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Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

The killer app of centralized chat systems is their general protections against unwelcome abusive contact from strangers (spam, harassment, death threats). Everyone focuses on the protocol but I focus on the experience, what with having been stalked for twenty years by an Internet-competent stalker. So I see nothing in this Modern XMPP website that is competitive on that point, which means I'll likely continue ignoring XMPP, same as I do IRC these days. Is there something I've missed that Modern XMPP implements that protects against abusers?

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I'm sorry that's happened to you. There definitely should be ways to mitigate that. There's not a lot happening on this front to my knowledge in the Jabber/XMPP ecosystem, but there's already building blocks in place which effectively limit abuse:

- Jabber addresses (JIDs) are not broadcast to everyone in public chat, only to the admins of services you use, except in private encrypted chatrooms (for encryption key retrieval) - most public chatrooms support nicknames, so you can have different nicknames in every room - it's easy with some clients to support multiple accounts to separate your activities - your address cannot be automatically gathered from 3rd party information (eg. a phone number) unless you precisely declare it in your contact information (vCard) or use a server which relies on such feature (like quicky.im to use your phone number as account name) - 3rd party information cannot be leaked from your address unless you explicitly declare it in your contact information (vCard) ; it's quite common for services based on phone numbers such as Signal to leak your phone number to third parties

Unfortunately, there is nothing yet like a Web of Trust or reputation system which you could use, for example to only display friend requests from friends of friends or something like that. And there's no support for single-use aliases as we have in the email world. But there is some level of interest for that and other fields of experimentation, and there's overall strong interest in keeping users safe and happy from the community at large, and a vast majority of server operators.

Many servers are operated by non-profits and much like in the Fediverse don't hesitate to defederate with a server whose admins are not interested in preventing abuse from their network. Following some issues with misogynistic neonazis in a public chatrooms a few months ago, we also setup a chatroom to discuss such issues on xmpp:abuse@joinjabber.org?join and you're more than welcome to join us and formulate ideas on how we can improve in this domain. In case you don't want to setup an account for that, you can reach the chatroom via https://anon.joinjabber.org (works on Tor browser).

It's okay. It started on ICQ and it's continued on every major Internet-connected social network that has ever existed. Exhaustion appears to have set in somewhat, but I'm still comforted to hear that you're studying the problem.

There's certainly no support for "I don't wish to be contacted by people who are confirmed abusers" (which requires some sort of centralization and human review), because neither voting nor web of trust on their own will address the problems of sock puppets online versus real human beings, cooperative manipulation by groups of abusers, and how to select among all possible codes of conducts for one that defines and demonstrates acceptable (to me) decisions about what is abusive behavior.

I appreciate the invite, but my day job takes priority, and I'm not able to allocate time for side projects this year.

> neither voting nor web of trust on their own will address the problems of sock puppets online versus real human beings, cooperative manipulation by groups of abusers

That's definitely what WoTs are about, because a group of harassers trying to boost one another's reputation will not be part of your social graph (or at least not closely) so their scheme would be useless.

The main reason WoTs have turned out of fashion is they leak an incredible about of metadata about interpersonal relationships, which can lead to imprisonment or outright death ("We kill based on metadata" - NSA). However there's active research as part of the GNU/Net project on Fog Of Trust, a zero-knowledge implementation of a WoT which preserves the social graph. I hope more serious cryptographers give this approach a look because from my non-cryptographer's perspective it looks like it would offer the best from both worlds of decentralized WoTs and centralized anti-abuse systems.

> how to select among all possible codes of conducts

The problem with CoCs is they're abstract constructs often disconnected from actual moderation practices. You can have the worst CoC or no COC at all and very friendly/respectful admins who will go to lengths to protect their users, or on the contrary a very good-looking CoC that will never be respected in practice because admins will find a loophole in there or threaten you for your outstanding hysteria when pointing out that you've been receiving hundreds of death/rape threats in the past hours.

It's the same as with any legal system. Of course a more respectful legal code is better than a bad legal code, but that's not what's actually solving problems. Legal tools cannot solve human (political) problems, only we collectively can do it. The same can be said about the law in most countries, it's just on paper but however it gets applied/interpreted is up to the cops and judges who are happy to make your life as a victim more miserable.

> I appreciate the invite, but my day job takes priority, and I'm not able to allocate time for side projects this year.

Good luck for the day job! If by any chance you can still find time to collect a few links you find would give us important perspective on the topic, or even to write down your own reflections, consider us interested.

You hit on the real core problem: There's no connection between the legal protections against abusive behaviors by strangers and unrestricted communication with strangers over the Internet :)

Well if you believe legal constructs and centralized law enforcement are the answer to abusive behavior, then sure. In my case, and that of most people i know, it's very rarely brought any satisfying solution, even when not talking about internet abuse. I have exactly zero trust in the judicial system and law enforcement agencies, and to be more precise as an anarcha-feminist i believe their structure and culture is part of the problem, promoting many forms of abuse across society.

See for example Angela Davis in "Are prisons obsolete?" or Emma Goldman in "Prisons: a social crime and failure" for (dated) explorations of these questions.

XEP-0191 (Blocking command): https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0191.html

It's a draft XEP, so it's not widely implemented yet. I know the server I'm using supports it via a plugin, but I don't think even Conversations supports it yet.

