Cautionary tale about letting big companies on federated communication protocols | Hacker News Reader

Cautionary tale about letting big companies on federated communication protocols

cloudisland.nz

87 pointsTimothee23 comments

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.

> 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).

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.

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.

> 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.

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

Yup, I too receive spam just fine. Greylisting and SPF alone doesn't stop it now. If I want to send e-mail to someone on gmail or office365 it usually ends up in spam.

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.

> 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.

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.

In that sense door locks are exclusionary.

...and it was good

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.

I had an experience similar to that. Many of my friends signed up for Google Chat back in the early aughts, so I got myself an account and added it to my IM client.

For a couple years, everything was great... but then, over the course of a few months, I got a weird, uncomfortable feeling like some of my friends might be shunning or excluding me. I'd hear about events having happened which nobody had bothered inviting me to, or I'd email people I thought I was close to and they wouldn't respond at all. Just odd.

Eventually someone asked me why I wasn't responding to their emails, which 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 years before the unified Google Account came along), and as part of that process, they created a new GMail account for every Google Chat user who didn't already have one.

In a forehead-slapping bit of hubris, they then inserted this new <my-gtalk-handle@gmail.com> address into all of my GMail-using friends' address books, where it would pop up in place of 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, 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.

That is pretty terrible

That is such sneaky malicious behavior, especially by a big player like Google, they must have sucked up so much personal information with this one weird trick.

This exact discussion was already exhausted the previous time Threads was announced.

I'm going to repeat now what I was saying three months ago: XMPP is fine now, as it was before Google Talk was a thing. It was a niche protocol for niche people, it remained a niche protocol for niche people.

Assuming that it expired just because Google Talk ceased to exist is just a fallacy.

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).

Somehow, even with the embarrassment of (fragmented) IM riches, status as a service eludes us. I miss finger and ytalk.

Is this description accurate? I remember when Google Talk did XMPP, and know that stopped. Was it a gradual/unexplainable change?

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.

The people who move to Threads are those who are being deceived, not the people who remain in federation networks. Yet, you can't expect Threads to commit resources to limiting its own growth. It's naive to think that it would.

Oh, I thought that was going to be about Google's takeover of USENET.

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