Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

The matter of federation is by no means settled. Many experts do not agree with Signal's conclusions and suspect ulterior motives, myself included. It is open source, though, but Moxie has definitely made decisions that are harmful to open source. Again, ulterior motives may be at play.

View on HN

I feel that it's unlikely that ulterior motives are in place, given that Signal's core user base consists of privacy conscious folks, thereby preventing an easy pivot towards a closed ecosystem once critical mass is reached. It's likely that if this were attempted, someone would just fork Signal, with support for some kind of decentralization, and split the user base in two.

However moxie seems to have an outdated form of federation in mind when he gives examples of IRC and email. While it is true that these technologies have been quite rigid, there are other examples of distributed technologies that are quite flexible in implementation. Bitcoin and Mastodon are examples where changes and updates are pushed through regularly.

The determining factor seems to be the amount of control the principal developer holds over the ecosystem. Mastodon instances basically all run the same code, and (mostly) everyone is happy with the direction they are going. Thus, Eugen pushes a new release, everyone runs it, and protocol changes can propagate throughout the network. Old nodes get left behind. However, say Eugen (or Signal) massively screws up, and they get forked. Now, any protocol changes must be adopted by both camps (who by definition have differing philosophies) to be fully applied.

It's already a closed ecosystem. The software is open, not the ecosystem. Moxie toes the line so that Signal's strengths always outweigh its faults for most people, which prevents an alternative from reaching a critical mass. By not federating he locks users into his ecosystem - a fringe group of upset users can't draw the rest of the users out if they have an incompatible platform. I think he's a smart guy who knows exactly what he's doing, but he puts on a nice face for PR because he can't exactly come out and admit his design choices are self-serving.

Also, Mastodon is built on open standards that have several competing and compatible implementations (GNUSocial and Pleorma are the main two), which are run by their own maintainers.

Moxie toes the line so that Signal's strengths always outweigh its faults for most people, which prevents an alternative from reaching a critical mass.

Signal is released under the GPL, meaning that if something did happen to shake user faith (data breach, data mining) a fork pointing at different servers could be instantly created with complete feature parity.

Every traditional barrier to user migration is removed. Features are the same. UX is the same. Compatibility is the same.

That's a precarious line to toe.

Also, Mastodon is built on open standards that have several competing and compatible implementations (GNUSocial and Pleorma are the main two), which are run by their own maintainers.

Yes, Mastodon is inter-operable with OStatus and ActivityPub. However I do not know of any significant user base that interacts with Mastodon through an alternative platform. Given the will, Mastodon could implement its own extensions to ActivityPub and break compatibility, with most users unaffected due to the strength behind the core development team.

>a fork pointing at different servers could be instantly created with complete feature parity.

But not federation. No one can talk to people on other servers. Such forks already exist, none of them are successful.

>Yes, Mastodon is inter-operable with OStatus and ActivityPub. However I do not know of any significant user base that interacts with Mastodon through an alternative platform.

I know of many people on both of the platforms I mentioned. Collaboration between all of these platforms is frequent and they drive improvements in each other.

>But not federation. No one can talk to people on other servers. Such forks already exist, none of them are successful.

They are not successful because Signal has not yet done anything particularly egregious. If they do, I believe that a fork would quickly gain popularity.

>I know of many people on both of the platforms I mentioned. Collaboration between all of these platforms is frequent and they drive improvements in each other.

We've both given anecdotes; user counts would be more conclusive. I've found +1 million [0] for Mastodon. Do you know how many users GNU Social and Pleroma have? I can't find these numbers from a quick Google search, but they might be somewhere.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)#Adoption]

>They are not successful because Signal has not yet done anything particularly egregious

Like I said: Moxie toes the line. He doesn't cross it. Well, everyone has a different line. He's crossed mine but not the lines the average user sets.

>We've both given anecdotes; user counts would be more conclusive. I've found +1 million [0] for Mastodon.

I question the methodology behind this figure. The nature of the decentralized network makes it difficult to get good estimates. All I have are anecdotes. Yes, the overwhelming majority of users are on Mastodon. However, I personally interact with several users on several different Pleroma instances and a couple on GNUSocial instances, and I did not seek them out for this purpose.

>I question the methodology behind this figure. The nature of the decentralized network makes it difficult to get good estimates. All I have are anecdotes. Yes, the overwhelming majority of users are on Mastodon. However, I personally interact with several users on several different Pleroma instances and a couple on GNUSocial instances, and I did not seek them out for this purpose.

However they are the exception. Because the overwhelming majority of users are on Mastodon, the Mastodon developers have the power to modify protocol implementations. If it was closer to an even split, any breaking changes would fracture the community, while in this case some smaller groups may be lost.

Come on. You can say the same thing about Chrome's effect on web standards. In reality that's not how it works, and the situation is far better than Signal.

Gmail is using their influence to modify email standards[0]. This is exactly how it works in reality. If a certain service provider holds most of the user base, they can implement breaking changes without fracturing the community. In some cases it's a net positive, helping protocols evolve, and in some cases it's a net negative.

[0]https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/13/17007100/google-amp-gmail...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com