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      Instant messaging: how to combine communication and freedom in a sustainable way / Part 1: What is the problem?

      Yannv · Friday, 29 January, 2021 - 08:35 edit · 5 minutes

    WHY should we take advantage of the massive abandonment of #whatsapp to restore freedom in instant messaging?

    Open standards, the cradle of the Internet

    Opte Project

    Unlike the telephone network - historically managed by a single company in most countries - the Internet consists of tens of thousands of interconnected networks managed globally by service providers: companies, associations, universities, governments and other entities.

    The Internet embodies a technical idea: that of an open architecture allowing the connection of heterogeneous networks. This open architecture reflected the founding spirit of the Internet: neutrality, sharing and freedom.

    But it is not enough to physically link the networks: a common language is also needed. And it is thanks to the open standards, managed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), that these heterogeneous networks were able to communicate with each other as a single network. This made it possible to achieve the success we know today.

    Thus, in a collaborative research project , universal communication protocols were born which allow access to resources by name (DNS), reading web pages (HTTP), exchanging e-mails (SMTP, IMAP, JMAP) and exchanging messages instantaneously (XMPP).

    It is thanks to this that anyone can create content, offer services, exchange products and chat freely without having to ask permission from a central authority!

    The mailbox or mail

    The first versions of the "current" mail appeared in 1982, and came out of the IETF Network Working Group, in the form of the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP). Subsequently, mail has evolved by gradually adding new possibilities, while still being accessible to all. This 39-year-old standard is still fully present in everyday life. A simple exchange of e-mails highlights these ideas which have not changed since its origins:

    • Your correspondent is not obliged to use the same email provider as you, so that you can exchange emails: an email address at yahoo can correspond with an email address at sfr.
    • The email is readable whatever your hardware and your software / application.
    • You have the freedom to change your provider or even be your own provider while continuing to communicate with your old contacts. Just give them your new address.

    Instant messaging

    Instant messaging systems soon drifted towards extreme partitioning. The Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which appeared in 1988 as an open standard, successively gave rise to a series of closed protocols, derived from ICQ, AIM, Yahoo messenger and MSN software.

    In 2004, the XMPP protocol was standardised by the IETF, finally allowing the emergence of a modern universal standard.

    #xmpp in figures

    This web includes more than 13 000 servers in the world, bringing together individuals, associations ("La quadrature du net", "l'april", "les chatons" ...), companies, multinationals and governments...

    There is a multitude of clients with all kinds of technologies (web, native, in a terminal, etc.), different uses (blogging, sav, games, IOT) and on all types of platforms (Linux, Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android).

    Despite the emergence of this modern universal standard, the waltz of messaging software continues: this software is associated with each company's flagship products, all of which are incompatible with each other: Skype, Facebook messenger, Whatsapp, iMessage, Telegram, for the best known.

    In their early days, some software, such as Facebook messenger or Skype, were compatible with the XMPP standard. But once the number of users was sufficient, they came out of it to create their closed network.

    This fragmentation is so marked that nowadays, users of these different networks are unable to communicate with each other: they are compartmentalised, and can hardly get out of it because of the network effect: they would have to convince all their contacts to switch to another network or to use an open standard protocol to be able to communicate again.

    At present, it is sad to observe a plethora of protocols, each one more incompatible than the other. There is no concerted work with the IETF to ensure that everyone can communicate with each other. On the contrary, instant messaging players are forcing their "standards" or voluntarily closing their networks.

    The case #signal: technically "free" and "decentralised", but in practice closed and centralised, just like its proprietary counterparts

    • The client, server and protocol source code is open source
    • It is therefore possible to create an alternative server with the same server and client software.
    • But its developer is against the principle of an open network with federated servers:
    • signal dev I'm not OK with LibreSignal using our servers, and I'm not OK with LibreSignal using the name "Signal.". You're free to use our source code for whatever you would like under the terms of the license, but you're not entitled to use our name or the service that we run.

    • wikipedia Signal's developers chose to use a centralised network architecture to provide the service17. This choice is intrinsically political and it is often difficult to place the cursor between security and accessibility. The developers justify their decision by the fact that it is difficult to develop rapidly on decentralised networks, which would not all be up to date and therefore secure. Developers argue that decentralisation is not an end in itself and that it is preferable to hand over metadata to a trusted actor who deletes it, rather than to several potentially unreliable ones39,17.

    • The consequence of this choice is that the signal is captive to its users, just like other proprietary networks.

    Closing remarks

    The sustainability of a communication system is measured by the number of users and the openness of its governance. It is thanks to this that e-mails work everywhere in the world and that you can access web pages independently.

    Today, instant messaging, combined with social networks, is increasingly present in everyone's life. The Internet has always been a free space. Alas, the most commonly used instant messaging systems today are building walls that threaten this freedom.

    So why not use open instant messaging that respects collectively defined standards?

    We would thus be opting for free, universal and borderless communication, reflecting the founding spirit of openness of the Internet.

    author : Yann, reading : Ludivine / Hugo, schematics : Mathieu, published on the XMPP network from the #movim web client.

    You can comment on this article via the XMPP network by first logging into movim (with your xmpp account or by creating a new one) and going to this address.