Transcript (English)

Isa: Hello and welcome to The Chosen Few, the one and only place for you. My name is Isabelle Santin, and today is a very special day because hot on the mic with me is my alter ego, right-hand lady, and longtime friend, Polly May.

Polly: Hi everyone, I'm very glad to be here.

Isa: The reason she is joining us on The Voice's blog is also quite special. I'm announcing an unofficial personal project of mine that has far reaching implications for the future of the modern net. But before we get into the meat and potatoes, we're gonna wind back the clock and take a look at what motivated me to even attempt such a project and why we think it matters. So Polly, suppose that we use Discord a lot, right? To communicate with each other. And over time it's just gotten kind of shittier and shittier, right? And Discord isn't the only social media platform to kind of have this problem. And it makes you wonder why, right?

Polly: I feel there are so many different social media platforms to suit so many different people's and group's needs. Yet all of them kind of fall short of the bigger picture of something that really stands out and is actually a decent cohesive platform to use.

Isa: Yeah, for sure. I definitely agree because, especially on a platform like Discord where the main way that people communicate is through instant messaging, so much of the focus of its recent features and developments has been on almost converting it to just kind of a thread/forum based like platform, which is a really strange move to be honest.

Polly: Yeah, and there's so many weird niche customization features as well that are all locked behind (Discord) Nitro paywalls, and there's a whole Nitro store and it just makes you wonder, what is the end goal of Discord anymore? It was clear from the get go that Discord was this instant messaging service for gamers and other people alike, but now it feels monopolized.

Isa: Yeah, for sure. It's like, they found their niche and then they just sort of started trying to over inflate their heft I suppose, and try and branch out way too much. And I feel like you kind of touched on this already with what you were saying, but this kind of feeds into this idea that big data and big tech right now is extremely hyper centralized. And because of that, there's a lot of control that over so many people and so many discussions all over the world that is put into the hands of too few people.

Polly: Yeah, and it's really hard to dissociate the app from the developers and the company behind it because if there's any controversy around Discord, perhaps remember when they were trying to add cryptocurrency as a valid payment method or the fact that if Discord ends up being sued by like the EU and whatnot, it's really hard to just take the Discord away from the company and just use Discord for Discord because everything's so tightly wrapped together. And like you said, it's all centralized. There's no escape from Discord, the collaboration.

Isa: Right exactly, it's like there's a very tight coupling between the company that controls the platform and the platform itself, right? And basically the responsibility for keeping it running. So that's kind of what leads us into the concept of this sort of mystery project that I have yet to name drop and I'm kind of saving it for the big reveal because I'm hoping I am clever enough to kind of make a pun on it. So basically I wanted to take the centralized control out of the picture, right? I wanted to have Discord, but have it in such a way that I still own my data and all of my friends still own their data, right?

Polly: I feel like the project as a whole is kind of just a message to the internet and saying that we own our data now. We are not standing for what you're gonna use our data for. So many companies sell your data off advertisement agencies, they sell it off to Google to recommend you searches and stuff and it feels like you're part of this huge social experiment basically where they're constantly changing things and secretly probing at you to get certain responses and they'll take all that data and run it through whatever system they have to fine tune it in a way that benefits them rather than the user, so I think having this completely decentralized project here where you own your data, you control what you give, what you receive, and it's yours! It's not any company's! There's no paywall behind it, there's no laws or anything. It's just like it should be, like it used to be. It's just like sending mail in the post.

Isa: And I do really like that comparison because the mail service nowadays is something that's highly distributed, right? Like even if it's controlled by a central entity, i.e. our governments, there's post offices everywhere. Like in every local place you have a post office that hires its own workers to send mail to the people that need it. And this project of mine is kind of very similar to that model where you have these sort of semi central hubs of activity and communication that all mesh together in a network. And the cool thing about it is that anyone can spin up one of these hubs and start talking to other people pretty much instantaneously. And that's kind of in line with sort of what I've observed in the past about, I want to preface this with the fact that I have a special interest, in decentralized application programming, just because I think it's a very neat way of designing apps. So I've read a lot about how old Skype and BitTorrent, how all these services have kind of implemented their own ways of communicating at scale, but in a way that is also directly scalable with the user base. And so one of the things that I've observed in, for example Skype, is that despite them using sort of a centralized authentication service so that everyone on the platform can be link, "hey, this is who I am" and then everyone else can see the same bio, the same name and profile picture, right? But our project takes this a step farther and everyone on the network is their own, is the one trusted source about who they are, right? So that's another way that we've basically taken the concept of trust and communication and sort of dispersed it and made it the responsibility of each individual. And it's obvious what kind of privacy and autonomy benefits that you get from such an application model, especially in a social networking type context.

Polly: Yeah, I mean, just not having to show yourself to literally everyone in the public is almost a step everyone wishes they could take these days with all these businesses prying into your social life through social media to tell them whether or not you get a job or not. It's kind of liberating to just have this one service that you control and you can directly control who sees you, who knows about you, and I don't know, it just feels really freeing as an idea.

Isa: Totally, and I like that word freeing. That's what this project is all about, that's central to the project's goals, it's about making knowledge and making the power to communicate, it's about anonymizing and freeing all of these things, decoupling them from the developer, even from groups of users that might cooperate with each other. Now how you participate in the network is totally up to you and completely customizable down to the individual lines of code that you are using to communicate with the service.

