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How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) (web.archive.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Interesting article, thanks for posting. I've used a few Matrix servers that use bridges to Discord and I've noticed a similar effect where they'll occasionally go down for extended periods of time. As nice as the idea is to use Element over Discord it's a lot easier to stick to the mainstream where people are and technical issues are at a minimum.

I'll admit this part did go a bit over my head.

What Google did to XMPP was not new. In fact, in 1998, Microsoft engineer Vinod Vallopllil explicitly wrote a text titled "Blunting OSS attacks" where he suggested to "de-commoditize protocols & applications […]. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS project’s entry into the market."

Microsoft put that theory in practice with the release of Windows 2000 which offered support for the Kerberos security protocol. But that protocol was extended. The specifications of those extensions could be freely downloaded but required to accept a license which forbid you to implement those extensions. As soon as you clicked "OK", you could not work on any open source version of Kerberos. The goal was explicitly to kill any competing networking project such as Samba.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'll admit this part did go a bit over my head.

It's referring to a strategy more commonly called 'triple e' or 'embrace, extend, extinguish' pioneered by Microsoft in the late 90's. The gist of it was that MS would adopt open standards and create proprietary extensions to the standard that were only usable on their platform. This would break the ability of users of non MS software to communicate with those in Microsoft's ecosystem and push users off those platforms.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the response. I was more referring to that specific example. The article talked about Microsoft dealing with word processors and linked that Wikipedia page.