What is the title of this LibrePlanet 2022 Lightning Talk? Free/Libre Standards for Social Media and other Communications Who is giving this talk? * Paul Fernhout https://pdfernhout.net What is the talk format in? * A plain-text IBIS-inspired notation What is the motivation for this talk? * A message in Vernor Vinge's 1992 novel "A Fire Upon the Deep" (from an intergalactic Usenet): Crypto: 0 As-Received-By: OOB shipboard ad hoc Language-Path: Arbwyth->Trade 24->Cherguelen->Triskweline, SjK units From: Twirlip of the Mists [Perhaps an organization of cloud fliers in a single jovian system. Very sparse priors.] Subject: Blighter Video thread Keywords: Hexapodia as the key insight Distribution: Threat of the Blight Date: 8.68 days since Fall of Relay Text of message: I haven't had a chance to see the famous video from Straumli Realm, except as an evocation. (My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true that humans have six legs? I wasn't sure from the evocation. If these humans have three pairs of legs, then I think there is an easy explanation for --MORE-- What is a current example of a breakdown in communications and sensemaking? * The Ukraine disaster is in that way a failure of communication and sensemaking. * The people in every country -- including Russia -- have a reasonable desire to feel secure and connected to global prosperity * A solution involving bombing civilians in other countries is unlikely to be the best answer to creating national or global security or better connections to global prosperity. * Unfortunately, Russia made its decision to bomb civilians in Ukraine and their life-supporting infrastructure without adequate local or global discussion of alternatives that might have better achieved intrinsic mutual security for all. * One sign of this as a failure of sensemaking is that Sergey Beseda, head of the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch, was recently arrested along with his deputy, Anatoly Bolyukh. * See also my related comment on some roots of Putin's tragic and misinformed choice and how free software for global intelligence and sensemaking might have helped prevent this tragedy: * "A Newer Way of Thinking" https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20961465&cid=62351773 * People can recognize there is a problem but then jump to the wrong solution * Email and IRC Chat have problems, but Facebook and Slack were unlikely to be the best answer. What are some problems with email? * Spam on your TODO list * HTML email privacy risks * HTML email security risks * Masquerading with lies about name and website * Pfishing * Management of attachments * Limited file sizes for attached documents, pictures, and especially videos * Not editable after sent What are problems with IRC? * No images * Too fragmented * Hard to setup * Not searchable What are problems with Facebook? * Privacy * Proprietary standards * Proprietary implementations * No local copies * Can be censored or disconnected at any time * Diverting attention via advertising * Directing attention with algorithms to increase wealth concentration * Increased outrage * Information overload in different ways * Immoral in a LibrePlanet sense of values and priorities (see also 42 Negative Affirmations of Maat Ancient Egypt example) What are problems with Slack? * See "Reasons Not to Use Slack for Free Software Development" (2016) https://pdfernhout.net/reasons-not-to-use-slack-for-free-software-development.html * Slack can change its TOS at any time * Slack can cut you or your community off at any time * You need to be online to use Slack * Slack copies the contents of secret URLs * Slack makes government surveillance easier * Slack is a single point of failure for your community * Slack's privacy policy guarantees very little * Slack is focused on teams, not communities * Slack limits are not advertised (like 5000 users maximum per "team") * It costs a lot to search or delete older messages * Your Slack discussions for free software projects are not public or findable * Slack private messages may not be very private * Slack may change ownership at any time What are key insights for moving forward? * Standards unify; incompatible services fragment * The power of plain text * Simple Made Easy ( Rich Hickey https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ ) * A democratic government is a special case of a free/libre software community What are current free alternatives? * Matrix.org * GNU social * Mastodon * Mattermost (can import from Slack) * Wordpress + plugins * Drupal + plugins * Nextcloud * Email with better clients and servers including using JMAP, Nylas, mailpile etc * IRC with better clients * Smallest Federated Wiki (Ward Cunningham) * Citadel * Kolab * Diaspora * A plain website of text files using Git * Twirlip (my own experiments, very rough) * Many others What are problems with free alternatives? * Usually more about implementations than standards * Hard to start using * Fragmentation of user bases with walled gardens * Often not federated * May not scale (like to trillions of messages) * Design missing the big messaging picture (e.g. whether email can be used to edit wikis) What is my guess at what the future holds for innovation in messaging? * Free/Libre standards that unify messaging, with free implementations (a social semantic desktop?) Example? * Could be as simple as JSON-ish with a schema perhaps with references via content hashes, as git-ish blockchain-ish merkle-tree-ish secured conversations: { __type: "fsf-email2", from: "pdfernhout@kurtz-fernhout.com", to: "colleague@example.com", timestamp: "2022-03-19T13:20:12+0000", authorizationToken: "jlkjlkdjlfh87298723ljlj", replyTo: "sha256-hash-of-a-message-plus-size-and-type", editOf: "sha256-hash-of-a-previous-message-plus-size-and-type", subject: "Re: 2020 LibrePlanet Lightning talk" message: "Hello! Here is the lightning talk video.", attachments: ["pdfernhout.net/twirlip/some-hash"], semanticRDFTriples: [{ ... }, { .... }] } * Obligatory XKCD on "How Standards Proliferate": https://xkcd.com/927/ * It is the social consensus issues that are hard at this point, not the technical ones * We need less, not more: less standards, less code, less features, less division & stupidity * We need better: better standards, better code, better features, better peacemaking & sensemaking What are ways to change behavior related to communications? (Lawrence Lessig, Code 2.0) * Rules (Hierarchy/Planning) * Norms (Culture/Meshwork) * Prices (Exchange) * Infrastructure (Gifts from the Past) Could a new FSF Campaign for Free/Libre communication standards help with this? * Yes + Important issue to deal with proprietary Services as a Software Substitute trap + Many free software developers care about free standards and communications + Enough Free Software developers using something might create a de-facto standard + Other organizations may put non-free copyrights or patents on their standards - Diversion from main mission of FSF from promoting free software - There are other communities who care more about standards - It's a really hard social problem and may be endless frustrating