Perhaps we need to rethink what is meant by a gimmick. If a gimmick is anything that we want to reject as extra or excessive or ill-fitting, then it may be important to ask what inhibitions or arbitrary conventions have made it seem like excess, and to revel in the exorbitant fictional constructions it produces. [...]

We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilisation superior to our own, but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primaeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us that we don t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains since we don t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned, and that reality is revealed to us that part of our reality that we would prefer to pass over in silence then we don t like it anymore.

Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

[Solaris] renders unnecessary any more alien stories. Nothing further can be said on this topic ...] Possibly, it can be said that when one feels the urge for such a thing, one should simply reread Solaris and learn its lessons again. Kim Stanley Robinson [...]

Before I start work, I browse through some photos of friends who are doing better than me, then an article on a black teenager who was killed on 115th for holding a weapon later identified as a showerhead, then an article on a black woman who was killed on the Grand Concourse for holding a weapon later identified as a cell phone, then I drown myself in the comments section and do some online shopping, by which I mean I put four dresses in my cart as a strictly theoretical exercise and then let the page expire.

1. Debian Installer does not support a proper BTRFS based root file system. It just allows btrfs as root but no subvolume support. Also I'm not sure about the luks support with btrfs as root.
2. I also wanted to give a try to systemd-boot as my laptop is UEFI capable and I've slowly started disliking Grub.
3. I really hate installing task-kde-desktop (Yeah you read it right, I've switched to be a KDE user for quite some time) which will pull tons of unwanted stuff and bloat. Well it's not just task-kde-desktop but any other task-desktop package does similar and I don't want to have too much of unused stuff and services running.

parted -a optimal -s /dev/sda mklabel gpt
parted -a optimal -s /dev/sda mkpart primary vfat 0% 1G
parted -a optimal -s /dev/sda set 1 esp on
mkfs.vfat -n boot_disk -F 32 /dev/sda1

cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sda2
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda2 ENC
mkfs.btrfs -L root_disk /dev/mapper/ENC

mount -o compress=zstd:1 /dev/mapper/ENC /mnt
btrfs subvol create /mnt/@
cd /mnt/@
btrfs subvol create ./home
btrfs subvol create ./opt
mkdir -p var
btrfs subvol create ./var/log
btrfs suvol set-default /mnt/@

cd /mnt/
debootstrap --include=dbus,locales,tzdata unstable @/ http://deb.debian.org/debian

umount /mnt
mount -o compress=zstd:1 /dev/mapper/ENC /mnt
mkdir -p /mnt/boot/efi
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot/efi
grml-chroot /mnt /bin/bash

apt-get update
apt-get install linux-image-amd64 dracut openssh-client \
                        kde-plasma-desktop plasma-workspace-wayland \
                        plasma-nm cryptsetup btrfs-progs sudo

LABEL="root_disk" / btrfs defaults,compress=zstd:1 0 0

ENCRYPTED_ROOT UUID=xxxx none discard,x-initrd.attach

export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
dpkg-reconfigure locales
dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

systemd.gpt_auto=no quiet root=LABEL=root_disk

apt-get install -y systemd-boot
bootctl install --make-entry-directory=yes --entry-token=machine-id
dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-6.0.0-5-amd64

<Location /.well-known/host-meta>
  Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin: "*"
  Header set Content-Type: "application/xrd+json; charset=utf-8"
  Header set Cache-Control: "max-age=86400"
</Location>
<Location /.well-known/webfinger>
  Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin: "*"
  Header set Content-Type: "application/jrd+json; charset=utf-8"
  Header set Cache-Control: "max-age=86400"
</Location>
# WebFinger (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7033)
RewriteMap lc int:tolower
RewriteMap unescape int:unescape
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/\.well-known/webfinger$
RewriteCond $ lc:$ unescape:% QUERY_STRING  (?:^ &)resource=acct:([^&]+)@linux\.it(?:$ &)
RewriteRule .+ /home/soci/%1/public_html/webfinger.json [L,QSD]
# answer 404 to requests missing "acct:" or for domains != linux.it
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/\.well-known/webfinger$
RewriteCond $ unescape:% QUERY_STRING  (?:^ &)resource=
RewriteRule .+ - [L,R=404]
# answer 400 to requests without the resource parameter
RewriteCond % REQUEST_URI  ^/\.well-known/webfinger$
RewriteRule .+ - [L,R=400]

QSoas> load /comments='"'

QSoas> edit

QSoas> set-perp /from-row=0

QSoas> expand /style=red-to-blue /flags=kinetics

QSoas> mfit-exponential-decay flagged:kinetics

• look at the depence of the tau_1 parameter as a function of the azide concentration;
• try fitting more than one exponential, using for instance:

  QSoas> mfit-exponential-decay /exponentials=2 flagged:kinetics
  

Nothing was easy This story begins in the 1980s. Somewhere around my Kindergarten year of school, around 1985, my parents bought a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 (aka CoCo II). It had 64K of RAM and used a TV for display and sound. This got you the computer. It didn t get you any disk drive or anything, no joysticks (required by a number of games). So whenever the system powered down, or it hung and you had to power cycle it a frequent event you d lose whatever you were doing and would have to re-enter the program, literally by typing it in. The floppy drive for the CoCo II cost more than the computer, and it was quite common for people to buy the computer first and then the floppy drive later when they d saved up the money for that. I particularly want to mention that computers then didn t come with a modem. What would be like buying a laptop or a tablet without wifi today. A modem, which I ll talk about in a bit, was another expensive accessory. To cobble together a system in the 80s that was capable of talking to others with persistent storage (floppy, or hard drive), screen, keyboard, and modem would be quite expensive. Adjusted for inflation, if you re talking a PC-style device (a clone of the IBM PC that ran DOS), this would easily be more expensive than the Macbook Pros of today. Few people back in the 80s had a computer at home. And the portion of those that had even the capability to get online in a meaningful way was even smaller. Eventually my parents bought a PC clone with 640K RAM and dual floppy drives. This was primarily used for my mom s work, but I did my best to take it over whenever possible. It ran DOS and, despite its monochrome screen, was generally a more capable machine than the CoCo II. For instance, it supported lowercase. (I m not even kidding; the CoCo II pretty much didn t.) A while later, they purchased a 32MB hard drive for it what luxury! Just getting a machine to work wasn t easy. Say you d bought a PC, and then bought a hard drive, and a modem. You didn t just plug in the hard drive and it would work. You would have to fight it every step of the way. The BIOS and DOS partition tables of the day used a cylinder/head/sector method of addressing the drive, and various parts of that those addresses had too few bits to work with the big drives of the day above 20MB. So you would have to lie to the BIOS and fdisk in various ways, and sort of work out how to do it for each drive. For each peripheral serial port, sound card (in later years), etc., you d have to set jumpers for DMA and IRQs, hoping not to conflict with anything already in the system. Perhaps you can now start to see why USB and PCI were so welcomed.

Sharing and finding resources Despite the two computers in our home, it wasn t as if software written on one machine just ran on another. A lot of software for PC clones assumed a CGA color display. The monochrome HGC in our PC wasn t particularly compatible. You could find a TSR program to emulate the CGA on the HGC, but it wasn t particularly stable, and there s only so much you can do when a program that assumes color displays on a monitor that can only show black, dark amber, or light amber. So I d periodically get to use other computers most commonly at an office in the evening when it wasn t being used. There were some local computer clubs that my dad took me to periodically. Software was swapped back then; disks copied, shareware exchanged, and so forth. For me, at least, there was no online to download software from, and selling software over the Internet wasn t a thing at all.

Three Different Worlds There were sort of three different worlds of computing experience in the 80s:

1. Home users. Initially using a wide variety of software from Apple, Commodore, Tandy/RadioShack, etc., but eventually coming to be mostly dominated by IBM PC clones
2. Small and mid-sized business users. Some of them had larger minicomputers or small mainframes, but most that I had contact with by the early 90s were standardized on DOS-based PCs. More advanced ones had a network running Netware, most commonly. Networking hardware and software was generally too expensive for home users to use in the early days.
3. Universities and large institutions. These are the places that had the mainframes, the earliest implementations of TCP/IP, the earliest users of UUCP, and so forth.

The difference between the home computing experience and the large institution experience were vast. Not only in terms of dollars the large institution hardware could easily cost anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars but also in terms of sheer resources required (large rooms, enormous power circuits, support staff, etc). Nothing was in common between them; not operating systems, not software, not experience. I was never much aware of the third category until the differences started to collapse in the mid-90s, and even then I only was exposed to it once the collapse was well underway. You might say to me, Well, Google certainly isn t running what I m running at home! And, yes of course, it s different. But fundamentally, most large datacenters are running on x86_64 hardware, with Linux as the operating system, and a TCP/IP network. It s a different scale, obviously, but at a fundamental level, the hardware and operating system stack are pretty similar to what you can readily run at home. Back in the 80s and 90s, this wasn t the case. TCP/IP wasn t even available for DOS or Windows until much later, and when it was, it was a clunky beast that was difficult. One of the things Kevin Driscoll highlights in his book called Modem World see my short post about it is that the history of the Internet we usually receive is focused on case 3: the large institutions. In reality, the Internet was and is literally a network of networks. Gateways to and from Internet existed from all three kinds of users for years, and while TCP/IP ultimately won the battle of the internetworking protocol, the other two streams of users also shaped the Internet as we now know it. Like many, I had no access to the large institution networks, but as I ve been reflecting on my experiences, I ve found a new appreciation for the way that those of us that grew up with primarily home PCs shaped the evolution of today s online world also.

