Among the most prominent new features you will find quality multi-party video conferences for XMPP, audio device hot-plugging, support for Outlook presence and calls, an overhauled user interface and support for the Opus and VP8 audio/video codec.

Get Jitsi. If you don’t, watch Free, open, secure and convenient communications: Can we finally replace Skype, Viber, Twitter and Facebook? as mentioned previously.

Some overall observations and questions:

• Call proprietary silos “legacy _” (eg “legacy social networks”) or similarly, the “AOL of _”. Jabber did this with chutzpah for many years, and now it is more or less true (for chat networks).
• “Federate or die.” This seems more prescriptive than descriptive. Jabber has succeeded as an open standard with lots of free implementations, but federation of large instances isn’t inevitable.
• Criticality of network effects. In this sense “can we” is nearly identical to “have we”.
• I don’t understand telecom world at all, but maybe that’s a good thing: attempts to ape telecom do not seem correlated with success.
• Noted that XMPP- and REST web API-based federation very different (BuddyCloud and StatusNet/pump.io represent similar-looking applications in each category on the panel). What are the reasons for one or the other, how could they interoperate?
• Even if there were free software as easy to use and deploy (yes, a trick statement) as Skype and Twitter, it’d be an uphill struggle for users interested in such things to find out, let alone to market to everyone else. Regarding the former, panelists introduced Free Your Speech, a blog about using distributed communications tools.
• Someone asked the obvious question about how WebRTC will be used, not really answered more substantially than ‘we’ll see’.

Also see discussion of the panel at reddit.

At first glance from user perspective it has improved on forums more than WordPress did on blogs at the time of its introduction (WordPress’ large improvements over alternatives were ease of installation and good support for a number of features like trackback, comments, and pretty URLs; the bar was low in 2003).

For autonomo.us folk, the interesting thing is that “WordPress of” means:

• the software is free software, deployable by anyone on their own servers
• a hosted version and other services are available for-fee

Jeff Atwood writes:

I greatly admire what WordPress did for the web; to say that we want to be the WordPress of forums is not a stretch at all. We’re also serious about this eventually being a viable open-source business, in the mold of WordPress. And we’re not the only people who believe in the mission: I’m proud to announce that we have initial venture capital funding from First Round, Greylock, and SV Angel. We’re embarking on a five year mission to improve the fabric of the Internet, and we’re just getting started. Let a million discussions bloom!

More WordPress-like businesses seems like a great thing for user and community autonomy. The one behind Discourse also has a great name: Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. Its goal, again from Atwood, is:

to raise the standard of civilized discourse on the Internet through seeding it with better discussion software:

• 100% open source and free to the world, now and forever.
• Feels great to use. It’s fun.
• Designed for hi-resolution tablets and advanced web browsers.
• Built in moderation and governance systems that let discussion communities protect themselves from trolls, spammers, and bad actors – even without official moderators.

The last bit is very good for autonomy, though the Franklin Street Statement didn’t address it: trolls, spammers, and bad actors make running your own service much more difficult. Why not let Facebook deal with the pain for you? Perhaps future guidance on network services ought encourage developers to ship mechanisms that mitigate these pain points for entities providing free network services.

Some other points of interest:

• Discourse is a Ruby on Rails application, GPLv2+; contributions require a CLA permitting CDCK to relicense. This may be a case where use of AGPL would’ve been a strong indication that aggressively selling proprietary licenses is part of the business’ plan, and it is good that is not the case.
• The default content license, only noted in the ToS, is unfortunately non-free (CC-BY-NC-SA); this prevents Discourse from being out-of-the-box FSS compliant, and the meta.discourse.org installation itself uses the default. Hopefully many deployments will bother to change the terms to use a free license.
• There is a “download an archive of all my posts” button; it is currently greyed out for me, but I only made a first post moments ago. Good that data export is at the very least an intended feature from the beginning.
• The software is not yet trivial to install.
• Discourse doesn’t seem to support federation in any way, but that’s not a criticism: it’d be stunning if it did.
• Some mail functionality is planned. Whether Discourse will destroy mailing lists, even for those who hate forums, prior to the release of Mailman3 is question for the ages.☻

But, also somewhat frustrating. Most of “Enclosure 3.0″ feels like old news. Software freedom is at least alluded to, but hand-wavingly — open code and open source communities are mentioned, as things to be protected and encouraged, even as “greatest source of hope for creating and better defining” what Lametti calls “the community cloud”. Apart from a passing mention of peer-to-peer as something encryption can help hide, there’s zero reference of decentralization, federation, distribution, or P2P, though one could be very generous and assume all that is intended to be implied in the description of the early web as having a horizontal architecture — but still, nothing about such an architecture as a solution.

