Federation in social networks, why it's never going to work.

Posted Dec 14, 2017 16:14 UTC (Thu) by jejb (subscriber, #6654)
Parent article: Federation in social networks

I'm afraid any platform that becomes widely federated becomes a problem for its users because anyone can join. This is what lead directly to the spam problem in email: The low barrier to entry means lots of undesirable use cases that users then have to spend time and effort defending against.

Secondly all commercial companies hate federation because it allows their walled gardens to leak. For proof of this look no further than XMPP (how many of you know what it is let alone actually have an XMPP account you use). That was a truly federated IM protocol which pretty much every walled garden uses under the covers but which non expose federation for. Why? well because if a google hangouts user could send a message to a facebook messenger user, neither of them would have any incentive to create an account on the other's services. The size of their accounts table correlates with their advertising revenue so the market drives models where captivity is required. They've killed XMPP federation for this reason and I'm fairly sure if they could get away with it they'd kill SMTP federation as well.

Thirdly governments and regulators see the anyone can federate aspect as a way for evading law enforcement. It may always be under the guise of it's for "criminals and terrorists" but federation gives you no one throat to choke, which they really dislike, so governments support the walled garden approach because then they have a commercial entity to regulate and control.

The point is not that federation is bad but in the current world we've created a vast array of powerful interests that oppose it, which is why it's very difficult to get any truly federated system to be widely accepted.

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Federation in social networks, why it's never going to work.

Posted Dec 14, 2017 20:31 UTC (Thu) by zarrro (guest, #54749) [Link] (4 responses)

> if they could get away with it they'd kill SMTP federation as well.

I think this is slowly happening. The barrier to having your own email server is getting higher and higher.

I mean yes, you can buy a domain, install a server, but the chances are very high that your emails will end up in spam in at least Gmail.

Federation in social networks, why it's never going to work.

Posted Dec 14, 2017 20:47 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I don't know what the numbers are but I wouldn't be surprised if over 90% of email, maybe 95%, had at least one of the sender or recipient being either Microsoft or Google hosted and not on-prem or any other hosting provider.

Federation in social networks, why it's never going to work.

Posted Dec 14, 2017 21:33 UTC (Thu) by jcrawfordor (guest, #114167) [Link] (2 responses)

I sadly agree with you here, when people ask me about running their own mail I tell them the easiest way to run a mail server is to pay someone else to do it!

I think this illuminates one of the big problems with federated systems... email has become the maintenance nightmare it is today for a few reasons, many of which are direct results of federation: ad-hoc methods of combating spam, and compatibility issues that tend to prevent making any changes to the protocol without nasty hacks around old implementations.

Newer systems seem to be a little less sensitive on the latter issue because most newer federation systems are using markup languages and other kinds of structured data that will encourage older implementations to just ignore content they don't understand.

As for spam, the OStatus/ActivitySub system does have a bit of a trick there. Because instances generally only start subscribing to other instances when one of their users follow a user on that other instance, new instances that appear on the network just to produce spam will tend not to be subscribed to by anyone. It's still possible for spammers to do things like pushing direct messages, but the attack surface is a little smaller than it might seem. Doing something like rejecting all pushes from an instance that no one on the current instance subscribes to are reasonably low cost measures that might seriously knock down spam potential.

Federation in social networks, why it's never going to work.

Posted Dec 15, 2017 10:51 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (1 responses)

"As for spam, the OStatus/ActivitySub system does have a bit of a trick there. Because instances generally only start subscribing to other instances when one of their users follow a user on that other instance, new instances that appear on the network just to produce spam will tend not to be subscribed to by anyone."

My only knowledge about microblogging is that Twitter has a really high profile user, but don't these microblogs get comments or answers? In that case the spammers can send their spam in comments and answers...

Federation in social networks, why it's inevitable

Posted Dec 21, 2017 3:55 UTC (Thu) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link]

"don't these microblogs get comments or answers? In that case the spammers can send their spam in comments and answers"

At the end of the day it's web-of-trust moderation. White/pass-lists and Black/block-lists and experiments with various graylisting techniques in between. Sources of spam get moderated/untrusted, perhaps fractionally and incrementally. Spam was never a problem for people who used whitelists of contacts that go to their main inbox with everything else going to a check-once-in-a-blue-moon folder if not /dev/null.

Also, 'microblogging' is stupid. Add a feature to make a default display have a message size limit, with a one-click away from 'more' and you can support both users with not much to say, and lots to say.

Finally, I consider the widespread prohibition of home/mobile servers by ISPs to be the real impediment. If that barrier were removed, development would happen exponentially faster. As in 5 years ago we'd have had stuff way better than we will in reality 5 years from now. The development that goes on with the w3c's blessing is political distraction from the field of opportunities to experiment everyone should have with their ordinary home/mobile internet service. The internet is and should be more than just http/s. It should be a place where people are free to develop and experiment with new protocols without having to negotiate permission from their ISP/gatekeeper.

Federation in social networks, why it's never going to work.

Posted Dec 21, 2017 4:42 UTC (Thu) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link] (1 responses)

> Thirdly governments and regulators see the anyone can federate aspect
> as a way for evading law enforcement. It may always be under the guise
> of it's for "criminals and terrorists" but federation gives you no one throat
> to choke, which they really dislike, so governments support the walled
> garden approach because then they have a commercial entity to regulate
> and control.

My government actually runs a public XMPP server which supports federation…

Federation in social networks, why it's never going to work.

Posted Dec 21, 2017 4:44 UTC (Thu) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

Also: XMPP isn't exactly the protocol you want to use for "anonymous" communication as a terrorist.