An Era of Scarcity I should take a moment to comment about the cost of software back then. A newspaper article from 1985 comments that WordPerfect, then the most powerful word processing program, sold for $495 (or $219 if you could score a mail order discount). That s $1360/$600 in 2022 money. Other popular software, such as Lotus 1-2-3, was up there as well. If you were to buy a new PC clone in the mid to late 80s, it would often cost $2000 in 1980s dollars. Now add a printer a low-end dot matrix for $300 or a laser for $1500 or even more. A modem: another $300. So the basic system would be $3600, or $9900 in 2022 dollars. If you wanted a nice printer, you re now pushing well over $10,000 in 2022 dollars. You start to see one barrier here, and also why things like shareware and piracy if it was indeed even recognized as such were common in those days. So you can see, from a home computer setup (TRS-80, Commodore C64, Apple ][, etc) to a business-class PC setup was an order of magnitude increase in cost. From there to the high-end minis/mainframes was another order of magnitude (at least!) increase. Eventually there was price pressure on the higher end and things all got better, which is probably why the non-DOS PCs lasted until the early 90s.

Increasing Capabilities My first exposure to computers in school was in the 4th grade, when I would have been about 9. There was a single Apple ][ machine in that room. I primarily remember playing Oregon Trail on it. The next year, the school added a computer lab. Remember, this is a small rural area, so each graduating class might have about 25 people in it; this lab was shared by everyone in the K-8 building. It was full of some flavor of IBM PS/2 machines running DOS and Netware. There was a dedicated computer teacher too, though I think she was a regular teacher that was given somewhat minimal training on computers. We were going to learn typing that year, but I did so well on the very first typing program that we soon worked out that I could do programming instead. I started going to school early these machines were far more powerful than the XT at home and worked on programming projects there. Eventually my parents bought me a Gateway 486SX/25 with a VGA monitor and hard drive. Wow! This was a whole different world. It may have come with Windows 3.0 or 3.1 on it, but I mainly remember running OS/2 on that machine. More on that below.

Programming That CoCo II came with a BASIC interpreter in ROM. It came with a large manual, which served as a BASIC tutorial as well. The BASIC interpreter was also the shell, so literally you could not use the computer without at least a bit of BASIC. Once I had access to a DOS machine, it also had a basic interpreter: GW-BASIC. There was a fair bit of software written in BASIC at the time, but most of the more advanced software wasn t. I wondered how these .EXE and .COM programs were written. I could find vague references to DEBUG.EXE, assemblers, and such. But it wasn t until I got a copy of Turbo Pascal that I was able to do that sort of thing myself. Eventually I got Borland C++ and taught myself C as well. A few years later, I wanted to try writing GUI programs for Windows, and bought Watcom C++ much cheaper than the competition, and it could target Windows, DOS (and I think even OS/2). Notice that, aside from BASIC, none of this was free, and none of it was bundled. You couldn t just download a C compiler, or Python interpreter, or whatnot back then. You had to pay for the ability to write any kind of serious code on the computer you already owned.

The Microsoft Domination Microsoft came to dominate the PC landscape, and then even the computing landscape as a whole. IBM very quickly lost control over the hardware side of PCs as Compaq and others made clones, but Microsoft has managed in varying degrees even to this day to keep a stranglehold on the software, and especially the operating system, side. Yes, there was occasional talk of things like DR-DOS, but by and large the dominant platform came to be the PC, and if you had a PC, you ran DOS (and later Windows) from Microsoft. For awhile, it looked like IBM was going to challenge Microsoft on the operating system front; they had OS/2, and when I switched to it sometime around the version 2.1 era in 1993, it was unquestionably more advanced technically than the consumer-grade Windows from Microsoft at the time. It had Internet support baked in, could run most DOS and Windows programs, and had introduced a replacement for the by-then terrible FAT filesystem: HPFS, in 1988. Microsoft wouldn t introduce a better filesystem for its consumer operating systems until Windows XP in 2001, 13 years later. But more on that story later.

Free Software, Shareware, and Commercial Software I ve covered the high cost of software already. Obviously $500 software wasn t going to sell in the home market. So what did we have? Mainly, these things:

1. Public domain software. It was free to use, and if implemented in BASIC, probably had source code with it too.
2. Shareware
3. Commercial software (some of it from small publishers was a lot cheaper than $500)

Let s talk about shareware. The idea with shareware was that a company would release a useful program, sometimes limited. You were encouraged to register , or pay for, it if you liked it and used it. And, regardless of whether you registered it or not, were told please copy! Sometimes shareware was fully functional, and registering it got you nothing more than printed manuals and an easy conscience (guilt trips for not registering weren t necessarily very subtle). Sometimes unregistered shareware would have a nag screen a delay of a few seconds while they told you to register. Sometimes they d be limited in some way; you d get more features if you registered. With games, it was popular to have a trilogy, and release the first episode inevitably ending with a cliffhanger as shareware, and the subsequent episodes would require registration. In any event, a lot of software people used in the 80s and 90s was shareware. Also pirated commercial software, though in the earlier days of computing, I think some people didn t even know the difference. Notice what s missing: Free Software / FLOSS in the Richard Stallman sense of the word. Stallman lived in the big institution world after all, he worked at MIT and what he was doing with the Free Software Foundation and GNU project beginning in 1983 never really filtered into the DOS/Windows world at the time. I had no awareness of it even existing until into the 90s, when I first started getting some hints of it as a port of gcc became available for OS/2. The Internet was what really brought this home, but I m getting ahead of myself. I want to say again: FLOSS never really entered the DOS and Windows 3.x ecosystems. You d see it make a few inroads here and there in later versions of Windows, and moreso now that Microsoft has been sort of forced to accept it, but still, reflect on its legacy. What is the software market like in Windows compared to Linux, even today? Now it is, finally, time to talk about connectivity!

Getting On-Line What does it even mean to get on line? Certainly not connecting to a wifi access point. The answer is, unsurprisingly, complex. But for everyone except the large institutional users, it begins with a telephone.

The telephone system By the 80s, there was one communication network that already reached into nearly every home in America: the phone system. Virtually every household (note I don t say every person) was uniquely identified by a 10-digit phone number. You could, at least in theory, call up virtually any other phone in the country and be connected in less than a minute. But I ve got to talk about cost. The way things worked in the USA, you paid a monthly fee for a phone line. Included in that monthly fee was unlimited local calling. What is a local call? That was an extremely complex question. Generally it meant, roughly, calling within your city. But of course, as you deal with things like suburbs and cities growing into each other (eg, the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex), things got complicated fast. But let s just say for simplicity you could call others in your city. What about calling people not in your city? That was long distance , and you paid often hugely by the minute for it. Long distance rates were difficult to figure out, but were generally most expensive during business hours and cheapest at night or on weekends. Prices eventually started to come down when competition was introduced for long distance carriers, but even then you often were stuck with a single carrier for long distance calls outside your city but within your state. Anyhow, let s just leave it at this: local calls were virtually free, and long distance calls were extremely expensive.

Getting a modem I remember getting a modem that ran at either 1200bps or 2400bps. Either way, quite slow; you could often read even plain text faster than the modem could display it. But what was a modem? A modem hooked up to a computer with a serial cable, and to the phone system. By the time I got one, modems could automatically dial and answer. You would send a command like ATDT5551212 and it would dial 555-1212. Modems had speakers, because often things wouldn t work right, and the telephone system was oriented around speech, so you could hear what was happening. You d hear it wait for dial tone, then dial, then hopefully the remote end would ring, a modem there would answer, you d hear the screeching of a handshake, and eventually your terminal would say CONNECT 2400. Now your computer was bridged to the other; anything going out your serial port was encoded as sound by your modem and decoded at the other end, and vice-versa. But what, exactly, was the other end? It might have been another person at their computer. Turn on local echo, and you can see what they did. Maybe you d send files to each other. But in my case, the answer was different: PC Magazine.

PC Magazine and CompuServe Starting around 1986 (so I would have been about 6 years old), I got to read PC Magazine. My dad would bring copies that were being discarded at his office home for me to read, and I think eventually bought me a subscription directly. This was not just a standard magazine; it ran something like 350-400 pages an issue, and came out every other week. This thing was a monster. It had reviews of hardware and software, descriptions of upcoming technologies, pages and pages of ads (that often had some degree of being informative to them). And they had sections on programming. Many issues would talk about BASIC or Pascal programming, and there d be a utility in most issues. What do I mean by a utility in most issues ? Did they include a floppy disk with software? No, of course not. There was a literal program listing printed in the magazine. If you wanted the utility, you had to type it in. And a lot of them were written in assembler, so you had to have an assembler. An assembler, of course, was not free and I didn t have one. Or maybe they wrote it in Microsoft C, and I had Borland C, and (of course) they weren t compatible. Sometimes they would list the program sort of in binary: line after line of a BASIC program, with lines like 64, 193, 253, 0, 53, 0, 87 that you would type in for hours, hopefully correctly. Running the BASIC program would, if you got it correct, emit a .COM file that you could then run. They did have a rudimentary checksum system built in, but it wasn t even a CRC, so something like swapping two numbers you d never notice except when the program would mysteriously hang. Eventually they teamed up with CompuServe to offer a limited slice of CompuServe for the purpose of downloading PC Magazine utilities. This was called PC MagNet. I am foggy on the details, but I believe that for a time you could connect to the limited PC MagNet part of CompuServe for free (after the cost of the long-distance call, that is) rather than paying for CompuServe itself (because, OF COURSE, that also charged you per the minute.) So in the early days, I would get special permission from my parents to place a long distance call, and after some nerve-wracking minutes in which we were aware every minute was racking up charges, I could navigate the menus, download what I wanted, and log off immediately. I still, incidentally, mourn what PC Magazine became. As with computing generally, it followed the mass market. It lost its deep technical chops, cut its programming columns, stopped talking about things like how SCSI worked, and so forth. By the time it stopped printing in 2009, it was no longer a square-bound 400-page beheamoth, but rather looked more like a copy of Newsweek, but with less depth.

