Should we block Vivaldi.net?

Hi everyone,

There's this new instance called vivaldi.net that is poised to EEE the Fediverse into a shopping mall.

In case this is nebullous, I'd like to remind my readers that "EEE" means "Embrance, Extend, Extinguish" and was a strategy adopted by Microsoft (but also Google) towards open source. By adopting an open standard or a popular idea, allocating resources to it, becoming ubiquitous in this field, and abruptly cutting all the resources they were allocating, they manage to kill all the enthusiasm about it. It's a common place that billionaire don't want us to daydream about better futures, or about a free cyberspace (that may for example be anti-industrial and demilitarized, enforced at the hardware level). Around the Mojang studio on Twitter were gravitating thousands of indie developers and videomakers who were both enthusiastic about Minecraft updates and chatting with the devs, giving each other more visibility, and daydreaming about computing being more free, notably from Microsoft, this is also in this context that I've learned about itch.io, so Microsoft have bought Mojang for 2 billion dollars. They could've bought e.g. 20,000 indie video games for $100,000 each instead but the goal was never to make money with Minecraft, but rather to shut down our dreams through power and brutality. This is also what's happened to Phonebloks, which had similarly leveraged social media (and Thunderclap) to give us more power on our devices (at the expense of Google and manufacturers), so Google has bought Motorola, launched the project Ara, got all the attention from tech outlets, and when everyone was watching shut down the project. Said tech outlets were praising Google's competence and how skilled their engineers were, so we all just gave up.

On the Fediverse we would fear such an operation with Google creating its own proprietary federated social server, but witches.town has shown that a gang of abused kids who were high on sugar could run the place and block whoever they'd want to. The Raspberry Pi case study shows that messing with us may come at a high cost, at least when it's done so frontally. Google wouldn't have a chance… now. EEE'ing the Fediverse should happen insidiously and gradually: we should let the mold install itself, without noticing it, for a long period of time until it's literally everywhere.

Let's talk briefly about the official Vivaldi account, which doesn't talk so much about the Vivaldi browser but rather gives tips and sure seems to have budget to give good vibes. The community manager is probably, for some part, happy to make a comfortable wage while getting away with their "good vibes" good consciousness, but this is likely just me being cynical (i.e. used as a disabled person to abled people continuously, softly abusing me and my kind, and only brutalizing us when we seem not being traumatized enough to leave the conversation, generally without even realizing it). Anyway, Vivaldi is a proprietary software developer and all of this positivity seems eerily similar to various advertising campaigns from Apple, Center Parks, and Spotify.

First, let me remind you all of Occam's razor: "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." For example child porn is a police problem, but also a technological problem (the lack of an ad blocker in the Tor browser, making sexual child abuse profitable) and a psychological one (there's a jail in France, without walls, dedicated to child molesters, whose inmates follow psychotherapy, with – according to a teacher I've had, Philippe Bessoles – a 0,0% rate of relapse. Thus the solution can't be mere police repression but also must include technological and psychotherapeutical aspects; as an autistic person who's been abused in different ways, I don't care about how immoral solutions may seem, so long as neurodivergent teenagers stay happy and healthy. Pointing to pedocriminals is just a way to make us accept being all hurt on their behalf.

Then there's this Cory Doctorow blog post reminding us that according to Lessig, in the class struggle both the people and capitalists can leverage the law, technology, the market, and norms. In 2018, Lavabit have launched a fundraiser to make not just email, but also file storage and transfer, VoIP, chat, fiat and cryptocurrency transfers, and workflows E2EE'd with a minimized metadata model, where the server only has access to the information immediately close to it, so for example if I sent an email from lavabit.com to nubo.coop and that both servers implemented the DIME, then Lavabit would only know that I'm sending an email to nubo.coop, but not to whom (and vice-versa, nubo.coop would only know that Bob is receiving an email from lavabit.com, but not from whom). This was happening in an already worrying trend of surveillance agencies compromising endpoints themselves rather than (rather secure) E2EE'd communications. The Volcano client was "slated for 2019" and there's an history with the FBI (a) telling Apple not to implement E2EE for iCloud, (b) the FBI being managed by a racist and homophobic piece of shit spying on every politician and blackmailing them to get more and more budget, (c) Lavabit shutting down to avoid turning its SSL key to the FBI, (d) Lalabit having got a gag order and fought against it in court, (e) Lavabit being willing to give some information to avoid a National Security Letter, against which it couldn't appeal. For obvious reasons, Volcano hasn't been released and a few months later Apple have started doing a privacy campaign in France, models taking a selfie while their faces are covered by the iPhone, printing "That's it, privacy with the iPhone". And then an Apple employee has announced a child sexual abuse material scanner, directly in the iPhone! Like the European union is trying to force software providers to implement ChatControl, under the excuse of handing pedocriminals over to the police, which isn't a complete (read: efficient) solution! I'm not a fan of confirmation biases, but there's quite a strong narrative here.