Also a relatively minor complaint, with implications: conflation of computing capacity and coordination (Lametti):

The Cloud — that is, the Internet as it evolves towards more centralized computing capacities and virtual “in the air,” “over the Internet” storage — presents enormous potential for users to have access to facilities such as vast data storage and infinite computing capacity.

I found the article via David Bollier, whose overall excellent post allows me to make this point more clearly (Bollier):

The Cloud is attractive because it can provide huge efficiency gains by centralizing computing applications that were previously run on our personal, general-purpose computers. The Cloud can move email, word-processing, tax data and countless other programs on to more flexible, large-scale servers that can be accessed by smartphones, tablets, laptops and remote sensors. These “thin clients” don’t have to have the computing and storage capacities of our desktop computers.

Entirely right, with an important caveat on the last sentence: these “thin clients” do have tremendous computing and storage capacities (performance of a mobile device lags around 20 years behind that of the most powerful supercomputer), and of course cloud computing capacity isn’t infinite, nor is it infinitely efficient. This is important, because the assumption that small devices are weak leads one to ignore decentralized/distributed/federated/P2P architectures.

The efficiency gains of cloud computing are ones of coordination (a term I’m using maximally broadly); distributed coordination is, almost tautologically, what P2P research is all about. I wonder (again) about the extent to which such has been stunted due to legal threats, furthering a cycle of more centralization, more centralization know-how, less decentralization know-how, less decentralization, and less ability to even imagine the feasibility of decentralization.

Following is Lametti’s core description of “Enclosure 3.0″ (Lametti):

Most obviously, a number of leading writers have begun to document their hesitations mainly regarding the phenomenon of the Cloud and reduced Internet privacy and personal autonomy on the Web, as well as the impact of the Cloud on copyright issues.

I agree with these writers and the concerns that they raise about privacy and personal autonomy on the Internet and the Cloud. However, I wish to voice distress over another change. There is also, in my view, the distinct possibility that the Cloud could do more than simply reduce or render meaningless the concept of privacy on the Internet; from the perspective of users, the Cloud might also reduce the range of user possibilities for robust interaction with the Internet/Cloud in a manner which then prevents users from participating in the Internet as creators, collaborators, and sharers (i.e., the manner to which they have quickly become accustomed). This means that users will less and less be generating content and changing modalities of interaction through open software development and such. The Cloud is “manageable” in a way the Internet was not, and with users increasingly interacting with the Internet with relatively less powerful devices than computers — smartphones, tablets, and the like—this ability for Cloud service providers to control or manage users is enhanced. All of this means that users will become increasingly information takers — streamers, not sharers or downloaders — and potentially less in a position to control and influence the “direction” of the Internet.

This further round of enclosure I shall call Enclosure 3.0. Enclosure 3.0 has the potential to go beyond undermining copyright and the public domain — Enclosure 2.0 — and to go beyond weakening privacy. Enclosure 3.0 has the potential to disempower Internet users and conversely empower a very small group of gatekeepers. Put bluntly, it has the potential to relegate Internet users to the status of digital sheep.

This all strikes me as cliche in 2012. But, this may be due to my ignorance of the academic literature. Are the academics trumpeting this sort of thing the past several years all well into the post-peer-review phase of their careers? And of course the hackers writing about such for many years are non-academics.

The part of Lametti’s paper that might be new to some autonomo.us readers are his calls for government action — regulation and provision of cloud computing. These are rather uninspired and under-informed (e.g., Ubuntu One is decidedly not a community-driven project), but this is hardly a criticism — I suspect most law professors, or social scientists in an applicable field, would come up with about the same translation of generic competition and consumer protection policy.

Rather “we” have failed to communicate the pertinence of software freedom at this level — and not just as a matter of individual freedom and ethics, but as potently generative of good political outcomes. Any activist or regulatory strategy that does not involve more software freedom as a mechanism, not just an output, side effect, or not at all, is missing out.

It’s also helpful that Lametti describes the architecture of the Internet as a commons, thus in need of management — though in need of commoning would be more apt; “enclosure” in the title being its dual. As software freedom and nearby are generative of good political outcomes, enclosure is generative of bad — monopoly abets monopoly.

What would an autonomo.us- and commoning-aware policy-activist strategy include? To start with, it might recognize that publicly interested entities (pick your favorites of government, university, civil society, responsible business, individuals; heck, pick them all!) have tremendous power as technology procurers and developers — demand and build following Franklin Street Statement recommendations.