Continuing with CompuServe CompuServe was a much larger service than just PC MagNet. Eventually, our family got a subscription. It was still an expensive and scarce resource; I d call it only after hours when the long-distance rates were cheapest. Everyone had a numerical username separated by commas; mine was 71510,1421. CompuServe had forums, and files. Eventually I would use TapCIS to queue up things I wanted to do offline, to minimize phone usage online. CompuServe eventually added a gateway to the Internet. For the sum of somewhere around $1 a message, you could send or receive an email from someone with an Internet email address! I remember the thrill of one time, as a kid of probably 11 years, sending a message to one of the editors of PC Magazine and getting a kind, if brief, reply back! But inevitably I had

The Godzilla Phone Bill Yes, one month I became lax in tracking my time online. I ran up my parents phone bill. I don t remember how high, but I remember it was hundreds of dollars, a hefty sum at the time. As I watched Jason Scott s BBS Documentary, I realized how common an experience this was. I think this was the end of CompuServe for me for awhile.

Toll-Free Numbers I lived near a town with a population of 500. Not even IN town, but near town. The calling area included another town with a population of maybe 1500, so all told, there were maybe 2000 people total I could talk to with a local call though far fewer numbers, because remember, telephones were allocated by the household. There was, as far as I know, zero modems that were a local call (aside from one that belonged to a friend I met in around 1992). So basically everything was long-distance. But there was a special feature of the telephone network: toll-free numbers. Normally when calling long-distance, you, the caller, paid the bill. But with a toll-free number, beginning with 1-800, the recipient paid the bill. These numbers almost inevitably belonged to corporations that wanted to make it easy for people to call. Sales and ordering lines, for instance. Some of these companies started to set up modems on toll-free numbers. There were few of these, but they existed, so of course I had to try them! One of them was a company called PennyWise that sold office supplies. They had a toll-free line you could call with a modem to order stuff. Yes, online ordering before the web! I loved office supplies. And, because I lived far from a big city, if the local K-Mart didn t have it, I probably couldn t get it. Of course, the interface was entirely text, but you could search for products and place orders with the modem. I had loads of fun exploring the system, and actually ordered things from them and probably actually saved money doing so. With the first order they shipped a monster full-color catalog. That thing must have been 500 pages, like the Sears catalogs of the day. Every item had a part number, which streamlined ordering through the modem.

Inbound FAXes By the 90s, a number of modems became able to send and receive FAXes as well. For those that don t know, a FAX machine was essentially a special modem. It would scan a page and digitally transmit it over the phone system, where it would at least in the early days be printed out in real time (because the machines didn t have the memory to store an entire page as an image). Eventually, PC modems integrated FAX capabilities. There still wasn t anything useful I could do locally, but there were ways I could get other companies to FAX something to me. I remember two of them. One was for US Robotics. They had an on demand FAX system. You d call up a toll-free number, which was an automated IVR system. You could navigate through it and select various documents of interest to you: spec sheets and the like. You d key in your FAX number, hang up, and US Robotics would call YOU and FAX you the documents you wanted. Yes! I was talking to a computer (of a sorts) at no cost to me! The New York Times also ran a service for awhile called TimesFax. Every day, they would FAX out a page or two of summaries of the day s top stories. This was pretty cool in an era in which I had no other way to access anything from the New York Times. I managed to sign up for TimesFax I have no idea how, anymore and for awhile I would get a daily FAX of their top stories. When my family got its first laser printer, I could them even print these FAXes complete with the gothic New York Times masthead. Wow! (OK, so technically I could print it on a dot-matrix printer also, but graphics on a 9-pin dot matrix is a kind of pain that is a whole other article.)

My own phone line Remember how I discussed that phone lines were allocated per household? This was a problem for a lot of reasons:

1. Anybody that tried to call my family while I was using my modem would get a busy signal (unable to complete the call)
2. If anybody in the house picked up the phone while I was using it, that would degrade the quality of the ongoing call and either mess up or disconnect the call in progress. In many cases, that could cancel a file transfer (which wasn t necessarily easy or possible to resume), prompting howls of annoyance from me.
3. Generally we all had to work around each other

So eventually I found various small jobs and used the money I made to pay for my own phone line and my own long distance costs. Eventually I upgraded to a 28.8Kbps US Robotics Courier modem even! Yes, you heard it right: I got a job and a bank account so I could have a phone line and a faster modem. Uh, isn t that why every teenager gets a job? Now my local friend and I could call each other freely at least on my end (I can t remember if he had his own phone line too). We could exchange files using HS/Link, which had the added benefit of allowing split-screen chat even while a file transfer is in progress. I m sure we spent hours chatting to each other keyboard-to-keyboard while sharing files with each other.

Technology in Schools By this point in the story, we re in the late 80s and early 90s. I m still using PC-style OSs at home; OS/2 in the later years of this period, DOS or maybe a bit of Windows in the earlier years. I mentioned that they let me work on programming at school starting in 5th grade. It was soon apparent that I knew more about computers than anybody on staff, and I started getting pulled out of class to help teachers or administrators with vexing school problems. This continued until I graduated from high school, incidentally often to my enjoyment, and the annoyance of one particular teacher who, I must say, I was fine with annoying in this way. That s not to say that there was institutional support for what I was doing. It was, after all, a small school. Larger schools might have introduced BASIC or maybe Logo in high school. But I had already taught myself BASIC, Pascal, and C by the time I was somewhere around 12 years old. So I wouldn t have had any use for that anyhow. There were programming contests occasionally held in the area. Schools would send teams. My school didn t really send anybody, but I went as an individual. One of them was run by a local college (but for jr. high or high school students. Years later, I met one of the professors that ran it. He remembered me, and that day, better than I did. The programming contest had problems one could solve in BASIC or Logo. I knew nothing about what to expect going into it, but I had lugged my computer and screen along, and asked him, Can I write my solutions in C? He was, apparently, stunned, but said sure, go for it. I took first place that day, leading to some rather confused teams from much larger schools. The Netware network that the school had was, as these generally were, itself isolated. There was no link to the Internet or anything like it. Several schools across three local counties eventually invested in a fiber-optic network linking them together. This built a larger, but still closed, network. Its primary purpose was to allow students to be exposed to a wider variety of classes at high schools. Participating schools had an ITV room , outfitted with cameras and mics. So students at any school could take classes offered over ITV at other schools. For instance, only my school taught German classes, so people at any of those participating schools could take German. It was an early Zoom room. But alongside the TV signal, there was enough bandwidth to run some Netware frames. By about 1995 or so, this let one of the schools purchase some CD-ROM software that was made available on a file server and could be accessed by any participating school. Nice! But Netware was mainly about file and printer sharing; there wasn t even a facility like email, at least not on our deployment.

BBSs My last hop before the Internet was the BBS. A BBS was a computer program, usually ran by a hobbyist like me, on a computer with a modem connected. Callers would call it up, and they d interact with the BBS. Most BBSs had discussion groups like forums and file areas. Some also had games. I, of course, continued to have that most vexing of problems: they were all long-distance. There were some ways to help with that, chiefly QWK and BlueWave. These, somewhat like TapCIS in the CompuServe days, let me download new message posts for reading offline, and queue up my own messages to send later. QWK and BlueWave didn t help with file downloading, though.

BBSs get networked BBSs were an interesting thing. You d call up one, and inevitably somewhere in the file area would be a BBS list. Download the BBS list and you ve suddenly got a list of phone numbers to try calling. All of them were long distance, of course. You d try calling them at random and have a success rate of maybe 20%. The other 80% would be defunct; you might get the dreaded this number is no longer in service or the even more dreaded angry human answering the phone (and of course a modem can t talk to a human, so they d just get silence for probably the nth time that week). The phone company cared nothing about BBSs and recycled their numbers just as fast as any others. To talk to various people, or participate in certain discussion groups, you d have to call specific BBSs. That s annoying enough in the general case, but even more so for someone paying long distance for it all, because it takes a few minutes to establish a connection to a BBS: handshaking, logging in, menu navigation, etc. But BBSs started talking to each other. The earliest successful such effort was FidoNet, and for the duration of the BBS era, it remained by far the largest. FidoNet was analogous to the UUCP that the institutional users had, but ran on the much cheaper PC hardware. Basically, BBSs that participated in FidoNet would relay email, forum posts, and files between themselves overnight. Eventually, as with UUCP, by hopping through this network, messages could reach around the globe, and forums could have worldwide participation asynchronously, long before they could link to each other directly via the Internet. It was almost entirely volunteer-run.

Running my own BBS At age 13, I eventually chose to set up my own BBS. It ran on my single phone line, so of course when I was dialing up something else, nobody could dial up me. Not that this was a huge problem; in my town of 500, I probably had a good 1 or 2 regular callers in the beginning. In the PC era, there was a big difference between a server and a client. Server-class software was expensive and rare. Maybe in later years you had an email client, but an email server would be completely unavailable to you as a home user. But with a BBS, I could effectively run a server. I even ran serial lines in our house so that the BBS could be connected from other rooms! Since I was running OS/2, the BBS didn t tie up the computer; I could continue using it for other things. FidoNet had an Internet email gateway. This one, unlike CompuServe s, was free. Once I had a BBS on FidoNet, you could reach me from the Internet using the FidoNet address. This didn t support attachments, but then email of the day didn t really, either. Various others outside Kansas ran FidoNet distribution points. I believe one of them was mgmtsys; my memory is quite vague, but I think they offered a direct gateway and I would call them to pick up Internet mail via FidoNet protocols, but I m not at all certain of this.

Pros and Cons of the Non-Microsoft World As mentioned, Microsoft was and is the dominant operating system vendor for PCs. But I left that world in 1993, and here, nearly 30 years later, have never really returned. I got an operating system with more technical capabilities than the DOS and Windows of the day, but the tradeoff was a much smaller software ecosystem. OS/2 could run DOS programs, but it ran OS/2 programs a lot better. So if I were to run a BBS, I wanted one that had a native OS/2 version limiting me to a small fraction of available BBS server software. On the other hand, as a fully 32-bit operating system, there started to be OS/2 ports of certain software with a Unix heritage; most notably for me at the time, gcc. At some point, I eventually came across the RMS essays and started to be hooked.

Internet: The Hunt Begins I certainly was aware that the Internet was out there and interesting. But the first problem was: how the heck do I get connected to the Internet?

