this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) (ploum.net)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The whole article is good. I was about to quote this part.

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.

We will need to be very vigilent with how things proceed here.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Absolutely, very vigilant. I want nothing from the bad corps. and especially just here. Though I use some things from some of them, try to keep it minimal.