Matrix announced today the Final countdown to 1.0
Hurray!
Month: May 2019
From Open Source to Open Communication
I just got around to reading mhoye’s article The Evolution Of Open and it challenged and changed my perspective in a good way, relevant to how Matrix fits in to the quest for “open” communications systems for the benefit of society as a whole.
I was focused on decentralization tech, empowering users to technically control their identity (see: “Self-Sovereign Identity“) as the primary need to concentrate on.
After reading that post, I’m seeing how empowering users needs to be at a much more social level, having communities that can technically communicate with anyone but practically need to set loose boundaries in variety of ways, having the personal and collective ability to “tune out” messages and people and entire communities that are abusive or just uninteresting to them.
It’s not that we shouldn’t all be open to hearing view from people who are different from us, it’s that if we allow everyone on the planet to shout into our ears at an equal volume, that’s not effective communication, it’s no use at all. (And spammers use spam bots to amplify their unwanted inputs.) Rather, we need ways to go selectively and occasionally to hear different views, moderated by people we trust.
In the #synchronicity channel the Matrix founder Matthew expressed reservations about how, in the article, federated systems are positioned as detrimental to providing a safe “open space” for all participants to be free from online abuses. The author writes, “I believe that federated infrastructure – that is, a focus on distributed and resilient services – is a poor substitute for an accountable infrastructure that prioritizes a distributed and healthy community”. Matthew countered that federated systems “have an existential reason to fix” that problem. Big-corp silos have financial reasons to address the problems of safe inclusion, and indeed have “health” and “reputation” teams dedicated to it, but they are only ever going to do so in profitable ways, which could be insidiously worse. Maybe the perspective expressed was what’s available today rather than future-looking. Today, the “best” moderation is achieved in some profitable silos. For the future, it seems obvious to me that federation is part of the solution, even though it poses challenges, and that point seems to be missed.
After reading and pondering these issues, I raise the priority of my ability as a user to control the rules that my federated messaging server applies to me, and to migrate to one that suits me better, above the technical ability to run my own instance of such a server.
Hoping Mozilla Embraces Matrix for Chat
Mozilla, bastion of the Open Internet, intends to switch its communications from the ancient and very open IRC, to … well, something better, as Mike Hoye explains in the articles Synchronous Text and Goals And Constraints.
My concern is that the first article suggests an intention to look for a complete packaged solution — “We are not rolling our own”. it reads to me like the hope is that not only is the software packaged, but also a hosting service and also the management of the service, and that brings to my mind such things as the handling of complaints and legal bureaucracy. Such a solution is likely to be commercial and closed, because commerce has found there is a great demand for such systems and developed some.
The state of open communication systems is fragmented and rough-edged in comparison, even though great progress has been made on some fronts. Perhaps open communication systems are under-valued by the governments, universities and open-source organizations that might have power to resource their development. They might see that email works very well and many other channels are available and think that the commercial market is doing a good job in developing new alternatives and doing society a favour in making them available for use for no charge. Perhaps the decision makers have not the background, the insight and the careful consideration it takes to be able to see the other side of the equation. Anyway, the result is that the development of open systems hasn’t really been pushed by larger society, and it seems to me only now in the last few years are we (society) starting to understand an inkling what we are missing because of that.
As someone who feels aligned with Mozilla’s view of the social values and ethics of an open internet, I have been quietly wishing that they and other organizations will increasingly help push open systems into the mainstream. The possibility of them adopting a proprietary communication system quite upsets me.
I admire the foresight of the French government for boldly choosing Matrix for their chat system.
I took the opportunity to drop some hints in this direction in my response today to Mozilla’s “Reimagine the Web” Survey.
The specific issue of replacing Mozilla’s main real-time communication network is being discussed in a room/channel named Synchronicity on Matrix and on IRC, and they plan to start standing up candidate solutions and evaluating them soon. I don’t have much available hobby time to participate, but I hope to throw a few tuits into that space if I can.
Mozilla’s “Reimagine the Web” Survey
My responses to Mozilla’s “Reimagine the Web” Survey; your responses are needed by 14th May.
- I consider myself to be:
- Tech savvy
- favorite thing about the internet:
- removes tedium like posting paper order forms; learn serious and fun things; work from home
- the term “open internet” is best explained as:
- my connections, data and activities are legally and practically owned and controlled by me, not by freebie-service lock-you-in companies
- Thinking about the future of the internet leaves you feeling:
- Super excited!
- Who is most responsible for making the internet a good place to be?
- big corps Won’t; gov’t Should but in UK is not proactive (encouraging to see French gov’t pushing open tech like Matrix); we users Are theoretically responsible for this part of our society but don’t know about the issue or what to do about it
- What values are most important for ensuring a healthy online experience?
- trust and reputation: to decide whose blogs, news, product ads to trust, I need the ability to share and manage reputation of users and companies
- What are the main challenges we, as a society, face on the internet at the moment?
- Privacy violations, Lack of Civility, Centralization of control
- What should Mozilla’s role in contributing to a healthy online experience focus on?
- Encouraging advocates of openness to work together, because hackers often prefer working in a sandbox but linked systems are key to open internet. Both encouraging individuals and especially forging relationships among organizations (smaller ones, bigger ones like Apache, FSF, Debian, any at all).
- Seeding initiatives to improve linking and viability of open internet projects, especially important but un-sexy areas that aren’t already addressed by enough volunteers, like ways for everyone to store and back up all kinds of their personal data.
- Teaching newcomers and general net citizens about the issues.
Ways to Delete Messages in a Matrix Federation?
The topic of purging obsolete/old/unwanted content is an important one for the Matrix ecosystem, as for other distributed systems. It’s not easy for developers and users to get our heads around all the desired and possible meanings of removal — from a user selectively removing items just from their own view, through servers garbage-collecting unreachable content, right up to a federation admin asking all servers in their federation to remove content and push that request out to their client apps which might honour the request.
It would be helpful if we could develop or refer to a set of descriptions of the different scenarios, that link the user’s point of view on the one hand to the system/protocol/server point of view on the other hand, with analogies to more familiar technologies like paper mail and email. Probably someone in the distributed systems world has already written this up. What would be very helpful is having some labels/terms/URIs to refer to them.
Without that, we are always going to be asking what a particular “Delete room” or “Delete user” or “Delete message” API or UI button really means. Without that, we are always going to be wrongly guessing what a user or another admin really wants to achieve.
Anybody know of such a write-up that we could borrow?
How healthy is the internet?
Mozilla has published The Internet Health Report 2019. I’ll be browsing many of its short articles.