Learning Link and Gopher ISPs weren t really a thing; the first one in my area (though still a long-distance call) started in, I think, 1994. One service that one of my teachers got me hooked up with was Learning Link. Learning Link was a nationwide collaboration of PBS stations and schools, designed to build on the educational mission of PBS. The nearest Learning Link station was more than a 3-hour drive away but critically, they had a toll-free access number, and my teacher convinced them to let me use it. I connected via a terminal program and a modem, like with most other things. I don t remember much about it, but I do remember a very important thing it had: Gopher. That was my first experience with Gopher. Learning Link was hosted by a Unix derivative (Xenix), but it didn t exactly give everyone a shell. I seem to recall it didn t have open FTP access either. The Gopher client had FTP access at some point; I don t recall for sure if it did then. If it did, then when a Gopher server referred to an FTP server, I could get to it. (I am unclear at this point if I could key in an arbitrary FTP location, or knew how, at that time.) I also had email access there, but I don t recall exactly how; probably Pine. If that s correct, that would have dated my Learning Link access as no earlier than 1992. I think my access time to Learning Link was limited. And, since the only way to get out on the Internet from there was Gopher and Pine, I was somewhat limited in terms of technology as well. I believe that telnet services, for instance, weren t available to me.

Computer labs There was one place that tended to have Internet access: colleges and universities. In 7th grade, I participated in a program that resulted in me being invited to visit Duke University, and in 8th grade, I participated in National History Day, resulting in a trip to visit the University of Maryland. I probably sought out computer labs at both of those. My most distinct memory was finding my way into a computer lab at one of those universities, and it was full of NeXT workstations. I had never seen or used NeXT before, and had no idea how to operate it. I had brought a box of floppy disks, unaware that the DOS disks probably weren t compatible with NeXT. Closer to home, a small college had a computer lab that I could also visit. I would go there in summer or when it wasn t used with my stack of floppies. I remember downloading disk images of FLOSS operating systems: FreeBSD, Slackware, or Debian, at the time. The hash marks from the DOS-based FTP client would creep across the screen as the 1.44MB disk images would slowly download. telnet was also available on those machines, so I could telnet to things like public-access Archie servers and libraries though not Gopher. Still, FTP and telnet access opened up a lot, and I learned quite a bit in those years.

Continuing the Journey At some point, I got a copy of the Whole Internet User s Guide and Catalog, published in 1994. I still have it. If it hadn t already figured it out by then, I certainly became aware from it that Unix was the dominant operating system on the Internet. The examples in Whole Internet covered FTP, telnet, gopher all assuming the user somehow got to a Unix prompt. The web was introduced about 300 pages in; clearly viewed as something that wasn t page 1 material. And it covered the command-line www client before introducing the graphical Mosaic. Even then, though, the book highlighted Mosaic s utility as a front-end for Gopher and FTP, and even the ability to launch telnet sessions by clicking on links. But having a copy of the book didn t equate to having any way to run Mosaic. The machines in the computer lab I mentioned above all ran DOS and were incapable of running a graphical browser. I had no SLIP or PPP (both ways to run Internet traffic over a modem) connectivity at home. In short, the Web was something for the large institutional users at the time.

CD-ROMs As CD-ROMs came out, with their huge (for the day) 650MB capacity, various companies started collecting software that could be downloaded on the Internet and selling it on CD-ROM. The two most popular ones were Walnut Creek CD-ROM and Infomagic. One could buy extensive Shareware and gaming collections, and then even entire Linux and BSD distributions. Although not exactly an Internet service per se, it was a way of bringing what may ordinarily only be accessible to institutional users into the home computer realm.

Free Software Jumps In As I mentioned, by the mid 90s, I had come across RMS s writings about free software most probably his 1992 essay Why Software Should Be Free. (Please note, this is not a commentary on the more recently-revealed issues surrounding RMS, but rather his writings and work as I encountered them in the 90s.) The notion of a Free operating system not just in cost but in openness was incredibly appealing. Not only could I tinker with it to a much greater extent due to having source for everything, but it included so much software that I d otherwise have to pay for. Compilers! Interpreters! Editors! Terminal emulators! And, especially, server software of all sorts. There d be no way I could afford or run Netware, but with a Free Unixy operating system, I could do all that. My interest was obviously piqued. Add to that the fact that I could actually participate and contribute I was about to become hooked on something that I ve stayed hooked on for decades. But then the question was: which Free operating system? Eventually I chose FreeBSD to begin with; that would have been sometime in 1995. I don t recall the exact reasons for that. I remember downloading Slackware install floppies, and probably the fact that Debian wasn t yet at 1.0 scared me off for a time. FreeBSD s fantastic Handbook far better than anything I could find for Linux at the time was no doubt also a factor.

The de Raadt Factor Why not NetBSD or OpenBSD? The short answer is Theo de Raadt. Somewhere in this time, when I was somewhere between 14 and 16 years old, I asked some questions comparing NetBSD to the other two free BSDs. This was on a NetBSD mailing list, but for some reason Theo saw it and got a flame war going, which CC d me. Now keep in mind that even if NetBSD had a web presence at the time, it would have been minimal, and I would have not all that unusually for the time had no way to access it. I was certainly not aware of the, shall we say, acrimony between Theo and NetBSD. While I had certainly seen an online flamewar before, this took on a different and more disturbing tone; months later, Theo randomly emailed me under the subject SLIME saying that I was, well, SLIME . I seem to recall periodic emails from him thereafter reminding me that he hates me and that he had blocked me. (Disclaimer: I have poor email archives from this period, so the full details are lost to me, but I believe I am accurately conveying these events from over 25 years ago) This was a surprise, and an unpleasant one. I was trying to learn, and while it is possible I didn t understand some aspect or other of netiquette (or Theo s personal hatred of NetBSD) at the time, still that is not a reason to flame a 16-year-old (though he would have had no way to know my age). This didn t leave any kind of scar, but did leave a lasting impression; to this day, I am particularly concerned with how FLOSS projects handle poisonous people. Debian, for instance, has come a long way in this over the years, and even Linus Torvalds has turned over a new leaf. I don t know if Theo has. In any case, I didn t use NetBSD then. I did try it periodically in the years since, but never found it compelling enough to justify a large switch from Debian. I never tried OpenBSD for various reasons, but one of them was that I didn t want to join a community that tolerates behavior such as Theo s from its leader.

Moving to FreeBSD Moving from OS/2 to FreeBSD was final. That is, I didn t have enough hard drive space to keep both. I also didn t have the backup capacity to back up OS/2 completely. My BBS, which ran Virtual BBS (and at some point also AdeptXBBS) was deleted and reincarnated in a different form. My BBS was a member of both FidoNet and VirtualNet; the latter was specific to VBBS, and had to be dropped. I believe I may have also had to drop the FidoNet link for a time. This was the biggest change of computing in my life to that point. The earlier experiences hadn t literally destroyed what came before. OS/2 could still run my DOS programs. Its command shell was quite DOS-like. It ran Windows programs. I was going to throw all that away and leap into the unknown. I wish I had saved a copy of my BBS; I would love to see the messages I exchanged back then, or see its menu screens again. I have little memory of what it looked like. But other than that, I have no regrets. Pursuing Free, Unixy operating systems brought me a lot of enjoyment and a good career. That s not to say it was easy. All the problems of not being in the Microsoft ecosystem were magnified under FreeBSD and Linux. In a day before EDID, monitor timings had to be calculated manually and you risked destroying your monitor if you got them wrong. Word processing and spreadsheet software was pretty much not there for FreeBSD or Linux at the time; I was therefore forced to learn LaTeX and actually appreciated that. Software like PageMaker or CorelDraw was certainly nowhere to be found for those free operating systems either. But I got a ton of new capabilities. I mentioned the BBS didn t shut down, and indeed it didn t. I ran what was surely a supremely unique oddity: a free, dialin Unix shell server in the middle of a small town in Kansas. I m sure I provided things such as pine for email and some help text and maybe even printouts for how to use it. The set of callers slowly grew over the time period, in fact. And then I got UUCP.

Enter UUCP Even throughout all this, there was no local Internet provider and things were still long distance. I had Internet Email access via assorted strange routes, but they were all strange. And, I wanted access to Usenet. In 1995, it happened. The local ISP I mentioned offered UUCP access. Though I couldn t afford the dialup shell (or later, SLIP/PPP) that they offered due to long-distance costs, UUCP s very efficient batched processes looked doable. I believe I established that link when I was 15, so in 1995. I worked to register my domain, complete.org, as well. At the time, the process was a bit lengthy and involved downloading a text file form, filling it out in a precise way, sending it to InterNIC, and probably mailing them a check. Well I did that, and in September of 1995, complete.org became mine. I set up sendmail on my local system, as well as INN to handle the limited Usenet newsfeed I requested from the ISP. I even ran Majordomo to host some mailing lists, including some that were surprisingly high-traffic for a few-times-a-day long-distance modem UUCP link! The modem client programs for FreeBSD were somewhat less advanced than for OS/2, but I believe I wound up using Minicom or Seyon to continue to dial out to BBSs and, I believe, continue to use Learning Link. So all the while I was setting up my local BBS, I continued to have access to the text Internet, consisting of chiefly Gopher for me.

Switching to Debian I switched to Debian sometime in 1995 or 1996, and have been using Debian as my primary OS ever since. I continued to offer shell access, but added the WorldVU Atlantis menuing BBS system. This provided a return of a more BBS-like interface (by default; shell was still an uption) as well as some BBS door games such as LoRD and TradeWars 2002, running under DOS emulation. I also continued to run INN, and ran ifgate to allow FidoNet echomail to be presented into INN Usenet-like newsgroups, and netmail to be gated to Unix email. This worked pretty well. The BBS continued to grow in these days, peaking at about two dozen total user accounts, and maybe a dozen regular users.

