Protocols, not Platforms
And why prayer is the only way to secure a truly free and open internet
I recently came across this article (via HN), which makes a cogent argument for an optimistic future of the internet being defined by interoperable protocols. Since around the time of the 2020 election, I’ve been exploring this space and trying to figure out where I can put my limited efforts to make a difference. There’s a world of new decentralized tech, summarized here by @JayGraber, but the more I look at the new tech, the less interested I am in a monolithic do-everything solution.
Scuttlebutt was for a while my favorite, because it had a story (if not yet implemented) for moderation, privacy, direct peer-to-peer information sharing, and social features. But it is a very data-hungry protocol, requiring every peer to store tons of data. And, because of its eventually-consistent model, it can only provide a stale, incomplete view of the world at any given time.
I have no doubt the other protocols mentioned in Graber’s all have something to contribute to real technological progress in this area. For now though, none of them is really standard, and won’t be until there’s some level of adoption.
In the meantime, RSS/Atom has that buy-in, and I’ve become more and more convinced that that’s as good a place to start as any. Even if web publishing transitions to something more cutting edge, there will need to be a migration path away from RSS. It may not be ideal, but it’s the best we have, as is often (always) the case with technical solutions.
RSS is as successful as it is because it piggy-backs on the web, and interoperates with anything, even to some extent walled gardens. It also is old enough to have had some of the major kinks at least spackled over, for example with WebSub.
So, I’m thinking about creating my own blog engine. The idea is that it would have two pages: my blog, generated from my RSS feed, and a “network” blog, generated by aggregating and sorting other RSS feeds I want to “re-blog”. To me, the gold standard in social media has been Twitter, so I’ll be heavily borrowing from their model for my own content and interface. In practice though, the result will likely be a mix of tweets, longer-form posts, short podcasts, and email newsletters, on a variety of topics.
The email newsletter aspect is particularly challenging. I don’t want to spam my subscribers with low-quality tweet-like content, or content they don’t care about, since I will likely publish highly technical posts like these alongside more liberal-artsy-type content and even devotional content. But my very favorite “social media” right now is an email newsletter one of my friends publishes twice weekly: the first edition is a traditional blog post, but it ends with a question for his readers; the second edition is a compilation of those answers.
Getting back to the technical side of things, part of my motivation in thinking through all this is the movement of “deplatforming”. I align strongly with political and cultural conservatives, who are currently being lumped into the same category as every other undesirable, and summarily ignored.
Other than being denied the network effects of a giant social media platform, there are a few specific threats against free publishing on the traditional web that have been rattling around in my head lately, and some limited things we can do about them. I’d love to hear about any pushback or amplification you might have on these.
Hosting. As we saw with Parler, it’s not safe to trust anyone for your technical infrastructure. Get your own server, or at least distribute your infrastructure across multiple providers simultaneously.
DNS. This hasn’t happened to my knowledge, but it would be quite easy for a domain registrar to deplatform someone by removing all their DNS records. There’s no easy solution here that I know of, other than using multiple independent domains registered with multiple registrars.
Certificate Authorities. In 2019, Kazakhstan’s government started abusing its role as the root certificate authority by hijacking its citizens’ HTTPS connections and injecting ads. A reasonable protection against this would be to use end-to-end encryption.
ISPs. ISPs can block sites or inject content into unencrypted traffic, since they mediate every request you make. This is a pretty well-known attack, and is traditionally handled by using SSL and a VPN.
What can’t be overcome in the same way is if access controls are applied to any layer of the internet’s infrastructure at all, requiring you to authenticate with a centrally-issued account in order to use a hosting provider, DNS server, CA, or ISP. I don’t see that happening soon, but it would effectively lock undesirables out of the network entirely.
The only recourse to this would be to build an entirely independent technical infrastructure. But if land ownership, debt, etc. are governed by the same authority that locks people out of the internet, this couldn’t be done in the traditional way either. If fiber optic cables, cell towers, and satellites are available only to a privileged few, all that’s left is essentially radio communications.
At this point I’m well outside my areas of expertise, but I know there are worldwide systems of radio relays allowing global decentralized networks of communication, and I have no doubt someone has implemented TCP/IP over radio. Of course radio can be jammed, but this might be the most resilient way forward for keeping the internet as we know it open to all members of our society.
</tinfoilhat>
Or, we could do what God told the Jews in exile to do:
Build houses and dwell in them; plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, so that they may bear sons and daughters — that you may be increased there, and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the Lord for it; for in its peace you will have peace.
It’s funny, I spend so much time thinking about how the totalitarian hand of the Left is coming down on God’s people, and then I read a Psalm and spend some time in prayer, and think “why is this important again”?
Local community and communion with the saints cannot be deplatformed. Even under the harshest circumstances, Jesus has promised never to forsake us. We are at all times connected with the entire body of Christ in prayer through the Holy Spirit. That’s our social network, our communication infrastructure.
The sacrament of the First Amendment pales in comparison with our direct line to the one who made the heavens and the earth. Whatever technological tools for building civilization crumble, we will always have access who bled and died for us, and no one is able to snatch us out of His hand.
Coming up with technical solutions to social problems is still worth doing, just… have fun with it, ok?