How the Internet was Meant to Work
Looking back at e-mail to see the future of social media.
A little bit of history
The modern Internet can be traced back to a US Department of Defence project called ARPANET that started in the late 1960s.
ARPANET
The goal of ARPANET was to allow multiple different networks to talk to each other using a single common communication protocol. In those days, each network had its own communication protocol, and a computer operator had to physically get up and walk over to a different computer terminal in order to switch between networks.
One of the biggest innovations to come out of ARPANET was an inter-network communication system called electronic mail, or "e-mail" for short.
Architecture of e-mail
E-mail, as everyone knows, is a way for two people to communicate with each other via electronic messages. However, what you may not realize is that there is no single main e-mail server.
An e-mail address is made up of a username and a server name. This is so that when you send an e-mail, your e-mail server knows which other e-mail server to contact in order to deliver your message.
Due to the fact that these electronic messages have to pass between networks, the entire e-mail system became completely decentralized. There was, and still is, no central authority on these interconnected networks. As long as any two servers can communicate, the system works.
Prior to the invention of e-mail, all communication centered around a single central server on each network.
The modern Internet
In many ways, the modem Internet has gone backwards. We now have multiple social networks which are centralized, and unable to communicate with each other. In order to communicate across one social network you have to leave the one you're busy with and move to the other.
Centralized control
Ever tried to communicate with someone on Facebook from your Twitter account? You can't.
Worse than this, you have no control over any of these social networks. You are completely at the mercy of the whims of these social networks. And you give them all of your personal information with no guarantees on how they're going to use them.
The open source movement
Back in the 70s and early 80s, most software was free. Not only was it free, you could actually get the source code, which allowed software engineers to adapt the software to different computers.
In the early 80s this started to change, as companies like Microsoft started producing proprietary software, and demanding that people pay for software.
This didn't sit well with many software engineers, who didn't like losing control of the software they were using, and started advocating for what they called "free, as in freedom" software. This was the birth of what became known as the open source movement.
Re-decentralization
Many of these open source "hackers" watched the rise of closed proprietary networks like Facebook and Twitter, and didn't like what they saw. It was the modern version of the loss of control they saw in the proprietary software movement of the 80s, disconnecting networks from each other, and a centralization of communication.
Federated social networking
Like they did in the 80s and 90s with the rise of proprietary software, "free software" engineers started writing open source social network software.
OStatus protocol
One of the first implementations was called StatusNet (now called GNU Social), and it used a protocol called OStatus to communicate between StatusNet servers.
Some other implementations that arose soon after were Pump.io, Friendica, amd Mastodon.
ActivityPub protocol
Unfortunately, as with many protocols, OStatus suffered some issues, including security problems. This led to the development of a new standard called ActivityPub.
With the establishment of this new standard, a number of the projects that implemented OStatus moved to using ActivityPub as their server-to-server communication (known as federation).
Some well known examples of projects that use ActivityPub for federation include Mastodon, Nextcloud, and Friendica. Other software includes Pleroma (similar to Twitter and Mastodon), PixelFed (an Instagram clone), and PeerTube (a federated video platform).
Tumbler actually just announced (November 2022) that they will be implementing the ActivityPub protocol too.
Real time chat services
As the Internet developed, in the early days of the world wide web, e-mail was just too slow for people who wanted real time communication, and so a number of realtime chat protocols were developed. The most popular and well known of these was called Internet Relay Chat or IRC for short.
IRC networks
IRC started out as a single server at the University of Oulu in Finland in the late 80s, but quickly spread to more servers around the world, with many of them connecting to each other, forming the first IRC network, a collection of IRC servers.
Eventually, disagreements between IRC servers lead to alternative IRC networks, and today you can choose between quite a number of IRC networks.
IRC, however, was not properly decentralized. You still had a unique nick (username) across the entire network, and all the servers had to essentially "agree" with each other. None of the servers could operate truly independently.
XMPP
In 1999, the XMPP protocol was born as the Jabber protocol. Jabber was more like e-mail, in that your username was tied to a particular server, and you could communicate with different users on different servers.
Jabber was just like e-mail, except it was instant. However, Jabber was more geared toward one-on-one chatting, and many people used both IRC and Jabber.
In 2004, Jabber was formalised as the XMPP protocol, and in 2005 Google announced an XMPP service called Google Talk.
The rise of closed chat
Eventually, Google closed off Google Talk from the rest of the XMPP servers, and morphed Talk into Hangouts, further closing their walls.
Many other chat clients started out using the XMPP protocol, including Facebook's chat feature, which then closed and turned into Messenger.
Many other companies staryed seeing communication as "the killer app" and started developing their own chat clients and protocols. Well known examples are Slack, Discord, Google Chat, HipChat, and Microsoft Teams.
Matrix
During the advent of various closed chat clients, another open source and distributed protocol arose, called Matrix.
Matrix is decentralized, offers end-to-end encryption, and anyone can run their own server and connect to the greater Matrix network.
With the Element chat client, the Matrix protocol offers an experience much like the two biggest closed proprietary chat clients, Slack and Discord.
However, unlike Discord and Slack, all your chat messages are end-to-end encrypted, and the server does not know the contents of the chat messages. And being decentralized, this means that there is no one person or company who can shut down chat rooms or remove users.
Here on Llamarific.social, I run an instance of Matrix and Element. Check out the page on Matrix to get started.
Conclusion
Centralized control allows a single entity to control what happens in a system, and allows for easier censorship and conformity to a single point of view.
Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, Slack... they are all central services, controlled by a single entity. You are subject to their management and their ideologies, and you don't have a say in how they handle your data.
The easiest way to fight back, to control your data, to maintain your privacy and not be subject to someone else, is to leave their servers and move to alternative places that respect your privacy and leave your data with you.
Of course, the best solution to this is to run your own systems, but not everyone can do that. This is why Llamarific.social exists, so that we can provide these alternatives to those who don't have the technical expertise to do it themselves.
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