Dial-up access availability I believe it was in 1996 that dial up PPP access finally became available in my small town. What a thrill! FINALLY! I could now FTP, use Gopher, telnet, and the web all from home. Of course, it was at modem speeds, but still. (Strangely, I have a memory of accessing the Web using WebExplorer from OS/2. I don t know exactly why; it s possible that by this time, I had upgraded to a 486 DX2/66 and was able to reinstall OS/2 on the old 25MHz 486, or maybe something was wrong with the timeline from my memories from 25 years ago above. Or perhaps I made the occasional long-distance call somewhere before I ditched OS/2.) Gopher sites still existed at this point, and I could access them using Netscape Navigator which likely became my standard Gopher client at that point. I don t recall using UMN text-mode gopher client locally at that time, though it s certainly possible I did.

The city Starting when I was 15, I took computer science classes at Wichita State University. The first one was a class in the summer of 1995 on C++. I remember being worried about being good enough for it I was, after all, just after my HS freshman year and had never taken the prerequisite C class. I loved it and got an A! By 1996, I was taking more classes. In 1996 or 1997 I stayed in Wichita during the day due to having more than one class. So, what would I do then but enjoy the computer lab? The CS dept. had two of them: one that had NCD X terminals connected to a pair of SunOS servers, and another one running Windows. I spent most of the time in the Unix lab with the NCDs; I d use Netscape or pine, write code, enjoy the University s fast Internet connection, and so forth. In 1997 I had graduated high school and that summer I moved to Wichita to attend college. As was so often the case, I shut down the BBS at that time. It would be 5 years until I again dealt with Internet at home in a rural community. By the time I moved to my apartment in Wichita, I had stopped using OS/2 entirely. I have no memory of ever having OS/2 there. Along the way, I had bought a Pentium 166, and then the most expensive piece of computing equipment I have ever owned: a DEC Alpha, which, of course, ran Linux.

ISDN I must have used dialup PPP for a time, but I eventually got a job working for the ISP I had used for UUCP, and then PPP. While there, I got a 128Kbps ISDN line installed in my apartment, and they gave me a discount on the service for it. That was around 3x the speed of a modem, and crucially was always on and gave me a public IP. No longer did I have to use UUCP; now I got to host my own things! By at least 1998, I was running a web server on www.complete.org, and I had an FTP server going as well.

Even Bigger Cities In 1999 I moved to Dallas, and there got my first broadband connection: an ADSL link at, I think, 1.5Mbps! Now that was something! But it had some reliability problems. I eventually put together a server and had it hosted at an acquantaince s place who had SDSL in his apartment. Within a couple of years, I had switched to various kinds of proper hosting for it, but that is a whole other article. In Indianapolis, I got a cable modem for the first time, with even tighter speeds but prohibitions on running servers on it. Yuck.

Challenges Being non-Microsoft continued to have challenges. Until the advent of Firefox, a web browser was one of the biggest. While Netscape supported Linux on i386, it didn t support Linux on Alpha. I hobbled along with various attempts at emulators, old versions of Mosaic, and so forth. And, until StarOffice was open-sourced as Open Office, reading Microsoft file formats was also a challenge, though WordPerfect was briefly available for Linux. Over the years, I have become used to the Linux ecosystem. Perhaps I use Gimp instead of Photoshop and digikam instead of well, whatever somebody would use on Windows. But I get ZFS, and containers, and so much that isn t available there. Yes, I know Apple never went away and is a thing, but for most of the time period I discuss in this article, at least after the rise of DOS, it was niche compared to the PC market.

Back to Kansas In 2002, I moved back to Kansas, to a rural home near a different small town in the county next to where I grew up. Over there, it was back to dialup at home, but I had faster access at work. I didn t much care for this, and thus began a 20+-year effort to get broadband in the country. At first, I got a wireless link, which worked well enough in the winter, but had serious problems in the summer when the trees leafed out. Eventually DSL became available locally highly unreliable, but still, it was something. Then I moved back to the community I grew up in, a few miles from where I grew up. Again I got DSL a bit better. But after some years, being at the end of the run of DSL meant I had poor speeds and reliability problems. I eventually switched to various wireless ISPs, which continues to the present day; while people in cities can get Gbps service, I can get, at best, about 50Mbps. Long-distance fees are gone, but the speed disparity remains.

Concluding Reflections I am glad I grew up where I did; the strong community has a lot of advantages I don t have room to discuss here. In a number of very real senses, having no local services made things a lot more difficult than they otherwise would have been. However, perhaps I could say that I also learned a lot through the need to come up with inventive solutions to those challenges. To this day, I think a lot about computing in remote environments: partially because I live in one, and partially because I enjoy visiting places that are remote enough that they have no Internet, phone, or cell service whatsoever. I have written articles like Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances based on my own personal experience. I instinctively think about making protocols robust in the face of various kinds of connectivity failures because I experience various kinds of connectivity failures myself.

(Almost) Everything Lives On In 2002, Gopher turned 10 years old. It had probably been about 9 or 10 years since I had first used Gopher, which was the first way I got on live Internet from my house. It was hard to believe. By that point, I had an always-on Internet link at home and at work. I had my Alpha, and probably also at least PCMCIA Ethernet for a laptop (many laptops had modems by the 90s also). Despite its popularity in the early 90s, less than 10 years after it came on the scene and started to unify the Internet, it was mostly forgotten. And it was at that moment that I decided to try to resurrect it. The University of Minnesota finally released it under an Open Source license. I wrote the first new gopher server in years, pygopherd, and introduced gopher to Debian. Gopher lives on; there are now quite a few Gopher clients and servers out there, newly started post-2002. The Gemini protocol can be thought of as something akin to Gopher 2.0, and it too has a small but blossoming ecosystem. Archie, the old FTP search tool, is dead though. Same for WAIS and a number of the other pre-web search tools. But still, even FTP lives on today. And BBSs? Well, they didn t go away either. Jason Scott s fabulous BBS documentary looks back at the history of the BBS, while Back to the BBS from last year talks about the modern BBS scene. FidoNet somehow is still alive and kicking. UUCP still has its place and has inspired a whole string of successors. Some, like NNCP, are clearly direct descendents of UUCP. Filespooler lives in that ecosystem, and you can even see UUCP concepts in projects as far afield as Syncthing and Meshtastic. Usenet still exists, and you can now run Usenet over NNCP just as I ran Usenet over UUCP back in the day (which you can still do as well). Telnet, of course, has been largely supplanted by ssh, but the concept is more popular now than ever, as Linux has made ssh be available on everything from Raspberry Pi to Android. And I still run a Gopher server, looking pretty much like it did in 2002. This post also has a permanent home on my website, where it may be periodically updated.

• When traveling to national parks or other wilderness areas, family and friends can keep in touch even where there is no cell coverage.
• It is a lot faster to just push a button and start talking than it is to unlock a phone, open the phone app, select a person, wait for the call to connect, wait for the other person to answer, etc. I m heading back. OK. Boom, 5 seconds, done. A phone user wouldn t have even dialed in that time.
• A whole group of people can be on the same channel.
• You can often buy a radio for less than the monthly cost of a cell plan.

How these services fit in This article is primarily about handheld radios that can be used by anybody. I laid out some of their advantages above. Before continuing, I should point out some of the other services you may consider:

• Cell phones, obviously. Due to the impressive infrastructure you pay for each month (many towers in high locations), in areas of cell coverage, you have this ability to connect to so many other phones around the world. With radios like discussed here, your range will likely a few miles.
• Amateur Radio has often been a decade or more ahead of what you see in these easy personal radio devices. You can unquestionably get amateur radio devices with many more features and better performance. However, generally speaking, each person that transmits on an amateur radio band must be licensed. Getting an amateur radio license isn t difficult, but it does involve passing a test and some time studying for the exam. So it isn t something you can count on random friends or family members being able to do. That said, I have resources on Getting Started With Amateur Radio and it s not as hard as you might think! There are also a lot of reasons to use amateur radio if you want to go down that path.
• Satellite messengers such as the Garmin Inreach or Zoleo can send SMS-like messages across anywhere in the globe with a clear view of the sky. They also often have SOS features. While these are useful safety equipment, it can take many minutes for a message to be sent and received it s not like an interactive SMS conversation and there are places where local radios will have better signal. Notably, satellite messengers are almost useless indoors and can have trouble in areas without a clear view of the sky, such as dense forests, valleys, etc.
• My earlier Roundup of secure messengers with off-the-grid capabilities (distributed/mesh messengers) highlighted a number of other options as well, for text-only communication. For instance:
  • For very short-range service, Briar can form a mesh over Bluetooth from cell phones or over Tor, if Internet access is available.
  • Dedicated short message services Mesh Networks like Meshtastic or Beartooth have no voice capability, but share GPS locations and short text messages over their own local mesh. Generally they need to pair to a cell phone (even if that phone has no cell service) for most functionality.
• Yggdrasil can do something similar over ad-hoc Wifi, but it is a lower-level protocol and you d need some sort of messaging to run atop it.

This article is primarily about the USA, though these concepts, if not the specific implementation, apply many other areas as well.

The landscape of easy personal radios The oldest personal radio service in the US is Citizens Band (CB). Because it uses a lower frequency band than others, handheld radios are larger, heavier, and less efficient. It is mostly used in vehicles or other installations where size isn t an issue. The FRS/GMRS services mostly share a set of frequencies. The Family Radio Service is unlicensed (you don t have to get a license to use it) and radios are plentiful and cheap. When you get a blister pack or little radios for maybe $50 for a pair or less, they re probably FRS. FRS was expanded by the FCC in 2017, and now most FRS channels can run up to 2 watts of power (with channels 8-14 still limited to 0.5W). FRS radios are pretty much always handheld. GMRS runs on mostly the same frequencies as FRS. GMRS lets you run up to 5W on some channels, up to 50W on others, and operate repeaters. GMRS also permits limited occasional digital data bursts; three manufacturers currently use this to exchange GPS data or text messages. To use GMRS, you must purchase a GMRS license; it costs $35 for a person and their immediate family and is good for 10 years. No exam is required. GMRS radios can transmit on FRS frequencies using the GMRS authorization. The extra power of GMRS gets you extra distance. While only the best handheld GMRS radios can put out 5W of power, some mobile (car) or home radios can put out the full 50W, and use more capable exterior antennas too. There is also the MURS band, which offers very few channels and also very few devices. It is not in wide use, probably for good reason. Finally, some radios use some other unlicensed bands. The Motorola DTR and DLR series I will talk about operate in the 900MHz ISM band. Regulations there limit them to a maximum power of 1W, but as you will see, due to some other optimizations, their range is often quite similar to a 5W GMRS handheld. All of these radios share something in common: your radio can either transmit, or receive, but not both simultaneously. They all have a PTT (push-to-talk) button that you push and hold while you are transmitting, and at all other times, they act as receivers. You ll learn that doubling is a thing where 2 or more people attempt to transmit at the same time. To listeners, the result is often garbled. To the transmitters, they may not even be aware they did it since, after all, they were transmitting. Usually it will be clear pretty quickly as people don t get responses or responses say it was garbled. Only the digital Motorola DLR/DTR series detects and prevents this situation.

