How to destroy a decentralized network (on the example of Fedivers)
Outside is 2023. The entire Internet is under the control of the GAFAM Empire. Whole? No, a few small enclaves have not yet succumbed to their oppression. And some of these non-joiners began to join forces, consolidating into Fedivers.
During the debates on Twitter and Reddit, Fedivers began to attract more and more attention and gained fame. People started taking it seriously. This could not escape the attention of the Empire.
Capitalists against competition
As Peter Thiel, one of the famous investors of Facebook (the organization is banned in the Russian Federation), put it, “Competition is for losers.” Yes, these hypocrites who claim that “the market will decide” do not want to obey the market at all when they have already entered it. They want a monopoly. From the very beginning, Facebook has been determined to undermine any competition. The easiest way to achieve this is by buying companies that sooner or later can compete with you. Such a fate befell, for example, Instagram and WhatsApp – they were bought only because they offered users an attractive product and took the clearing from Facebook.
But you can’t buy Fedivers – after all, this is an unofficial set of servers that exchange information using the ActivityPub protocol. These servers can even use different software (Mastodon is the most famous example, but you might also come across Pleroma, Pixelfed, Peertube, WriteFreely, Lemmy and many other solutions).
A decentralized network cannot be bought!
But there is another way: to devalue it. This is exactly what Google did with XMPP.
How Google joined the XMPP federation
At the end of the 20th century, instant messaging services (instant messengers) went into the juice. One of the first successful instances was ICQ, followed by the MSN messenger. MSN was the tiktok of its time: a world where teenagers could hang out for hours and days without adult supervision.
Since MSN was part of Microsoft, Google wanted to compete with it and in 2005 offered Google Talk, including it in the Gmail interface. Let me remind you that in those days there were no smartphones, and web applications were out of the question. All applications needed to be installed on a computer, and Gmail’s web interface was a breakthrough technology. At some point, MSN was even woven into Microsoft Windows, and it was really difficult to remove it from this OS. But Google Chats on the Gmail web interface was much closer to the user, even compared to the program built into the operating system.
Meanwhile, while Google and Microsoft were fighting for hegemony, free software enthusiasts were trying to build a decentralized messenger. The result was XMPP, which, like email, worked over a federated protocol. Many servers could exchange data using this protocol, and each user connected to a specific server through a client installed on himself. After that, the user could communicate with any other user who connected to any server through any client. It is on this principle that the ActivityPub protocol and, accordingly, Fedivers now work.
In 2006 Google talk became compatible with XMPP. Google took XMPP seriously. I remember one day in 2008 I got a call at work. Someone on the other side said, “Hi, we’re from Google, we’d like to offer you a job.” I made several calls and it turned out that they found me through the list of XMPP developers. They were looking for sysadmins to maintain XMPP servers.
So Google has seriously entered the federation. How cool was it? This meant that all of a sudden every single Gmail user was an XMPP user. For XMPP, this is only for the good, right? I was in ecstasy.
How Google killed XMPP
But, as they say, “it was smooth on paper.” First of all, despite the active participation in the development of the XMPP standard, Google was also preparing a closed implementation, which was not allowed to study by anyone. It turns out that they were not too careful about the protocol that they developed. Not everything was implemented. They forced the community to slow down XMPP development to accommodate the process. Pleasant features were not implemented or used in XMPP clients, as they turned out to be incompatible with Google Talk (avatars could not gain a foothold in XMPP for a painfully long time). Federation sometimes failed: it happened that for hours or days there was no communication between Google servers and regular XMPP servers. The XMPP community has repurposed as watchdogs and debuggers for Google servers, reporting irregularities and downtime (I’ve done this a few times myself; this may have been what prompted me to change jobs).
Since the user audience of Google talk was much wider than the audience of “real XMPP users”, there was almost no way to “leave Google talk users by the way”. Newbies who discovered XMPP without being Google talk users themselves found the experience painful, since their contact list was mostly Google Talk users. At first glance, communication with them should have been easy, but in fact the XMPP messenger was a stripped-down version of the Google talk functionality. A typical XMPP contact list included mostly Google Talk users plus a few geeks.
In 2013, Google realized that most XMPP interactions still take place among Google Talk users. Googlers made absolutely no attempt to respect a protocol that they didn’t control 100%. Therefore, they cut off the oxygen for the project and announced that it would no longer be federal. After that, a long story began to develop their own messenger; the first option was Hangout (and then Allo, Duo. I didn’t follow further).
It is expected that none of the Google users raised an eyebrow. In fact, they did not understand what had happened. In the worst case, some of someone’s contacts went offline forever. That’s all. But from the point of view of XMPP federation, the situation looked like most of the users suddenly disappeared somewhere. Even hardcore XMPP fanatics like yours truly have had to create Google accounts to keep in touch with friends. I remind you: for them, we just ended up offline. It was our fault.
