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Email is the prime example of federated communication. From protocol inception to painful expansion and aging protocol all until corporate apropriaton. But I st

Email is the prime example of federated communication. From protocol inception to painful expansion and aging protocol all until corporate apropriaton. But I still think federation is the way forward, absolute centralisation is bad I'll let you figure why, but absolute decentralization is also bad, limitations due to its nature, unusual working for most users... Meanwhile federation is right in the middle, and users already use it with email without even noticing!

BrenBarn 9mo ago
People often mention email as an example of federated communication, but the way email works in practice doesn't entirely live up to that ideal. Good luck getting your own self-hosted email server to send emails that actually reach anyone using a major email provider; they'll just be blocked as spam. In practice, email is much less federated than it seems. A significant proportion of people are just using gmail. You probably don't have to include that many providers to cover a majority of people in the US. I think federation has promise, but federation in itself is not a solution. Technical approaches do not address the more fundamental issue that, regardless of the mechanics of the system, big players will have more influence on its operation and evolution. Thus we will always need sociopolitical mechanisms to restrict big players.
- patmorgan23 9mo ago
  Federation does at least give you the choice of providers, even a little bit of competition goes a long way to improving a company's behavior.
  - BrenBarn 9mo ago
    But in practice in doesn't always give you a choice, because the biggest providers will embrace and extend and start providing things other providers don't. Or they'll just make it difficult to export your data, etc.
tsimionescu 9mo ago
Email is by far the least secure form of communication in common use right now. It's trivial to impersonate others over email, and every MTA that processes your email has access to the full contents, because they are never encrypted except in flight (and except by a few tiny disparate groups using PGP, and even these groups can't authenticate one another). And not for lack of trying, I should add.
- fc417fc802 9mo ago
  Comes across as an ad hominem. Email is insecure due to being dated, having a massive amount of inertia, and being essentially impossible to upgrade in the necessary ways without breaking backwards compatibility. None of that has anything to do with federation vs p2p vs centralization. If you want a fair comparison for reasoning about security related challenges and tradeoffs you should probably go with matrix.
  - tsimionescu 9mo ago
    I don't agree with this at all. There are fundamental tradeoffs, and the reason no one has added e2e encryption to email, while we did add it to the web, is not because of backwards compatibility, it's because there was no compelling solution to some of these trade-offs. Matrix simply doesn't solve some of the problems that email solves, or at least not in an e2e encrypted manner. For example, I can't send a document to a public institution's Matrix account, not in a manner that either (a) isn't e2e encrypted with no realistic risk of a MITM, or (b) doesn't require an out-of-band pre-approval, such as someone from the institution adding my account to some encrypted room. Also, even if Matrix did find a way to make it easy to send e2e encrypted data to someone else without out-of-band communication, it would then suffer from the problem of spam. Every client would have to filter all incoming messages for spam, instead of being able to centralize this work at the server level.
    - fc417fc802 9mo ago
      Doesn't the spam filtering complaint apply in equal measure to _any_ E2EE messaging solution? Signal can't implement content based filtering either. Out of band confirmation is similarly universal unless you're okay with either TOFU or delegation. (Delegation being recursively subject to the same choice.) TLS on the web goes with delegation and a root certificate store obviously. My point being that none of this is specific to either email or federation more generally.

BrenBarn 9mo ago

People often mention email as an example of federated communication, but the way email works in practice doesn't entirely live up to that ideal. Good luck getting your own self-hosted email server to send emails that actually reach anyone using a major email provider; they'll just be blocked as spam. In practice, email is much less federated than it seems. A significant proportion of people are just using gmail. You probably don't have to include that many providers to cover a majority of people in the US. I think federation has promise, but federation in itself is not a solution. Technical approaches do not address the more fundamental issue that, regardless of the mechanics of the system, big players will have more influence on its operation and evolution. Thus we will always need sociopolitical mechanisms to restrict big players.

patmorgan23 9mo ago
Federation does at least give you the choice of providers, even a little bit of competition goes a long way to improving a company's behavior.
- BrenBarn 9mo ago
  But in practice in doesn't always give you a choice, because the biggest providers will embrace and extend and start providing things other providers don't. Or they'll just make it difficult to export your data, etc.

tsimionescu 9mo ago

Email is by far the least secure form of communication in common use right now. It's trivial to impersonate others over email, and every MTA that processes your email has access to the full contents, because they are never encrypted except in flight (and except by a few tiny disparate groups using PGP, and even these groups can't authenticate one another). And not for lack of trying, I should add.

fc417fc802 9mo ago
Comes across as an ad hominem. Email is insecure due to being dated, having a massive amount of inertia, and being essentially impossible to upgrade in the necessary ways without breaking backwards compatibility. None of that has anything to do with federation vs p2p vs centralization. If you want a fair comparison for reasoning about security related challenges and tradeoffs you should probably go with matrix.
- tsimionescu 9mo ago
  I don't agree with this at all. There are fundamental tradeoffs, and the reason no one has added e2e encryption to email, while we did add it to the web, is not because of backwards compatibility, it's because there was no compelling solution to some of these trade-offs. Matrix simply doesn't solve some of the problems that email solves, or at least not in an e2e encrypted manner. For example, I can't send a document to a public institution's Matrix account, not in a manner that either (a) isn't e2e encrypted with no realistic risk of a MITM, or (b) doesn't require an out-of-band pre-approval, such as someone from the institution adding my account to some encrypted room. Also, even if Matrix did find a way to make it easy to send e2e encrypted data to someone else without out-of-band communication, it would then suffer from the problem of spam. Every client would have to filter all incoming messages for spam, instead of being able to centralize this work at the server level.
  - fc417fc802 9mo ago
    Doesn't the spam filtering complaint apply in equal measure to _any_ E2EE messaging solution? Signal can't implement content based filtering either. Out of band confirmation is similarly universal unless you're okay with either TOFU or delegation. (Delegation being recursively subject to the same choice.) TLS on the web goes with delegation and a root certificate store obviously. My point being that none of this is specific to either email or federation more generally.