FRS and GMRS radios As mentioned, the FRS/GMRS radios are generally the most popular, and quite inexpensive. Those that can emit 2W will have pretty decent range; 5W even better (assuming a decent antenna), though the 5W ones will require a GMRS license. For the most part, there isn t much that differentiates one FRS radio from another, or (with a few more exceptions) one GMRS handheld from another. Do not believe the manufacturers claims of 50 mile range or whatever; more on range below. FRS and GMRS radios use FM. GMRS radios are permitted to use a wider bandwidth than FRS radios, but in general, FRS and GMRS users can communicate with each other from any brand of radio to any other brand of radio, assuming they are using basic voice services. Some FRS and GMRS radios can receive the NOAA weather radio. That s nice for wilderness use. Nicer ones can monitor it for alert tones, even when you re tuned to a different channel. The very nicest on this as far as I know, only the Garmin Rino series will receive and process SAME codes to only trigger alerts for your specific location. GMRS (but not FRS) also permits 1-second digital data bursts at periodic intervals. There are now three radio series that take advantage of this: the Garmin Rino, the Motorola T800, and BTech GMRS-PRO. Garmin s radios are among the priciest of GMRS handhelds out there; the top-of-the-line Rino will set you back $650. The cheapest is $350, but does not contain a replaceable battery, which should be an instant rejection of a device like this. So, for $550, you can get the middle-of-the-road Rino. It features a sophisticated GPS system with Garmin trail maps and such, plus a 5W GMRS radio with GPS data sharing and a very limited (13-character) text messaging system. It does have a Bluetooth link to a cell phone, which can provide a link to trail maps and the like, and limited functionality for the radio. The Rino is also large and heavy (due to its large map-capable screen). Many consider it to be somewhat dated technology; for instance, other ways to have offline maps now exist (such as my Garmin Fenix 6 Pro, which has those maps on a watch!). It is bulky enough to likely be left at home in many situations. The Motorola T800 doesn t have much to talk about compared to the other two. Both of those platforms are a number of years old. The newest entrant in this space, from budget radio maker Baofeng, is the BTech GMRS-PRO, which came out just a couple of weeks ago. Its screen, though lacking built-in maps, does still have a GPS digital link similar to Garmin s, and can show you a heading and distance to other GMRS-PRO users. It too is a 5W unit, and has a ton of advanced features that are rare in GMRS: ability to pair a Bluetooth headset to it directly (though the Garmin Rino supports Bluetooth, it doesn t support this), ability to use the phone app as a speaker/mic for the radio, longer text messages than the Garmin Rino, etc. The GMRS-PRO sold out within a few days of its announcement, and I am presently waiting for mine to arrive to review. At $140 and with a more modern radio implementation, for people that don t need the trail maps and the like, it makes a compelling alternative to Garmin for outdoor use. Garmin documents when GPS beacons are sent out: generally, when you begin a transmission, or when another radio asks for your position. I couldn t find similar documentation from Motorola or BTech, but I believe FCC regulations mean that the picture would be similar with them. In other words, none of these devices is continuously, automatically, transmitting position updates. However, you can request a position update from another radio. It should be noted that, while voice communication is compatible across FRS/GMRS, data communication is not. Garmin, Motorola, and BTech all have different data protocols that are incompatible with radios from other manufacturers. FRS/GMRS radios often advertise privacy codes. These do nothing to protect your privacy; see more under the privacy section below.

Motorola DLR and DTR series Although they can be used for similar purposes, and I do, these radios are unique from the others in this article in several ways:

• Their sales and marketing is targeted at businesses rather than consumers
• They use digital encoding of audio, rather than analog FM or AM
• They use FHSS (Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum) rather than a set frequency
• They operate on the 900MHz ISM band, rather than a 460MHz UHF band (or a lower band yet for MURS and CB)
• The DLR series is quite small, smaller than many GMRS radios.

I don t have space to go into a lot of radio theory in this article, but I ll briefly expand on some of this. First, FHSS. A FHSS radio hops from frequency to frequency many times per second, following some preset hopping algorithm that is part of the radio. Although it complicates the radio design, it has some advantages; it tends to allow more users to share a band, and if one particular frequency has a conflict with something else, it will be for a brief fraction of a second and may not even be noticeable. Digital encoding generally increases the quality of the audio, and keeps the quality high even in degraded signal conditions where analog radios would experience static or a quieter voice. However, you also lose that sort of audible feedback that your signal is getting weak. When you get too far away, the digital signal drops off a cliff . Often, either you have a crystal-clear signal or you have no signal at all. Motorola s radios leverage these features to build a unique radio. Not only can you talk to a group, but you can select a particular person to talk to with a private conversation, and so forth. DTR radios can send text messages to each other (but only preset canned ones, not arbitrary ones). Channels are more like configurations; they can include various arbitrary groupings of radios. Deconfliction with other users is established via hopsets rather than frequencies; that is, the algorithm that it uses to hop from frequency to frequency. There is a 4-digit PIN in the DLR radios, and newer DTR radios, that makes privacy very easy to set up and maintain. As far as I am aware, no scanner can monitor DLR/DTR signals. Though they technically aren t encrypted, cracking a DLR/DTR conversation would require cracking Motorola s firmware, and the chances of this happening in your geographical proximity seem vanishingly small. I will write more below on comparing the range of these to GMRS radios, but in a nutshell, it compares well, despite the fact that the 900MHz band restrictions allow Motorola only 1W of power output with these radios. There are three current lines of Motorola DLR/DTR radios:

• The Motorola DLR1020 and DLR1060 radios. These have no screen; the 1020 has two channels (configurations) while the 1060 supports 6. They are small and compact and great pocketable just work radios.
• The Motorola DTR600 and DTR700 radios. These are larger, with a larger antenna (that should theoretically provide greater range) and have a small color screen. They support more channels and more features (eg, short messages, etc).
• The Motorola Curve (aka DLR110). Compared to the DLR1060, it adds limited WiFi capabilities that are primarily useful in certain business environments. See this thread for more. These features are unlikely to be useful in the environments we re talking about here.

These radios are fairly expensive new, but DLRs can be readily found at around $60 on eBay. (DTRs for about $250) They are quite rugged. Be aware when purchasing that some radios sold on eBay may not include a correct battery and charger. (Not necessarily a problem; Motorola batteries are easy to find online, and as with any used battery, the life of a used one may not be great.) For more advanced configuration, the Motorola CPS cable works with both radios (plugs into the charging cradle) and is used with the programming software to configure them in more detail. The older Motorola DTR650, DTR550, and older radios are compatible with the newer DLR and DTR series, if you program the newer ones carefully. The older ones don t support PINs and have a less friendly way of providing privacy, but they do work also. However, for most, I think the newer ones will be friendlier; but if you find a deal on the older ones, hey, why not? This thread on the MyGMRS forums has tons of useful information on the DLR/DTR radios. Check it out for a lot more detail. One interesting feature of these radios is that they are aware if there are conflicting users on the channel, and even if anybody is hearing your transmission. If your transmission is not being heard by at least one radio, you will get an audible (and visual, on the DTR) indication that your transmission failed. One thing that pleasantly surprised me is just how tiny the Motorola DLR is. The whole thing with antenna is like a small candy bar, and thinner. My phone is slightly taller, much wider, and only a little thinner than the Motorola DLR. Seriously, it s more pocketable than most smartphones. The DTR is of a size more commonly associated with radios, though still on the smaller side. Some of the most low-power FRS radios might get down to that size, but to get equivolent range, you need a 5W GMRS unit, which will be much bulkier. Being targeted at business users, the DLR/DTR don t include NOAA weather radio or GPS.

Power These radios tend to be powered by:

• NiMH rechargable battery packs
• AA/AAA batteries
• Lithium Ion batteries

Most of the cheap FRS/GMRS radios have a NiMH rechargable battery pack and a terrible charge controller that will tend to overcharge, and thus prematurely destroy, the NiMH packs. This has long ago happened in my GMRS radios, and now I use Eneloop NiMH AAs in them (charged separately by a proper charger). The BTech, Garmin, and Motorola DLR/DTR radios all use Li-Ion batteries. These have the advantage of being more efficient batteries, though you can t necessarily just swap in AAs in a pinch. Pay attention to your charging options; if you are backpacking, for instance, you may want something that can charge from solar-powered USB or battery banks. The Motorola DLR/DTR radios need to sit in a charging cradle, but the cradle is powered by a Micro USB cable. The BTech GMRS-PRO is charged via USB-C. I don t know about the Garmin Rino or others. Garmin offers an optional AA battery pack for the Rino. BTech doesn t (yet) for the GMRS-PRO, but they do for some other models, and have stated accessories for the GMRS-PRO are coming. I don t have information about the T800. This is not an option for the DLR/DTR.