While XMPP has survived to this day and remains a very active community, the messenger never recovered from that blow. Exaggerated expectations from “we were taken to Google” turned into severe disappointment and a quiet slide into oblivion. XMPP has gone niche. So niche that when everyone rushed into group chats (Slack, Discord), the free software community simply reinvented such a protocol (called Matrix) to be able to compete – whereas XMPP already had the ability to create group chats. (Disclaimer: I have never studied the Matrix protocol, so I have no idea how it compares to XMPP from a technical point of view. I just think that it solves the same problems as XMPP, and also competes in the same space).
Would the fate of XMPP have been different if the alliance with Google had not taken place, or if the merger with Google had not been considered? You can’t say now. But I am convinced that the community would have grown more slowly and perhaps grown healthier. It would be larger and more significant than it is today. De facto, this would be the main platform for decentralized communication. I am sure of one thing: without an alliance with Google, XMPP would feel no worse than it does now.
This was not the first case: remember the Microsoft Playbook
What Google has done with XMPP has happened before. In fact, in 1998, Microsoft programmer Vinod Wallopllil wrote an open article “Blunting OSS attacks” (rough translation: “How to moderate the appetites of open source”), in which he proposed to “de-commodify (de-share) protocols and applications […]. By building on these protocols and developing new ones, we can keep projects that are developed as free software out of the market.” Microsoft put this into practice with the release of Windows 2000, which supported the Kerberos security protocol. But then this protocol was expanded. The specifications for such extensions could be freely downloaded, but it was required to accept a license that prohibited the implementation of these extensions. As soon as you clicked “OK” – and you lost the ability to work with any open source version of Kerberos. This was done for the sole purpose of killing any competing networking project such as Samba.
Glyn Moody cites this story in his book Rebel Code to demonstrate that the eradication of open source and decentralized projects was indeed deliberate. This never happens by chance and never comes down to “just bad luck.”
Microsoft used a similar tactic to dominate the office market: Microsoft Office began to use proprietary formats (the file format can be thought of as a protocol for data exchange). When alternative solutions (OpenOffice and LibreOffice) learned to open files in doc/xls/ppt formats quite well, Microsoft released a new format, which they called “open and standardized.” This format was deliberately made very complex (20,000 page spec sheet!), and most importantly, wrong. Yes, some bugs were deliberately introduced into the specification, and therefore software that fully implemented the OOXML format would work differently than Microsoft Office.
These bugs, plus high-level lobbying, in particular, led the city of Munich to abandon the idea of switching completely to Linux. So it’s actually a viable strategy. That is why today docx, xlsx and pptx are still the norm. I speak about this from my own experience, as the Munich authorities paid me to work on bringing OOXML rendering in LibreOffice closer to Microsoft standards, which went against the specification.
UPDATE:
Meta and Fedivers
Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to retake them. Exactly the same story happened between Meta (an organization banned in Russia) and Fedivers.
There were rumors that the Meta would become “Fediverse Compatible”. You can create an account on Mastoson and follow your friends’ Instagram feeds from it (the organization is banned in Russia).
I don’t know if there is any grain of truth in these rumors, if it is even possible for Meta to consider such an option. But there is one point that I learned from my own experience working with XMPP and OOXML: if Meta joins Fediverse, then only Meta will benefit from this. In fact, the reaction suggests that this victory is already brewing: there has been a debate in Fediverse about whether to block Meta or not. If the lockdown goes through, we’ll end up with a frustratingly fragmented, two-tier Fediverse that isn’t attractive to newcomers.
UPDATE: These rumors have been confirmed by at least one Mastodon admin, kev, who works at fosstodon.org. He was approached with an invitation to take part in a behind the scenes Meta meeting. He reacted in the best possible way: he politely refused and, most importantly, published this letter with the addressee and addressee. Thank you kev!
I know that we all dream of someday bringing all our relatives and friends to Fediverse in order to completely get rid of the need to communicate in proprietary networks. But Fedivers is not looking for market dominance or profit. Freedom-loving people join Fedivers. If people are not ready for freedom or do not strive for it, this is normal. They are free to remain on proprietary platforms. No one needs to be pulled into Fedivers by force. Do not try to maximize the audience, no matter what it takes. We must be honest and have no doubt that people join Fediverse precisely because they share certain values of this network.
Competing with Meta on the mindless ideology of “growth at any cost”, we will surely lose. They are the aces of this game. It is they who are trying to pull everyone into their field, to involve people in competition, and at the same time they will sell guns to rival parties.
Fedivers can only win by holding its own territory and talking about freedom, morality, ethics and values. By conducting open non-commercial negotiations in which no one is spying on anyone. Recognizing that there is no goal to win. Don’t “support”. The goal is to stay functional. So much so that it serves as an island of freedom for people connected by one chain. This will never be offered to you by a commercial company.
