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> It seems to be yet another "federation" system. Is this worth any attention? In the current internet environment of walled gardens and a siloed and decimated

> It seems to be yet another "federation" system. Is this worth any attention? In the current internet environment of walled gardens and a siloed and decimated internet, any federation system is worthy of attention.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Given Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have shown they're against federated messaging the more pertinent question for me is "can it work? Will anyone other than geeks switch from Facebook, et al.. You'd probably need some legislation to force those running large communication platforms to open their protocols and allow federation before there can be significant progress. I really can't see their being political will for that at present.
- speedplane 8y ago
  > Given Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have shown they're against federated messaging the more pertinent question for me is "can it work? You're probably right, the legacy companies won't buy-in without a fight, but I see two avenues of success. - New companies: If a federated messaging system existed five years ago, Slack may have chosen to run on an open standard rather than build its own. - Large corporates: they may want the self-hosting, security customizeation, and lack of vendor lock-in of an open standard. For example, I know that Goldman Sachs has built their own in-house messaging service (crazy, I know). They may be a good candidate to switch to an open standard.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    The lack of ability for their chat to interface with others is probably a considerable measure of control over information flow, which I imagine is good for Goldman Sachs.
    - speedplane 8y ago
      > The lack of ability for their chat to interface with others is probably a considerable measure of control over information flow, which I imagine is good for Goldman Sachs. A federated system can still be locked down, and made to be inoperable with other services. If you wanted to make an email service that didn't speak to other email services, you would still probably start with the email standard and make changes to lock it down rather than creating a new email service from scratch. Likewise, a Goldman Sachs (or similar company) that wanted a locked down messaging service would likely consider an open platform that they could modify and lock down rather than using a commercial one (like slack) or rolling their own (which is extremely expensive).

pbhjpbhj 8y ago

Given Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have shown they're against federated messaging the more pertinent question for me is "can it work? Will anyone other than geeks switch from Facebook, et al.. You'd probably need some legislation to force those running large communication platforms to open their protocols and allow federation before there can be significant progress. I really can't see their being political will for that at present.

speedplane 8y ago
> Given Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have shown they're against federated messaging the more pertinent question for me is "can it work? You're probably right, the legacy companies won't buy-in without a fight, but I see two avenues of success. - New companies: If a federated messaging system existed five years ago, Slack may have chosen to run on an open standard rather than build its own. - Large corporates: they may want the self-hosting, security customizeation, and lack of vendor lock-in of an open standard. For example, I know that Goldman Sachs has built their own in-house messaging service (crazy, I know). They may be a good candidate to switch to an open standard.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  The lack of ability for their chat to interface with others is probably a considerable measure of control over information flow, which I imagine is good for Goldman Sachs.
  - speedplane 8y ago
    > The lack of ability for their chat to interface with others is probably a considerable measure of control over information flow, which I imagine is good for Goldman Sachs. A federated system can still be locked down, and made to be inoperable with other services. If you wanted to make an email service that didn't speak to other email services, you would still probably start with the email standard and make changes to lock it down rather than creating a new email service from scratch. Likewise, a Goldman Sachs (or similar company) that wanted a locked down messaging service would likely consider an open platform that they could modify and lock down rather than using a commercial one (like slack) or rolling their own (which is extremely expensive).