Meshtastic I ll briefly mention Meshtastic. It uses a low-power LoRa system. It can t handle voice transmissions; only data. On its own, it can transmit and receive automatic GPS updates from other Meshtastic devices, which you can view on its small screen. It forms a mesh, so each node can relay messages for others. It is also the only unit in this roundup that uses true encryption, and its battery lasts about a week more than the a solid day you can expect out of the best of the others here. When paired with a cell phone, Meshtastic can also send and receive short text messages. Meshtastic uses much less power than even the cheapest of the FRS radios discussed here. It can still achieve respectable range because it uses LoRa, which can trade bandwidth for power or range. It can take it a second or two to transmit a 50-character text message. Still, the GMRS or Motorola radios discussed here will have more than double the point-to-point range of a Meshtastic device. And, if you intend to take advantage of the text messaging features, keep in mind that you must now take two electronic devices with you and maintain a charge for them both.

Privacy The privacy picture on these is interesting.

Cell phone privacy Cell phones are difficult for individuals to eavesdrop, but a sophisticated adversary probably could: or an unsophisticated adversary with any manner of malware. Privacy on modern smartphones is a huge area of trouble, and it is safe to say that data brokers and many apps probably know at least your location and contact list, if not also the content of your messages. Though end-to-end encrypted apps such as Signal can certainly help. See Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances for more details.

GMRS privacy GMRS radios are unencrypted and public. Anyone in range with another GMRS radio, or a scanner, can listen to your conversations even if you have a privacy code set. The privacy code does not actually protect your privacy; rather, it keeps your radio from playing conversations from others using the same channel, for your convenience. However, note the in range limitation. An eavesdropper would generally need to be within a few miles of you.

Motorola DLR/DTR privacy As touched on above, while these also aren t encrypted, as far as I am aware, no tools exist to eavesdrop on DLR/DTR conversations. Change the PIN away from the default 0000, ideally to something that doesn t end in 0 (to pick a different hopset) and you have pretty decent privacy right there. Decent doesn t mean perfect; it is certainly possible that sophisticated adversaries or state agencies could decode DLR/DTR traffic, since it is unencrypted. As a practical matter, though, the lack of consumer equipment that can decode this makes it be, as I say, pretty decent .

Meshtastic Meshtastic uses strong AES encryption. But as messaging features require a paired phone, the privacy implications of a phone also apply here.

Range I tested my best 5W GMRS radios, as well as a Motorola DTR600 talking to a DLR1060. (I also tried two DLR1060s talking to each other; there was no change in rnage.) I took a radio with me in the car, and had another sitting on my table indoors. Those of you familiar with radios will probably recognize that being in a car and being indoors both attenuate (reduce the strength of) the signal significantly. I drove around in a part of Kansas with gentle rolling hills. Both the GMRS and the DLR/DTR had a range of about 2-3 miles. There were times when each was able to pull out a signal when the other was not. The DLR/DTR series was significantly better while the vehicle was in motion. In weaker signal conditions, the GMRS radios were susceptible to significant picket fencing (static caused by variation in the signal strength when passing things like trees), to the point of being inaudible or losing the signal entirely. The DLR/DTR remained perfectly clear there. I was able to find some spots where, while parked, the GMRS radios had a weak but audible signal but the DLR/DTR had none. However, in all those cases, the distance to GMRS dropping out as well was small. Basically, no radios penetrate the ground, and the valleys were a problem for them all. Differences may play out in other ways in other environments as well: for instance, dense urban environments, heavy woods, indoor buildings, etc. GMRS radios can be used with repeaters, or have a rooftop antenna mounted on a car, both of which could significantly extend range and both of which are rare. The DLR/DTR series are said to be exceptionally good at indoor environments; Motorola rates them for penetrating 20 floors, for instance. Reports on MyGMRS forums state that they are able to cover an entire cruise ship, while the metal and concrete in them poses a big problem for GMRS radios. Different outdoor landscapes may favor one or the other also. Some of the cheapest FRS radios max out at about 0.5W or even less. This is probably only a little better than yelling distance in many cases. A lot of manufacturers obscure transmit power and use outlandish claims of range instead; don t believe those. Find the power output. A 2W FRS transmitter will be more credible range-wise, and the 5W GMRS transmitter as I tested better yet. Note that even GMRS radios are restricted to 0.5W on channels 8-14. The Motorola DLR/DTR radio gets about the same range with 1W as a GMRS radio does with 5W. The lower power output allows the DLR to be much smaller and lighter than a 5W GMRS radio for similar performance.

Overall conclusions Of course, what you use may depend on your needs. I d generally say:

• For basic use, the high quality, good range, reasonable used price, and very small size of the Motorola DLR would make it a good all-arounder. Give one to each person (or kid) for use at the mall or amusement park, take them with you to concerts and festivals, etc.
• Between vehicles, the Motorola DLR/DTR have a clear range advantage over the GMRS radios for vehicles in motion, though the GPS features of the more advanced GMRS radios may be more useful here.
• For wilderness hiking and the like, GMRS radios that have GPS, maps, and NOAA weather radio reception may prove compelling and worth the extra bulk. More flexible power options may also be useful.
• Low-end FRS radios can be found very cheap; around $20-$30 new for the lowest end, though their low power output and questionable charging circuits may limit their utility where it really counts.
• If you just can t move away from cell phones, try the Zoleo app, which can provide some radio-like features.
• A satellite communicator is still good backup safety gear for the wilderness.

Postscript: A final plug for amateur radio My 10-year-old Kenwood TH-D71A already had features none of these others have. For instance, its support for APRS and ability to act as a digipeater for APRS means that TH-D71As can form an automatic mesh between them, each one repeating new GPS positions or text messages to the others. Traditional APRS doesn t perform well in weak signal situations; however, more modern digital systems like D-Star and DMR also support APRS over more modern codecs and provide all sorts of other advantages as well (though not FHSS). My conclusions above assume a person is not going to go the amateur radio route for whatever reason. If you can get those in your group to get their license the technician is all you need a whole world of excellent options opens to you.

Appendix: The Trisquare eXRS Prior to 2012, a small company named Trisquare made a FHSS radio they called the eXRS that operated on the 900MHz band like Motorola s DLR/DTR does. Trisquare aimed at consumers and their radios were cheaper than the Motorola DLR/DTR. However, that is where the similarities end. Trisquare had an analog voice transmission, even though it used FHSS. Also, there is a problem that can arise with FHSS systems: synchronization. The receiver must hop frequencies in exactly the same order at exactly the same time as the sender. Motorola has clearly done a lot of engineering around this, and I have never encountered a synchronization problem in my DLR/DTR testing, not even once. eXRS, on the other hand, had frequent synchronization problems, which manifested themselves in weak signal conditions and sometimes with doubling. When it would happen, everyone would have to be quiet for a minute or two to give all the radios a chance to timeout and reset to the start of the hop sequence. In addition, the eXRS hardware wasn t great, and was susceptible to hardware failure. There are some that still view eXRS as a legendary device and hoard them. You can still find them used on eBay. When eXRS came out in 2007, it was indeed nice technology for the day, ahead of its time in some ways. I used and loved the eXRS radios back then; powerful GMRS wasn t all that common. But compared to today s technology, eXRS has inferior range to both GMRS and Motorola DLR/DTR (from my recollection, about a third to half of what I get with today s GMRS and DLR/DTR), is prone to finicky synchronization issues when signals are weak, and isn t made very robustly. I therefore don t recommend the eBay eXRS units. Don t assume that the eXRS weaknesses extend to Motorola DLR/DTR. The DLR/DTR radios are done well and don t suffer from the same problems. Note: This article has a long-term home on my website, where it may be updated from time to time.

Introduction to Matrix Matrix is an "open standard for interoperable, decentralised, real-time communication over IP. It can be used to power Instant Messaging, VoIP/WebRTC signalling, Internet of Things communication - or anywhere you need a standard HTTP API for publishing and subscribing to data whilst tracking the conversation history". It's also (when compared with XMPP) "an eventually consistent global JSON database with an HTTP API and pubsub semantics - whilst XMPP can be thought of as a message passing protocol." According to their FAQ, the project started in 2014, has about 20,000 servers, and millions of users. Matrix works over HTTPS but over a special port: 8448.

Security and privacy I have some concerns about the security promises of Matrix. It's advertised as a "secure" with "E2E [end-to-end] encryption", but how does it actually work?

Data retention defaults One of my main concerns with Matrix is data retention, which is a key part of security in a threat model where (for example) an hostile state actor wants to surveil your communications and can seize your devices. On IRC, servers don't actually keep messages all that long: they pass them along to other servers and clients as fast as they can, only keep them in memory, and move on to the next message. There are no concerns about data retention on messages (and their metadata) other than the network layer. (I'm ignoring the issues with user registration, which is a separate, if valid, concern.) Obviously, an hostile server could log everything passing through it, but IRC federations are normally tightly controlled. So, if you trust your IRC operators, you should be fairly safe. Obviously, clients can (and often do, even if OTR is configured!) log all messages, but this is generally not the default. Irssi, for example, does not log by default. IRC bouncers are more likely to log to disk, of course, to be able to do what they do. Compare this to Matrix: when you send a message to a Matrix homeserver, that server first stores it in its internal SQL database. Then it will transmit that message to all clients connected to that server and room, and to all other servers that have clients connected to that room. Those remote servers, in turn, will keep a copy of that message and all its metadata in their own database, by default forever. On encrypted rooms those messages are encrypted, but not their metadata. There is a mechanism to expire entries in Synapse, but it is not enabled by default. So one should generally assume that a message sent on Matrix is never expired.