The one thing I do think XMPP really has going on for privacy protection is that multi-user chats can be configured to not give out the real JID of members to other members, which is something I kind of miss in Matrix.

> It's a draft XEP, so it's not widely implemented yet.

Just to pick on this, sorry. The XSF terminology is not obvious (it was inherited from other standards organizations).

Draft here means the protocol is absolutely in use, it just means that it is theoretically open to changes. The next stage is "Final", and that is typically only reached after substantial time in production (it's basically a statement that the document is 100% finished and won't ever be updated).

There have been proposals to change the term "Draft" to "Active" or similar.

XEP-0191 is supported by practically all servers: https://compliance.conversations.im/test/xep0191/

And supported by all modern clients.

Block commands are not the solution I'm describing, sorry.

If the Block command is the network's only available abuse prevention tool, then chat network has failed to do a good enough of job of implementing anti-abuse protections.

(I'm aware that some people don't believe in network-level anti-abuse protections, and I'm not going to try to convince anyone to agree with me. This is just how I evaluate whether a given chat network is accessible to me or not. XMPP is one such network, and doesn't have any, so.)

So what are you looking for?

Do you mean forced non-anomymity to the provider so every time you block them they need a new phone number to contact you again?

Figuring out the right combination of G-lines to get some bastard to stay out on IRC is a bit trickier, certainly, but I'm sufficiently stubborn that even the worst of the harassers I've been chasing down for users have given up before I have.

I don't know if what you describe is the answer, but certainly I mean "someone is implementing anti-attacker processes upon new signups and existing accounts", so that the majority of abusive attacks are stopped before I'm required to Block someone.

As you describe with G-lines, without a centralized anti-attacker system, it is very much the whack-a-mole game that I'm accustomed to from XMPP or IRC.

> without a centralized anti-attacker system, it is very much the whack-a-mole game

Unfortunately, even centralized networks play this whack-a-mole game. Facebook/Google requesting ID cards or phone number has unfortunately not eliminated abuse from their network. Which is not to say there's no way we can improve the situation (see my other comment).

Your statement is incomplete, and presents only the framing "abuse was not eliminated", as if eliminating abuse were a boolean Y/N flag and therefore all steps taken to date are a total failure.

The two centralized networks you referenced have eliminated some abuse from their network by taking those steps.

As I said elsethread, I won't try to persuade you that it's right for them to have taken steps, but I'm certain we still both agree that it's impossible to completely eliminate abuse from any system containing user-generated content, and therefore the metric of success you set ("eliminated") is provably unattainable, which does^ invalidate your framing.

^ (unless you think it's possible to fully eliminate abuse, in which case you have a trillion dollar startup idea to pursue, because we all sure need that!)

> The two centralized networks you referenced have eliminated some abuse from their network by taking those steps.

That is true, but at the same time they have also eliminated many legitimate users and placed remaining users in dangerous situations by requesting more personal information that can and will be leaked and will be used again them.

Also, their anti-abuse model relies exclusively on the benevolence of law enforcement: that's why they collect more information in order to cooperate with law enforcement. However in most (all?) parts of the world law enforcement is neither concerned with protecting people, especially victims of cyber-harassment and misogynistic violence.

Internally, Facebook and such platforms usually combat violent (as in, blood is visible) and "indecent" (a woman breastfeeding in a photo, what a scandal) content but not hateful fascist/masculinist propaganda. It usually takes a massive media scandal for such platforms to close down well-known groups coordinating harassment/doxxing campaigns.

From my personal and political perspective as a politically-active non-binary person, that tradeoff is not worth it. But i can understand and respect if your perspective on the matter is different.

> unless you think it's possible to fully eliminate abuse

I don't think it's possible to fully eliminate abuse ever, whether in cyberspace or in the physical space. We can however, develop collective processes and reflexes in order to strongly mitigate the harm done by people attempting abuse.

From a protocol's perspective, reputation systems and WoTs are not hard to specify. The real problem that has not truly been explored yet is how to develop a good UI/UX for this pattern, where the user can turn many knobs until they feel safe, but they don't have to do it in order to enjoy reasonable defaults.

I'm not at all saying it's an easy problem to tackle, but there is also interest in anti-abuse systems in other federated protocols such as ActivityPub. See for example this talk "Decentralized social networks vs the trolls" from the last AP Conference: https://conf.tube/videos/watch/d8c8ed69-79f0-4987-bafe-84c01...

I sure hope we can make a better situation overall, and that sacrificing privacy to reach that is not an option on the table. Privacy/pseudonymity is a fundamental pillar of anti-abuse schemes and removing it for short-term gains is sure to backfire sooner or later down the road.

I sort of wish we had an effective way to say e.g. "no DMs from account that isn't <this> verified" on less centralised systems - the "no DMs from unregistered users" switch on some ircds being the most primitive possible gesture in such a direction.

I imagine you'd want to turn that dial rather higher than I would, and with good reason, but having a dial at all seems like a good way to avoid a whole bunch of other potential problems.

(though "if this was going to happen it probably already would have" is likely a good argument for not holding one's breath)

Configure your client or server to reject contacts not on the whitelist?

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