Re: universal friction, was Outsourcing

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On Sun, Jan 1, 2023 at 10:11 PM John R Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 1 Jan 2023, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> If you want a walled garden, there's no shortage of them but I have two
>> observations.
>
> If you read to the end you will see that I am absolutely opposed to walled
> gardens.

We may have a terminology issue here.  If only people on an approved list
can contact you, for me that is the definition of a walled garden.

Then you have the wrong definition. It makes no sense as a metaphor and more importantly, it has nothing to do with the objections made to Facebook, Twitter, WAP, Signal etc. being walled gardens.

The problem with a walled garden is that there is only one wall for all the inmates, the only way to contact the inmates is to become one. and then you can't contact anyone else.

My goal is to give everyone maximal personal autonomy, that means they don't have to take your calls unless they want to, they don't even have to be aware you are trying to contact you.

 
> The exception to that in my current code is that there is one message, a
> contact request message that is authorized by default. So, if I have your
> contact address (john@xxxxxxxxxxx, @john_levine, whatever) and I don't
> already have you in my contacts, the first message I send, is a contact
> exchange request saying 'Hi I am PHB, can I send you messages'.

The introduction problem is very hard.  Speaking as a spammer, I plan to
buy lists of millions of addresses (which are widely and cheaply
available) and send introduction requests to all of them.  If they don't
say yes, I'll do it over and over, maybe with slightly different
identities and requests, and we've just moved the spam into the
introductions. 

Not true.

The value of sending this activity is considerably less than the value of actually sending a message. Incentive management is a powerful tool.

I have never had a problem with spammers on Twitter or Facebook. The issues that do arise tend to be issues like catfishing etc. which is a problem but it is not a problem of someone not wanting the communication, it is a problem of someone not wanting the person on the other side to be a scumbag of the slimy variety.

Of course any channel can be spammed, but spamming my contact exchange channel doesn't get in the way of my regular communications which is a win for a start.

Having to use heuristics or requiring introductions from a friend of a friend or whatever for my contact channel is not ideal but it is a heck of a lot less of a problem than having them interrupting every communication.

Like I said, Madonna is going to need peeps to manage her contact channel. but she probably has a rule that gives instant approval to contact requests from other a-listers and she probably gets requests from certain folk on certain lists personally. But 

 
The only way I know of to prevent that is to add friction
to limit the number of requests you can send, but now you have to figure
out how to tell that requests from many different addresses go into the
same friction bucket because they are from the same sender, for some
version of "same".

There are more and better solutions.

 
Or if I buy someting frome an online vendor, I would like to get status
updates from that vendor.  How do I add them to my whitelist?  Do we
invent some new handshake so as part of the order they tell me what
address to add?  Seems awfully complicated.  You can't do it manually
since in the paragraph above a lot of my spam intro requests say "I am the
vendor from whom you just bought something".

If the transaction is mediated through a Mesh enabled interaction, that can be done automatically as part of the transaction. Or there can be automatic authorization for contact requests or certain communications from bookmarked sites.

 
If the rule is that I only get to use one address, nope.  I have nine
phone numbers and use about a thousand e-mail addresses, all quite
legitimately, and I am not interested in an "improved" system where I
can't do that or something close to it.

The Mesh allows you to use as many addresses and accounts as you like. But it doesn't require you to partition systems to achieve weak versions of what public key cryptography does right.

 

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