I am not open to your ahistorical take on Google Chat and XMPP.
Google didn't do anything wrong by using an open standard.
They didn't do anything wrong by building a good interface that people liked to use.
And they didn't do anything wrong by disconnecting from the network when the spam and harassment outweighed the benefit to their users.
We, the XMPP community, failed to capitalize on success by diversifying the network. It's our own fault not enough nodes were there.
@evan The SPAM increases BECAUSE OF google. Large reach with little effort, that's the recipe for spam.
Small nodes are overwhelmed by a big node and stop working.
The growth of a decentralized Network is slow and has to be protected.
What makes any network “work” or not is a balance of features and humans.
I am amazed that all the new apps or platforms [threads] are not taking the time to be more creative and sociotechnical about the features with a recognition to NOT recreate the past. Whether fediverse or owned.
@evan the should have worked with Google to fix the issue.
I've already seen a lot of people quick to push Threads off the fedi rather than deal with the issues it might create
@dilmandila @evan but Meta brings eyeballs and users to the the fediverse. It also brings brands to the fediverse. I know a lot of people may not like those things.
But rather than block and run away, shouldn't we try and address the issues in the standard?
@anclement @dilmandila human beings aren't eyeballs.
Participation in the social web is a human right.
We will not be changing the ActivityPub spec to keep people trapped in walled gardens and out of the social web.
@anclement @dilmandila nobody should ever have to interact with anyone they don't want to on the social web. EVER. That is fundamental, and I will fight tooth and nail against any structure that doesn't let people shape their own social space.
But that is part of the protocol already. Blocking accounts and defederation already work, as well as blocking words. We need better support for Bayesian filtering, but I think that will come.
> Participation in the social web is a human right.
Really? https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
No, it is not a violation of "human rights" if, say, my instance or all instances choose not to federate with Threads.
That you bring "human rights" into the issue is a measure of the poverty of your actual argument. And I might add that Facebook has complete disregard for human rights.
@TomSwirly @anclement @dilmandila
Article 19: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
Article 27: "Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits."
> all people have a right to be on the fediverse,
And indeed, anyone can get a free Mastodon account, or browse anonymously, so this problem is completely solved.
But you're going much further. You are saying is that people have a "right" to see Threads threads on Mastodon. This does not follow.
It's like claiming there's a "right" to see New York Post articles in the New York Times.
No such right exists, and you don't make a case why it should.
@TomSwirly @evan @anclement @dilmandila You're heading down a very dark alley in which lurks a Fediverse where "we don't federate with user_count > 400, we don't federate with gay owners, we don't federate with marxists, we don't federate with socialists, we don't federare with pro-Israel, we don't federate with pro-Palestine," and so on becomes the norm.
A splintered network. And all that because some people don't understand that pub/sub is user to user, not instance to instance, and want to punish other users while telling their users what they can subscribe and what they can publish.
@mikka @evan @anclement @dilmandila
> You're heading down a very dark alley
In a world where children are being killed right as we speak, this is hyperbolic. A sense of perspective goes far.
> A splintered network.
Yes, it's a federated system, that's the whole point of it. If you don't like it there are a zillion other social networks. Or you can have accounts on two instances.
> want to punish other users
Get a grip.
@evan @anclement @dilmandila Yes, I did in fact read the link I sent you.
These rights in no way translate into a right to see Threads threads on Mastodon, anymore than I have a right to see RT shows on the BBC.
Anyone can see Threads. Anyone can see Mastodon. No human rights are impaired to the slightest degree if Threads threads do not appear on Mastodon.
Can you provide an example of Facebook dealing with problems it has already caused?
Here's one of many it hasn't:
Facebook is a company of proven dishonesty and rapacity. They lost the benefit of the doubt a decade ago.
, if I wanted to federate with Threads, that is bigger than 35x the it's not technically possible.@benpate @charlesroper @evan Ideally, a client or server that bridged AP and RSS/Atom would not, in fact, poll for individual feeds but would instead exploit WebSub (nee: PubSubHubbub) as a means to share feed polling between systems.
See WebSub Spec at W3C: https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/
WebSub provides a common mechanism for communication between publishers of any kind of Web content and their subscribers, based on HTTP web hooks. Subscription requests are relayed through hubs, which validate and verify the request. Hubs then distribute new and updated content to subscribers when it becomes available. WebSub was previously known as PubSubHubbub.
That sounds like an interesting theory.
Are you saying that "#supernodes" (like #Threads?) are o.k., but there need to be more "standard" #Fediverse instances to counterbalance their huge number of users?
@evan when Galactica, flagship of the Colonial Fleet but with strict defederation policies, encountered the more powerful Battlestar Pegasus it was important to both collaborate with the Pegasus against a common enemy, but also maintain autonomy as the the interests of the Pegasus were not always aligned with the fleet.
The Galactica, despite being outmatched by the Pegasus, remained crucial to the fleet as a focal point and a strategic asset in a role that smaller ships could not have played.
@evan If this is the conclusion we should draw, is there any case of an open protocol where it has played out this way? Where a flourishing ecosystem of small nodes successfully counter-balanced the big ones and everyone is still free to spin up new nodes and enter the ecosystem? Genuinely curious, because I haven't found a auch a case, but I'm not around that long.
@marcelweiss We've already discussed at length, that it's currently not possible to just spin up an email server and operate on eye level with the big ones. You have at length explained that this is for spam protection, reinforcing the point that email is not a valid example here.
PodCasts, contrary to popular belief, do not constitute a protocol, nor a network. It's simply a format of entertainment. @evan
@marcelweiss Granted, RSS, like many other file formats is alive and well. Podcasts also may use it, true. Or may not, that largely depends on the player. Like file formats, entertainment formats are not protocols.
Your opinion on discussions of open protocols and how they interact with the corporate world is duly noted.
Let's get back to the actual question that I posed towards @evan: Is there an example where the above mentioned strategy worked out as I described?
@evan Google didn't disconnect from the network, the network disconnected from Google, because they refused to implement TLS on s2s connections.
How's that for an ahistorical take?
@timoj @evan I'm not sure I'd call SIP a failure. Maybe the average user doesn't interact with it very much, but vast numbers of people use it everyday. Callcenter operations, corporate PBXs, private LTE systems, follow-me numbers, and lots of telecon services use SIP in some way or another.
The major exception is Microsoft, naturally. Although even Teams—which uses Skype-derived protocols, supposedly—can interoperate with SIP endpoints.
#telecom #SIP
@timoj @evan True. Though that's a pretty ambitious goal. The telcos have always been seemingly uncomfortable with the "internet way" of doing things. (Honestly, I think we're still probably 20 years from getting to a single consensus and standards body.)
Do you think SIP would have been better if 3GPP hadn't adopted it into the IMS standard? That always looked like a win to me, finally building on an IETF standard rather than in parallel to it.
@timoj @[email protected] Really good question. And I think up through WCDMA, the answer is "definitely no". With LTE, the feeling I get is "we shouldn't have bothered wasting time on XYZ", where that might be any number of legacy-ish LTE features like circuit-switched voice and data, baroque encapsulation formats, and the whole idea of terminating a subscriber's data traffic anywhere but at the closest possible point.
Definitively separate control vs. data planes is not a bad idea, though.
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