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About federation in particular: Moxie wrote about why Signal is unfederated a little while back: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal

by skaul 8y ago

About federation in particular: Moxie wrote about why Signal is unfederated a little while back: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ It has some interesting insights into when federation works and when it doesn’t. “Nothing about any of the protocols we’ve developed requires centralization; it’s entirely possible to build a federated Signal Protocol-based messenger, but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.”

kuschku 8y ago
Yeah, but moxie is mostly wrong. He's only seen worst-case scenarios and assumes everything is lile that, so he builds his centralized stuff instead. You can easily move forward with a federated protocol as well if you've got cooperating people, guarantee only 6 months of support for a protocol version, and have a versioning and feature flag system. Hell in one project I contribute to we've kept protocol compatibility since 2009, we've got mamy third party clients, everyone hosts their own server — and still we can introduce new features without breakage in a matter of days (at least into beta, QA and translation take a while).
- y_molodtsov 8y ago
  And how many consumer users does that project have? Federated clients lost.
  - kuschku 8y ago
    So you're saying that the only reason Facebook messenger with thousands of deva and a multi billion ad budget won against XMPP was that XMPP was federated? No. The reason federated clients lost was that mega corporations can't make profit with em, and so they spent billions on their own tech. This isn't david vs goliath, this is david vs a nuclear aircraft carrier
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  If he's wrong and it's easy, why can no one do it? Why did Slack overrun IRC? XMPP left by the wayside by Google and Facebook? Because it isn't easy, and users will always value the experience over compatibility and principal.
  - kuschku 8y ago
    Marketing, marketing, and amount of money that goes into that development. Give me a few thousand developers, a multi billion dollar ad budget, and the ability to signup every facebook user on the planet to my messaging service, and I'll also win against XMPP. In fact, with those resources carrier pidgeons would've won against XMPP.
    - heckanoobs 8y ago
      This doesn't explain why IRC can't compete with Slack or the other corporate messaging services. Slack was a side project by a failing game company. Its growth was largely organic. I think the original premise is right that user experience is more important than ethics or philosophy or whatever the heck it is we're talking about when federations come up
      - kuschku 8y ago
        IRC didn't by even have anyone trying to improve stuff until the IRCv3 WG came along, and now we're seeing massive innovation and adoption in short timeframes.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        sanderjd 8y ago
        But the fact that nobody was working on it is also part of the same discussion: non-centralized services haven't had clear ways to incentive the time investment to develop them. The community and respect of working on open source has worked well enough for some developers to create and keep these projects sputtering along, but it never worked for the designers and product vision folks. One of the promises of blockchain-based decentralized projects is that they may be able to incentive their contributors by cutting them in on the potential success of the project. It remains to be seen whether that's workable, but it's an interesting idea.
- bradknowles 8y ago
  The worst cases are the only ones that actually matter. If you can demonstrate your stuff still works in the worst case, then when the worst case does actually happen, your staff is the only thing that will still be working when everything else goes down the tubes. All of computer science is predicated on worst case analysis for a very, very good reason.
Boulth 8y ago
It's good to compare this with views on the other side: https://gultsch.de/objection.html https://gultsch.de/objection.html

by skaul 8y ago

kuschku 8y ago

Yeah, but moxie is mostly wrong. He's only seen worst-case scenarios and assumes everything is lile that, so he builds his centralized stuff instead. You can easily move forward with a federated protocol as well if you've got cooperating people, guarantee only 6 months of support for a protocol version, and have a versioning and feature flag system. Hell in one project I contribute to we've kept protocol compatibility since 2009, we've got mamy third party clients, everyone hosts their own server — and still we can introduce new features without breakage in a matter of days (at least into beta, QA and translation take a while).

y_molodtsov 8y ago
And how many consumer users does that project have? Federated clients lost.
- kuschku 8y ago
  So you're saying that the only reason Facebook messenger with thousands of deva and a multi billion ad budget won against XMPP was that XMPP was federated? No. The reason federated clients lost was that mega corporations can't make profit with em, and so they spent billions on their own tech. This isn't david vs goliath, this is david vs a nuclear aircraft carrier
toomuchtodo 8y ago
If he's wrong and it's easy, why can no one do it? Why did Slack overrun IRC? XMPP left by the wayside by Google and Facebook? Because it isn't easy, and users will always value the experience over compatibility and principal.
- kuschku 8y ago
  Marketing, marketing, and amount of money that goes into that development. Give me a few thousand developers, a multi billion dollar ad budget, and the ability to signup every facebook user on the planet to my messaging service, and I'll also win against XMPP. In fact, with those resources carrier pidgeons would've won against XMPP.
  - heckanoobs 8y ago
    This doesn't explain why IRC can't compete with Slack or the other corporate messaging services. Slack was a side project by a failing game company. Its growth was largely organic. I think the original premise is right that user experience is more important than ethics or philosophy or whatever the heck it is we're talking about when federations come up
    - kuschku 8y ago
      IRC didn't by even have anyone trying to improve stuff until the IRCv3 WG came along, and now we're seeing massive innovation and adoption in short timeframes.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - sanderjd 8y ago
        But the fact that nobody was working on it is also part of the same discussion: non-centralized services haven't had clear ways to incentive the time investment to develop them. The community and respect of working on open source has worked well enough for some developers to create and keep these projects sputtering along, but it never worked for the designers and product vision folks. One of the promises of blockchain-based decentralized projects is that they may be able to incentive their contributors by cutting them in on the potential success of the project. It remains to be seen whether that's workable, but it's an interesting idea.
bradknowles 8y ago
The worst cases are the only ones that actually matter. If you can demonstrate your stuff still works in the worst case, then when the worst case does actually happen, your staff is the only thing that will still be working when everything else goes down the tubes. All of computer science is predicated on worst case analysis for a very, very good reason.

Boulth 8y ago

It's good to compare this with views on the other side: https://gultsch.de/objection.html https://gultsch.de/objection.html