There are other examples, like Center Parks, a company dedicated to killing biodiversity to install hotels in "fancy" places (like the Roybon forest), "in the middle of nature", and showing ads with a classic heterosexual family enjoying boatswaining in a river, on which was printed "closer than ever". Killing biodiversity is more and more a deviant act; in other words, it's a normative problem and the solution is also normative, showing that their company is here for good, to get families closer, letting them enjoy true holidays, away from screens and urban life. There's also Spotify advertising for feminist podcasts while trying to EEE podcasts and I think you've got the drill.

I'm not saying that the Vivaldi community manager would be a sort of greedy, hypocrite wolf in a sheep's clothes, lurking in the shadows until we'd lower our guard. But the Vivaldi CM doesn't represent accurately the aggregative effect of the Vivaldi company trying to lock its users in until its shareholders will vote to maximize profits, at the cost of degrading a product that Vivaldi users won't be able to leave. They might not even be aware that sharing cool tips (that seem kinda obvious anyway, as if there was a larger strategy consisting in targeting abuse survivors… but I'm derailing again) could be part of an attempt to EEE the Fediverse. But the elephant must be in the room before it can start brutalizing everyone.

Vivaldi.net makes me think of Twitter bridges. AFAIK, there's nothing wrong with using Mastodon and Twitter as interconnected clients, and I definitely don't feel like lecturing you all about this, but there are also Twitter users just keeping Mastodon as a sort of backup account, without interacting here, and it's difficult to tell them to maybe actually interact with people here because we'd look like rude people telling influencers to sort of make the Fediverse more attractive to the public (kinda like some Linux users think that video games on Linux are a top priority for libre software). The behaviour is just here already, it's the norm, so it will be difficult, especially for mere users, to collectively fight against it. And I'm afraid that the longer we'll tolerate vivaldi.net, the harder it will be to block any kind of enclosure – as an instance, as a branded Bonfire group, etc. The more we tolerate vivaldi.net, the more a culture of "what if we let proprietary software companies here?" and "give it a chance" will develop here.

As of now, vivaldi.net users are just sandwich persons for their favorite proprietary browser. Maybe it's just great, and maybe it's the best available browser? I'm not judging their tastes. I'm not judging the fact that they've started using their Mastodon account, that Vivaldi has aggressively created for them, without asking them. Maybe it's just another case of a proprietary software vendor using suggestible people (i.e. abuse survivors, neurodivergent people) to make money and this is even more a reason to put the blame on it, and not on them. But this definitely looks like the first step in a more global EEE operation.

We can't count on capitalists to defend any system, and neither our ecosystem or capitalism itself as a system. All their care about is their rents. But they may also consider allocating some resources in making what they sell more profitable in a manner that's beneficial not only for them, but also for other capitalists. This could be considered as class solidarity and maybe they even feel like they're doing something good, that they will have some gratitude from their peers. This isn't a scheme to make capitalism (as a system) weaker or stronger, and we could imagine this could just be an opportunity to monetize the Vivaldi browser, but this also doesn't exclude a commercial proprietary software vendor investing resources into making one of our spaces more commercial, and more profitable for "everyone". It's a win-win!

I'm fairly confident in all that I've said, but I'm also an idiot so maybe this will come out as silly or even insulting and ridiculous. Before prompting for a vote, I'd like to take the temperature and see what we all think about this.