular nodes, but it might as well be a CDN.
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
in reply to Simon Lucy • • •Simon Lucy
in reply to Jens Finkhäuser 🌻 • • •True, though we had alternative vendors at the Beeb which could be given different proportions of content ( probably not any more), and in the end it's just cache and peering relationships. If it's not big enough to need that kind of acceleration then just cache.
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
in reply to Simon Lucy • • •faried nawaz
in reply to Jens Finkhäuser 🌻 • • •however, i don’t know how widespread support for this is in clients.
bep_0044.rst_post
www.bittorrent.orgJens Finkhäuser 🌻
in reply to faried nawaz • • •Charles ☭ H
in reply to Jens Finkhäuser 🌻 • • •#Scuttlebutt, aka #ssb, is an already existing p2p social network with some server-like nodes.
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
in reply to Charles ☭ H • • •@aral @futureisfoss
Leonardo
in reply to Jens Finkhäuser 🌻 • • •Popstar Tourist
in reply to Jens Finkhäuser 🌻 • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Popstar Tourist • • •@jens @futureisfoss
Rokosun
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •I'm also a big fan of these domain-less peer-to-peer services and have been keeping an eye on the developments there. One such decentralized p2p project I know is the @briar messenger and they've recently announced the release of their new Briar Mailbox app, which is an app you can just keep running on an old android device or something and it basically turns it into a server for sending & receiving your Briar messages! - https://briarproject.org/news/2023-briar-mailbox-released/
Briar Mailbox released to improve connectivity - Briar
briarproject.orgRokosun
in reply to Rokosun • • •Like @aral said, they're all different methods/solutions for tackling the same problem, and they don't have to be mutually exclusive with one another. Its good to have different options at our disposal 😉
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
in reply to Rokosun • • •What I'm building with @interpeer is similar enough from 10,000ft, but is really less about "a messenger" or "a social media app", and more about re-imagining a generic (stack of) protocols where HTTP and TCP would be nowadays, with a tentative view to pushing into IP extensions (rather than replacing IP, though I'm open to that in principle).
Because of that genericity, a whole lot of individually relatively small things are different from...
Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
in reply to Jens Finkhäuser 🌻 • • •But of course I know about scuttlebutt and briar.
smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)
in reply to Jens Finkhäuser 🌻 • • •@ArneBab is involved with #Hypha, the original #p2p freenet. See: https://freenetproject.org
Freenet
freenetproject.orgRokosun
in reply to smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊) • • •https://reticulum.network/ and the GUI app for it https://github.com/markqvist/sideband. These projects are still in their early stages and the last time I tried it out there were many bugs, tho its still an interesting project to keep an eye on.
https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ - this one seemed more technical to me but from what I understand it helps liberate your IP address or something like that 🤷
GitHub - markqvist/Sideband: LXMF client for Android, Linux and macOS allowing you to communicate with people or LXMF-compatible systems over Reticulum networks using LoRa, Packet Radio, WiFi, I2P, or anything else Reticulum supports.
GitHubJens Finkhäuser 🌻
in reply to smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊) • • •pettter
in reply to Jens Finkhäuser 🌻 • • •Jens Finkhäuser 🌻
in reply to pettter • • •But it also means more aggressively taking out single points of failure. I was recently editing https://specs.interpeer.io/draft-jfinkhaeuser-caps-for-distributed-auth/draft-jfinkhaeuser-caps-for-distributed-auth-02/ which is about authorization without having to ask some auth server.
@futureisfoss @aral @octonion888 @interpeer
Capabilities for Distributed Authorization
Interpeer SpecificationsJens Finkhäuser 🌻
in reply to Jens Finkhäuser 🌻 • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Rokosun • • •https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/
#SmallWeb
What is the Small Web?
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Rokosun
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Also not gonna lie, Kitten is the cutest software project I've ever heard of
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Kristoffer Lawson
in reply to Rokosun • • •Rokosun
in reply to Kristoffer Lawson • • •Harald Eilertsen
in reply to Rokosun • • •Not only can you take your identity and content to a new server, but you can keep one or more live clones so that if your main server goes down (permanently or temporarily) you can just log in to one of the clones and carry on as usual. Useful as a backup, but also in case your main instance suddenly shuts down or kicks you out.
Nomadic identity, brought to you by Hubzilla - Andrew Manning - Medium
Andrew Manning (Medium)Rokosun
in reply to Harald Eilertsen • • •gcvsa ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭
in reply to Rokosun • • •I'm a tech consultant who has been building email systems for over 25 years and using email for over 35 years.
Google didn't "take over the email ecosystem", and any suggestion that they did so displays a complete lack of understanding of the email ecosystem.
Gmail provided a better "free" email system than Hotmail, etc. There are many, many ways to use email that don't involve Google, many free or so low cost as to be insignificant.
Aral Balkan
in reply to gcvsa ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 • • •Rokosun
in reply to gcvsa ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 • •@gcvsa ⭐️🔰🇺🇸🇵🇭 @Aral Balkan @Rokosun
Just listen to these people's experiences and tell me companies like Google still don't have power & influence over the email ecosystem:
https://octodon.social/@aneel/110571044143582876
https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html
... show more@gcvsa ⭐️🔰🇺🇸🇵🇭 @Aral Balkan @Rokosun
Just listen to these people's experiences and tell me companies like Google still don't have power & influence over the email ecosystem:
https://octodon.social/@aneel/110571044143582876
https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html
https://trouble.social/@mookie/110571569621571610
What gives these companies their power is simply the fact that they own the vast majority of email users. One of the fundemantal flaws with federated networks is that corporations with large amounts of money & resources can scoop up the userbase and then get to control which messages reach them and who they can interact with.