The CitizenWeb Project was announced few days ago.

The CitizenWeb Project is a mission to fight for a free, open, and above all a decentralized Internet. In order to achieve this, it aims to empower everyday internet users with the information and resources they need to take matters into their own hands. We seek to spread the word about how to secure yourself online and how to declare “digital independence” in this age of the Google hivemind and Facebook privacy nightmares. While these services may be convenient, they carry very dangerous implications for our freedoms. This is only getting worse with time, as the corporations behind these services become entangled and indiscernable from government services and real-life social obligation. And it is only getting worse for the most sensitive users: journalists, activists, muckrakers and whistleblowers.

There are viable alternatives to these invasive and ubiquitous services. The CitizenWeb Project is therefore focused on giving the tools to each individual user to become an independent “citizen” of the Web — to decentralize their social networks and platforms, to become the TRUE owners of their data, and to communicate and network in security.

It seems to be a blog+ by Jacob Cook whose site right now says:

Site is down while I move to a new aparment and the Internet service gets changed. Everything should be back to normal by the 4th of February.

- JC, 31 Jan 2013

Like the low uptime of autonomo.us through its history, this is another data point showing just how far self-hosting has to go. But it also has retro/DIY charm.

Read the CitizenWeb Manifesto for a Decentralized Web.

Cook seems to be particularly interested in Tent.io, one of many things I alluded to yesterday with “much outside this tiny universe has happened in the last 30 months that is pertinent and good, or at least curious.”

One heartening thing about CitizenWeb is that it seems aware of software freedom; a coming-soon chapter of their guide is titled “What is Free Software, and Why Do I Give A Damn?” The Case for Making The Switch. Materials they publish are under CC-BY-SA. Not perfect in using proprietary services (at least github and twitter) and not free counterparts, but a project completely in line with Franklin Street Statement guidelines is an extremely rare beast. Let’s hope software freedom plays a big part in CitizenWeb’s future; especially if it does, hopefully you’ll hear more here.

An excellent post by Brianna Laugher served to remind me of the need to reboot autonomo.us:

Autonomy is a term not widely used by free software activists, although it has been – the autonomo.us group was set up to help promote free network services. But I wonder: what if we reformulated the four freedoms in the terminology of autonomy rather than freedom, and emphasised the benefit to communities over the benefit to individuals?

(I strongly agree with Brianna’s post, but autonomo.us didn’t start to re-conceptualize software freedom via new terminology, so I’ll leave that aside for now, and be glad for the unintended reminder.)

…

I think it is fair to say that since the publication of the Franklin Street Statement, no free network service and no federated protocol has emerged to seriously challenge the increasing centralization of the web and software, and the critique and recommendations of autonomo.us, as stated in the FSS, have not gained the currency we had hoped for.

But the need for free-as-in-freedom services and federation, and the salience of our critique and recommendations, have only increased (admittedly a wholly unsurprising and self-serving assessment). Two examples that I’ve personally blogged about: flailing attempts at user autonomy within proprietary systems, and lack of appreciation of software freedom and nearby as the most potent mechanism to promote and protect our autonomy. (Warning: those are highly opinionated personal posts that only indirectly touch on free network services; if the implications are unclear, I take it as instructive as to how far we, or at least I, have to go.)

How to go forward? Certainly, the FSS and nearby deserve harsh scrutiny in all aspects. But mainly we need to create, deploy, and use free network services and federated/distributed/P2P protocols.

In the tiny universe of people who contributed to the FSS or discussions immediately following, I would guess the three most significant developments in the last 30 months are the pending shift of StatusNet to pump.io, the launch of GNU MediaGoblin, and the ongoing development of libre.fm. Uncharitably, the most pertinent shared characteristic of these projects is that federation is to-be-implemented. [Correction: Evan says pump.io already federates.]

Much outside this tiny universe has happened in the last 30 months that is pertinent and good, or at least curious. Tell us about it. Join us. Edit us. Be autonomo.us.☻

Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University, and founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, will speak about “Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing” on Friday, February 5, 2010, 7-9 pm. This event will be webcast live.

• What: ISOC-NY Public Meeting: Eben Moglen – ‘Freedom In The Cloud’
• When: Fri. Feb 5 2010 7pm-9pm
• Where: Room 109, Warren Weaver Hall, 251 Mercer Street NYC (SW corner of West 4th) (See note below)
• Webcast: http://www.livestream.com/isocny
• Sponsors: ISOC-NY, NYU ACM, Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy Clinic

HT Michael Mandiberg.