Polly: I think one of the best things is that it is gonna be an open source project. It means that if you feel there's something wrong with it in your specific use case in your small community, you can easily change that and almost tailor the experience to you and your audience. You don't have to do it the way Discord does, and you can just add whatever you want, you can take away what you want. It's fully customizable, it almost feels modular in a sense. It's like an opt-in, opt-out system. 

Isa: Certainly, and that is one of the big benefits of the open source community in general that I feel like is lost on a lot of people these days. I mean, especially when you have the presence of such huge projects like WebKit, like Log4j to name an infamous example, the software supply chain itself has become rather centralized and concentrated among these few very popular, very highly used projects. And I feel that's kind of antithetical to the whole point of open source, which is the fact that you can access the source code, you're not meant to just copy and paste it. You're meant to actually collaborate and contribute back to that community and contribute back your knowledge and basically your version of what you want to use. And I feel in the context of this project of ours, that's something that we'll see essentially emphasized in how it all operates and works together.

Polly: I think another big thing is that this project, there is no real owner to it. It is very much by the community, for the community. There is no sole responsibility to maintain it. There is no sole responsibility to take any fall for it if anything was to happen on the platform. So many people misuse social media platforms, whether people like Discord a lot to do various illegal things and kind of everyone ends up taking the blame for that because you're all housed under the same roof. Whether you realize it or not, you are taking the blame for it because it actively changes how Discord, for example, has to change moving forward. All these privacy policy changes, all of these certain features they have to add, all of these safety mechanics that to us, the day-to-day user it's completely irrelevant because we're not involved in any of that. We shouldn't need to have every single one of our messages monitored just because someone's doing something illegal somewhere else. And just being able to really just associate the application from any governing body, any singular sole person in any context is just amazing. It's just like I said before, it's just so freeing to know that this is something that is yours. Like that specific version of it is yours, not all versions.

Isa: Right, exactly. And it's yours to keep. There's no guarantee of like warranty. There's no guarantee of updates. There's no guarantee of liability. It's just, you download the source code, you compile it and you use it. And you can modify it if you want, right?

Polly: Yeah, and that's the thing is that we're hoping to build an environment where people will want to modify it, people will want to update it, people will want to maintain it. Because you can go on any feedback form for any application and you will find so many able-bodied, willing people who would pay money to contribute to these big projects where the developers actually just ignore all their requests for whatever reason, there's a multitude of reasons, but there are so many people who want change and I think this is their opportunity to make change.

Isa: Certainly, and I love the way you worded that. And I guess this leads right into the name drop. It's quite subversive in that sense. And that's what it's called. It's called Subverse, introducing Subverse. Hell yeah, I pulled that off. But basically, Subverse is this project that we've been discussing. It's not necessarily an actual technology in a sense. It's a standardized protocol first. And the idea is that people can implement this protocol however they see fit. It's a very simple protocol that basically employs mutual authentication and end-to-end encryption. And that's it! And it essentially just acts as a way to pass messages between hubs in the network. And the idea is that then people design customizable clients for these hubs that communicate with each other in unspecified, unstandardized ways, which is what I think is really powerful about how I've set up the framework for this is that Subverse can be used as a very malleable and modular overlay over the modern internet. And I have always imagined either people re-implementing the modern web on Subverse, for example. You can do that. You can re-implement Discord on Subverse. You can do that. You could even re-implement something akin to BitTorrent and just be able to do that using this sort of diverse heterogeneous network that is constantly evolving and shaping itself to the needs of its users.

Polly: Like you said before, Subverse isn't an application. It's a tool. It's a resource for which people can use however they want. Subverse could be as simple as just setting up a server to message a friend. It could be as in-depth as a local meetup group. You could plan a wedding on Subverse, you know? Totally. You could play games on Subverse. You can share files on Subverse, host files on Subverse. You could really just do anything on Subverse.

Isa: Precisely. And that's the whole point of it. It's to give the power back into our hands, it's our network, it's our new way to communicate with each other and it puts the sole responsibility of both implementing those communication systems and maintaining them, both in terms of infrastructure and source code, it puts all of that responsibility on the community. And I think that's something that is really powerful and makes it really resilient that way.

Polly: Like I said before, if people want change, they'll make change, and I know people really want change. We're all sick and tired of having to conform to the norms of social media. Everyone's using Discord, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, Twitter. We all just want something a bit more us, a bit more for us, a bit more freeing.

Isa: Exactly. And we just want to get away, we just wanna get off of fucking Twitter and Discord! Like we don't want this shit anymore! We're stuck on it cause there's nothing else! But now there will be, and anyone can like take steps to kind of contribute to the project, which that's a really nice segue into kind of the conclusion of this podcast is that Subverse exists as an implementation and right now it's a very evolving standard. It's not very well set in stone yet. And there is an implementation of this evolving standard that already exists and that people can contribute to right now, and I'll leave a link to that in the transcript of this blog post (https://www.github.com/SubverseIM/Subverse.NET), so be sure to check that out on the Subverse IM GitHub. And yeah, that has been the meat and potatoes. You guys let me cook and we've eaten well! So thank you for joining me, Polly. 

Polly: That's no problem. I'm always happy to talk about Subverse. It's something I'm very passionate about. 

Isa: Hell yeah. Thanks for listening everyone. 

Both: Bye bye!