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Comment by jholman | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what's going on, and I prefer to trust the FSF, but I notice that they are wilfully misrepresenting the statement by pergu@google on the operators@xmpp list, and so are you, cs702.

Per said, a month ago, "is there anything you can do about it in that case, otherwise we will have to institute very tight limits of invites per day being sent from federated domains", speaking about specific domains, and speculating about a possible future strategy.

FSF says (paraphrasing): "we have this symptom, we're convinced it's for this technical cause... " (so far so good) " ... "and this email thread says that Google is doing it on purpose". Bullshit, that thread says nothing of the kind. Stick to what you know.

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jholman: could you imagine Google doing the same thing for email? ("We will have to institute very tight limits of emails per day being sent from external domains.")

Please go back and read my comment again.

My point is not that this is okay [0]. My point is that FSF is claiming "Google is doing this on purpose and this link says so", and YOU said "this link says so", and that's not what that links says. So stop making shit up. Stick to what you know, and/or to your opinions.

FSF could have avoided my complaint by changing "According to this thread, Google is doing this on purpose" to "Based on this thread we're guessing Google may be doing this on purpose". You could have avoided my complaint by leaving your whole last sentence off.

[0] Supposing that this IS what's happening, I'm not defending it (nor opposing it, I'm not forming an opinion). But as a side note, my understanding is that nearly all email providers DO do this thing for email; if a given domain is spamming hard enough, eventually email providers start dropping mail silently. Don't they?

It also says that they were considering limiting invites per domain per day, which is quite a different thing than blocking all external invites, and it actually isn't all that different from what is done with email from domains that tend to send out a lot of spam.

However, the problems with this solution are a) that it doesn't discriminate between domains with a lot of traffic and domains with a lot of spammy traffic (though, again, that's just speculation and maybe they do have that data), and b) there's no message to the user that is being ignored. I don't know if jabber supports rejection messages, but it would be much better if they could get a message that let them know why they were being turned down so they could pressure their chat server operator to reign in the spam accounts.

It appears from the FSF post that they've actually tested invite requests, though, so presumably they are rejecting all invites, which makes the earlier email even less relevant as evidence of what is going on now. Surely the FSF has a contact at Google?

I agree.

It's really unclear what's going on, actually.

We don't know exactly what the FSF is seeing, nor if they did fair tests, nor if they're reporting fairly (though I tend to assume so, tentatively).

We don't know if Google did something deliberately, nor who did it. We don't know how it relates to Per's mailling list message, if at all. If there was action, we don't know if it's an experiment, or a bug, or who it affects, or how often.

More generally, it doesn't seem like this is an urgent issue that requires panicking. The world can get along fine for a month without people being able to invite gmail users. But, on the other hand, if the worst case is true, that Google has started blocking invites from ALL other domains, ALL the time, then I think the FSF's political position is sound.

So far, though, this really isn't like Reader.

Sure the world may get by, but federated IM should be the future of online communications, possibly even more so than email. People love to chat online, SMS, iMessage, etc. But these systems shouldn't be so fragmented into isolated little islands. Apple's iMessage shouldn't even exist and should just redirect people to an XMPP service, while SMS should just be seen as a legacy.

I agree, which is why I said "If <blah blah blah>, then I think the FSF's political position is sound."

jholman: after reading everything again and thinking about it, you're right, I went too far with my last sentence. I added a note to my comment. Thank you.

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