After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.
cfenollosa.comaneel
2023-06-19 13:10:39
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gcvsa ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭
in reply to Rokosun • • •If you are going to make quantitative statements about email usage, you are required to show evidence affirming your claims. "Vast majority of email users"? Show your data.
Rokosun
in reply to gcvsa ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 • •You said you're a tech consultant who has been building email systems for over 25 years and using email for over 35 years, so I thought you'd know better than me. Anyway, since you asked I looked up the actual data, and this is literally the first sentance of Gmail's wikipedia article:
> Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide making it the largest email service in the world.
Wikipedia page - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail
And the source Wikipedia c... show more
You said you're a tech consultant who has been building email systems for over 25 years and using email for over 35 years, so I thought you'd know better than me. Anyway, since you asked I looked up the actual data, and this is literally the first sentance of Gmail's wikipedia article:
> Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide making it the largest email service in the world.
Wikipedia page - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail
And the source Wikipedia cited for that data - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/26/gmail-dominates-consumer-email-with-1point5-billion-users.html
This means that if Gmail unfairly blocks your email server, like the experience of many others I've linked above in my previous post, then you'll lose access to 1.5 billion active email users, which is surely a number you cannot ignore. Also note that there is no transparency or an appeal process for this blocking.
Its also interesting to look at the most used email clients - https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/most-used-email-clients
> Even though it’s the second-most popular email client, Gmail’s market share is still a significant 32.6 percentage points behind Apple’s. But together, Apple and Gmail make up a whopping 87.02% of the total email client market share.
> The third-most popular email client is Microsoft’s Outlook. It’s used by 4.42% of email users worldwide. Fourth on the list of the most used email clients is Yahoo! Mail, which has a market share of 2.91%. This is followed by Google Android, with 1.5%, and Outlook.com, with 0.66%.
See a pattern here? The majority of the email ecosystem (both in servers & clients) is dominated by big tech corporations like Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc who has the money and resources to scoop up such a big chunk of the userbase.
Most Used Email Clients Worldwide [Apr 2023 Update] | Oberlo
Ying Lin (Oberlo)Tio
in reply to Rokosun • •I have said since the moment I discovered this fediverse network that nothing escapes the forces of trade. Facebook (fucking Meta name man 😁 ) wants to trade with people, so if they see the fediverse growing they'll jump and try to conquer it. Happened to pretty much everything, from software to products or events.
Defederating with them does not seem a solution for me. Rather let people get used to the fediverse through them, and then maybe they can move to different instances. But what's sure in my mind is that everything that's free and good (purely free and good) is fragile in this trade society.
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Rokosun
in reply to Tio • • •@tio I'm also not so sure about defederation even tho I hate Meta joining this place, you can read some of the talks I had with my instance admins (@kev & @mike) here - https://fosstodon.org/@futureisfoss/110572085192899168
There seem to be a lot of questions about how Meta is gonna make money out of this and how that will affect other fediverse users, we'll need to wait and see. And you're of course right that its all about trade, I hope more people become aware of this through your new documentary - https://social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc44-1164-9071-4d18-9b8950421735
... show more@tio I'm also not so sure about defederation even tho I hate Meta joining this place, you can read some of the talks I had with my instance admins (@kev & @mike) here - https://fosstodon.org/@futureisfoss/110572085192899168
There seem to be a lot of questions about how Meta is gonna make money out of this and how that will affect other fediverse users, we'll need to wait and see. And you're of course right that its all about trade, I hope more people become aware of this through your new documentary - https://social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc44-1164-9071-4d18-9b8950421735
Rokosun
2023-06-19 17:35:24
Tio likes this.
Paramdeo Singh 🇬🇾
in reply to Rokosun • • •Decentralization is the ideal: where the user chooses what to view or block, not a gatekeeping admin making that choice for them.
The Fediverse is feudal at its core, and I'm not sure how evenly this problem is spread between ActivityPub (the protocol) and instance admins (the people).
Protocols > People? People > Protocols? I choose the former.
Rokosun
in reply to Paramdeo Singh 🇬🇾 • • •@paramdeo You're absolutely right here, the ability to defederate shows you that this system doesn't really work and that admins do have some level of control/influence over their users, and the bigger the instance the more power the admin will have. We've had lengthy discussions about this issue before, here's the last post I wrote from what I remember - https://social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc44-7762-f814-5ad9-208146996908
@paramdeo You're absolutely right here, the ability to defederate shows you that this system doesn't really work and that admins do have some level of control/influence over their users, and the bigger the instance the more power the admin will have. We've had lengthy discussions about this issue before, here's the last post I wrote from what I remember - https://social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc44-7762-f814-5ad9-208146996908
Rokosun
2022-08-13 21:15:06
Rokosun
in reply to Rokosun • • •Paramdeo Singh 🇬🇾
in reply to Rokosun • • •Like with Twitter under Musk, I think some Fediverse admins that are pro-censorship are afraid that Zuckerberg won't allow censorship. Coupled with the enormity of Meta's userbase that kind of freedom makes radical instances that defederate obsolete.