Seizing the means of messenger production

Seizing the means of messenger production - Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow Business Stack Internal: the knowledge intelligence layer that powers enterprise AI.Stack Data Licensing: decades of verified, technical knowledge to boost AI performance and trust.Stack Ads: engage developers where it matters — in their daily workflow.They discuss the early internet’s evolution from individual creativity into today’s internet that turns users into products, Galen’s takeaways from building a new network architecture that prioritizes user control, and why messenger applications are ripe for decentralization.Tlon is releasing a decentralized messenger app that gives you ownership of your data, built on Urbit, a complete, wholly encapsulated system that allows you to run a personal server in the cloud. Use the code STACK to skip the waitlist for the Tlon Messenger app.Connect with Galen on LinkedIn.Shoutout to user mkobuolys for winning a Populist badge for their answer to Set default transition for go_router in Flutter.TRANSCRIPT[Intro Music]Ryan Donovan: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology. I'm your host, Ryan Donovan, and today we are talking about calm computing and owning your own applications. Today's internet is making us all little products out there, harvesting our data. And my guest today, Galen Wolf Polly, who's the CEO of Tlon, who is gonna talk about how they are making your applications your own. So, welcome to the show, Galen.Galen Wolfe-Pauly: Yeah, thanks for having me.Ryan Donovan: Before we get into Messenger and all that, how did you get into software and technology?Galen Wolfe-Pauly: That could be a whole podcast of its own, probably.Ryan Donovan: TLDR, buddy.Galen Wolfe-Pauly: I grew up near Silicon Valley, so it was a part of my childhood, just building things on the early internet, but I actually never really thought that I would work in this world. And the short version would be I went and studied architecture, 'cause I was very interested in the discipline that had the longest history of making things and just how things are made, generally. And during the course of being in school, I started to realize, I think maybe buildings and the way buildings are made is already figured out, and the sort of frontier of how things are made and how they influence how we think is really in the digital world. And because I just had such experience building software, it really was like I stumbled into it. It was also just somewhat natural, and I think I'm also just stubborn enough to not wanna work for anyone else. So, then I was always starting my own things and working closely with people starting things. Then, yeah, I guess that's also pretty related to why we build the things we build. I felt like, wait, not only do I wanna build my own things, but I want to make things for people that they actually own and control, and can do whatever they want with. I am very optimistic about what people can do when you give them their own tools and let them do whatever they want. But that also maybe is 'cause that's what I like doing.Ryan Donovan: That's the spirit of the early internet. Remember the early days? It was like everybody was building their own things on there. Everybody had their own website, GeoCities, or LiveJournal pages, or whatever, and then something shifted, right?Galen Wolfe-Pauly: I remember that very well. I definitely spent a lot of time hosting things from my computer in my bedroom as a teenager. What I was aware of in that shift, where all of a sudden people were connected all the time through services, was the fact that what those services provided in convenience was also very much a technical innovation that they were running software in the cloud for you, and that just provided a much better user experience than figuring out how to configure it and keep it online at your house. I could see that, I think always, as a pretty significant technical problem. If you want people to have that freedom and flexibility of they have their own computer, you gotta figure out how to get them a computer that can run in a data center forever, which is a hard problem.Ryan Donovan: Now you're working on Messenger. To start, talk about architecture being solved problems. Is messaging not a solved problem?Galen Wolfe-Pauly: The thing that's not a solved problem is how we do personal computing in the cloud. A lot of computing in the cloud's not very personal, right? It's mostly service oriented, or it's for a big company to run services for a lot of people. So, the first thing that I worked on for a long time was really, yeah, could you build a better system for individuals to be able to store their own data, run their own applications in a totally sealed little virtual machine, totally portable. And so, that project was called Urbit. It has a wild and complicated, strange history. It's [an] unhinged open-source project that ultimately did produce something that worked pretty well, which, once it started to work, it was starting to satisfy my initial interest, which is could you actually just build a user-facing application that an ordinary person can use that they actually own and control? And what I found that we were using this system for as really just contributors people having fun with this thing that we were working on, was just, yeah, messaging and collaboration. And I don't think that's an accident, because if you think back to the early internet, what were we doing on the early internet? You're just talking to each other, and it is quite simplistic as a use case, but it might also just be the first use case of a new technology. In this case, I think, messaging is definitely, in many ways, a solved problem, but for me—this may be that I just have a kind of heightened sensitivity to this stuff—for people that I really care about, or my collaboration with them is really important, it feels really weird to use a large company's service for that. I care a lot about the history of the conversation. I care that it can't disappear. I actually probably wanna modify the system a little bit. I want to feel like I have control over it. As you might imagine, people attracted to this project of, 'hey, how do we own our computing?' They also want to talk to each other on that platform 'cause it just feels natural. So, that's where the messenger as a product emerged. And I pushed that really far. I felt if it's gonna be a messenger, then you gotta be able to just install it on your phone. I need to be able to send it to my, maybe not my mom, but my cousin – let's not solve the age issue there, which could be big, but just an ordinary person of my age-ish or younger, can they just get set up and go? And that is, in the last say, three to six months, the thing actually is passable in that form factor, which is– there are a lot of messengers in the world, so it sets up an interesting dynamic, for sure.Ryan Donovan: My understanding of the history of messengers, I don't exactly know how ICQ works, but my understanding is that there's always some sort of server to connect, pass through messages to make sure you can find people. How do you connect people with a sort of locally installed messenger/server?Galen Wolfe-Pauly: I'll do the most simplistic technical explanation, and then we can dig as deep as you want. So, the system that we built is– think of it as one little virtual machine per person, a private key that you see to this virtual machine with, and the public key of that is your network address. The way we drive those public keys, they're very short. They look like synthetic usernames. So, each of those machines is a node on a network and can pass packets between each other; they can also share programs, they can run little programs, and stuff like that. So, the simplest version we came up with was we can run a hosting service of those machines so that when you sign up on your phone, we'll spin up a machine on your behalf, and then the client just connects to that little VM. But if your friend is more suspicious of us, or just privacy-conscious, generally, they could self-host, and you would see no degradation of the user experience, right? It doesn't matter. If you and your friend are running WhatsApp, someone has self-hosted the same thing. And then, the other difference would be if you could someday just say, 'you know what? I don't know if I trust Meta anymore, I'm gonna download my WhatsApp and run it myself.' A lot of people would say, 'but you're still running it for me.' I'm like, yeah, I know. But one way to think about it would be, we haven't actually prototyped this. We've never actually finished it, but I think someday we definitely will. We could let you actually stream the event log of that virtual machine and keep it locally always. So, we keep a copy for you in the cloud. Cloud's really convenient. But if you– the example I always think of is, remember when the Telegram CEO got arrested, and everyone was like, ' oh, Telegram is already probably compromised,' but people all of a sudden realize that's a problem, but you can't leave. So, in our case, the difference would be, you could actually unilaterally exit. You could just cycle your keys. You have your whole event log locally, and the whole network could become much more decentralized overnight. And that is, I think, a very big difference [from] 'I connect to a service.' I'm never gonna run Signal locally. I'm never gonna run WhatsApp locally. Maybe I get the data out, but I can't run it. And in this case, no, you can actually run it yourself forever. Very different.Ryan Donovan: Do you wanna sort of peer-to-peer? I think even with some of the mastodon or torrenting, there's still a central announce or a federator, right? Is it possible to just have peer-to-peer clients working on your system?Galen Wolfe-Pauly: You can think of the peer discovery process as being a little bit like DNS. So, there are root nodes. There are 256 of them, t