GDPR in the federation But even if that setting was enabled by default, how do you control it? This is a fundamental problem of the federation: if any user is allowed to join a room (which is the default), those user's servers will log all content and metadata from that room. That includes private, one-on-one conversations, since those are essentially rooms as well. In the context of the GDPR, this is really tricky: who is the responsible party (known as the "data controller") here? It's basically any yahoo who fires up a home server and joins a room. In a federated network, one has to wonder whether GDPR enforcement is even possible at all. But in Matrix in particular, if you want to enforce your right to be forgotten in a given room, you would have to:

1. enumerate all the users that ever joined the room while you were there
2. discover all their home servers
3. start a GDPR procedure against all those servers

I recognize this is a hard problem to solve while still keeping an open ecosystem. But I believe that Matrix should have much stricter defaults towards data retention than right now. Message expiry should be enforced by default, for example. (Note that there are also redaction policies that could be used to implement part of the GDPR automatically, see the privacy policy discussion below on that.) Also keep in mind that, in the brave new peer-to-peer world that Matrix is heading towards, the boundary between server and client is likely to be fuzzier, which would make applying the GDPR even more difficult. Update: this comment links to this post (in german) which apparently studied the question and concluded that Matrix is not GDPR-compliant. In fact, maybe Synapse should be designed so that there's no configurable flag to turn off data retention. A bit like how most system loggers in UNIX (e.g. syslog) come with a log retention system that typically rotate logs after a few weeks or month. Historically, this was designed to keep hard drives from filling up, but it also has the added benefit of limiting the amount of personal information kept on disk in this modern day. (Arguably, syslog doesn't rotate logs on its own, but, say, Debian GNU/Linux, as an installed system, does have log retention policies well defined for installed packages, and those can be discussed. And "no expiry" is definitely a bug.

Matrix.org privacy policy When I first looked at Matrix, five years ago, Element.io was called Riot.im and had a rather dubious privacy policy:

We currently use cookies to support our use of Google Analytics on the Website and Service. Google Analytics collects information about how you use the Website and Service. [...] This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our Website and use our Service and also allows us to improve our Website and our Service.

When I asked Matrix people about why they were using Google Analytics, they explained this was for development purposes and they were aiming for velocity at the time, not privacy (paraphrasing here). They also included a "free to snitch" clause:

If we are or believe that we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data, we will do so in order to comply with any legal obligation, the instructions or requests of a governmental authority or regulator, including those outside of the UK.

Those are really broad terms, above and beyond what is typically expected legally. Like the current retention policies, such user tracking and ... "liberal" collaboration practices with the state set a bad precedent for other home servers. Thankfully, since the above policy was published (2017), the GDPR was "implemented" (2018) and it seems like both the Element.io privacy policy and the Matrix.org privacy policy have been somewhat improved since. Notable points of the new privacy policies:

• 2.3.1.1: the "federation" section actually outlines that "Federated homeservers and Matrix clients which respect the Matrix protocol are expected to honour these controls and redaction/erasure requests, but other federated homeservers are outside of the span of control of Element, and we cannot guarantee how this data will be processed"
• 2.6: users under the age of 16 should not use the matrix.org service
• 2.10: Upcloud, Mythic Beast, Amazon, and CloudFlare possibly have access to your data (it's nice to at least mention this in the privacy policy: many providers don't even bother admitting to this kind of delegation)
• Element 2.2.1: mentions many more third parties (Twilio, Stripe, Quaderno, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Outplay, PipeDrive, HubSpot, Posthog, Sentry, and Matomo (phew!) used when you are paying Matrix.org for hosting

I'm not super happy with all the trackers they have on the Element platform, but then again you don't have to use that service. Your favorite homeserver (assuming you are not on Matrix.org) probably has their own Element deployment, hopefully without all that garbage. Overall, this is all a huge improvement over the previous privacy policy, so hats off to the Matrix people for figuring out a reasonable policy in such a tricky context. I particularly like this bit:

We will forget your copy of your data upon your request. We will also forward your request to be forgotten onto federated homeservers. However - these homeservers are outside our span of control, so we cannot guarantee they will forget your data.

It's great they implemented those mechanisms and, after all, if there's an hostile party in there, nothing can prevent them from using screenshots to just exfiltrate your data away from the client side anyways, even with services typically seen as more secure, like Signal. As an aside, I also appreciate that Matrix.org has a fairly decent code of conduct, based on the TODO CoC which checks all the boxes in the geekfeminism wiki.

Metadata handling Overall, privacy protections in Matrix mostly concern message contents, not metadata. In other words, who's talking with who, when and from where is not well protected. Compared to a tool like Signal, which goes through great lengths to anonymize that data with features like private contact discovery, disappearing messages, sealed senders, and private groups, Matrix is definitely behind. (Note: there is an issue open about message lifetimes in Element since 2020, but it's not at even at the MSC stage yet.) This is a known issue (opened in 2019) in Synapse, but this is not just an implementation issue, it's a flaw in the protocol itself. Home servers keep join/leave of all rooms, which gives clear text information about who is talking to. Synapse logs may also contain privately identifiable information that home server admins might not be aware of in the first place. Those log rotation policies are separate from the server-level retention policy, which may be confusing for a novice sysadmin. Combine this with the federation: even if you trust your home server to do the right thing, the second you join a public room with third-party home servers, those ideas kind of get thrown out because those servers can do whatever they want with that information. Again, a problem that is hard to solve in any federation. To be fair, IRC doesn't have a great story here either: any client knows not only who's talking to who in a room, but also typically their client IP address. Servers can (and often do) obfuscate this, but often that obfuscation is trivial to reverse. Some servers do provide "cloaks" (sometimes automatically), but that's kind of a "slap-on" solution that actually moves the problem elsewhere: now the server knows a little more about the user. Overall, I would worry much more about a Matrix home server seizure than a IRC or Signal server seizure. Signal does get subpoenas, and they can only give out a tiny bit of information about their users: their phone number, and their registration, and last connection date. Matrix carries a lot more information in its database.

Amplification attacks on URL previews I (still!) run an Icecast server and sometimes share links to it on IRC which, obviously, also ends up on (more than one!) Matrix home servers because some people connect to IRC using Matrix. This, in turn, means that Matrix will connect to that URL to generate a link preview. I feel this outlines a security issue, especially because those sockets would be kept open seemingly forever. I tried to warn the Matrix security team but somehow, I don't think this issue was taken very seriously. Here's the disclosure timeline:

• January 18: contacted Matrix security
• January 19: response: already reported as a bug
• January 20: response: can't reproduce
• January 31: timeout added, considered solved
• January 31: I respond that I believe the security issue is underestimated, ask for clearance to disclose
• February 1: response: asking for two weeks delay after the next release (1.53.0) including another patch, presumably in two weeks' time
• February 22: Matrix 1.53.0 released
• April 14: I notice the release, ask for clearance again
• April 14: response: referred to the public disclosure

There are a couple of problems here:

1. the bug was publicly disclosed in September 2020, and not considered a security issue until I notified them, and even then, I had to insist
2. no clear disclosure policy timeline was proposed or seems established in the project (there is a security disclosure policy but it doesn't include any predefined timeline)
3. I wasn't informed of the disclosure
4. the actual solution is a size limit (10MB, already implemented), a time limit (30 seconds, implemented in PR 11784), and a content type allow list (HTML, "media" or JSON, implemented in PR 11936), and I'm not sure it's adequate
5. (pure vanity:) I did not make it to their Hall of fame

I'm not sure those solutions are adequate because they all seem to assume a single home server will pull that one URL for a little while then stop. But in a federated network, many (possibly thousands) home servers may be connected in a single room at once. If an attacker drops a link into such a room, all those servers would connect to that link all at once. This is an amplification attack: a small amount of traffic will generate a lot more traffic to a single target. It doesn't matter there are size or time limits: the amplification is what matters here. It should also be noted that clients that generate link previews have more amplification because they are more numerous than servers. And of course, the default Matrix client (Element) does generate link previews as well. That said, this is possibly not a problem specific to Matrix: any federated service that generates link previews may suffer from this. I'm honestly not sure what the solution is here. Maybe moderation? Maybe link previews are just evil? All I know is there was this weird bug in my Icecast server and I tried to ring the bell about it, and it feels it was swept under the rug. Somehow I feel this is bound to blow up again in the future, even with the current mitigation.

Moderation In Matrix like elsewhere, Moderation is a hard problem. There is a detailed moderation guide and much of this problem space is actively worked on in Matrix right now. A fundamental problem with moderating a federated space is that a user banned from a room can rejoin the room from another server. This is why spam is such a problem in Email, and why IRC networks have stopped federating ages ago (see the IRC history for that fascinating story).

The mjolnir bot The mjolnir moderation bot is designed to help with some of those things. It can kick and ban users, redact all of a user's message (as opposed to one by one), all of this across multiple rooms. It can also subscribe to a federated block list published by matrix.org to block known abusers (users or servers). Bans are pretty flexible and can operate at the user, room, or server level. Matrix people suggest making the bot admin of your channels, because you can't take back admin from a user once given.

The command-line tool There's also a new command line tool designed to do things like:

• System notify users (all users/users from a list, specific user)
• delete sessions/devices not seen for X days
• purge the remote media cache
• select rooms with various criteria (external/local/empty/created by/encrypted/cleartext)
• purge history of theses rooms
• shutdown rooms

This tool and Mjolnir are based on the admin API built into Synapse.

Rate limiting Synapse has pretty good built-in rate-limiting which blocks repeated login, registration, joining, or messaging attempts. It may also end up throttling servers on the federation based on those settings.

Fundamental federation problems Because users joining a room may come from another server, room moderators are at the mercy of the registration and moderation policies of those servers. Matrix is like IRC's +R mode ("only registered users can join") by default, except that anyone can register their own homeserver, which makes this limited. Server admins can block IP addresses and home servers, but those tools are not easily available to room admins. There is an API (m.room.server_acl in /devtools) but it is not reliable (thanks Austin Huang for the clarification). Matrix has the concept of guest accounts, but it is not used very much, and virtually no client or homeserver supports it. This contrasts with the way IRC works: by default, anyone can join an IRC network even without authentication. Some channels require registration, but in general you are free to join and look around (until you get blocked, of course). I have seen anecdotal evidence (CW: Twitter, nitter link) that "moderating bridges is hell", and I can imagine why. Moderation is already hard enough on one federation, when you bridge a room with another network, you inherit all the problems from that network but without the entire abuse control tools from the original network's API...

Room admins Matrix, in particular, has the problem that room administrators (which have the power to redact messages, ban users, and promote other users) are bound to their Matrix ID which is, in turn, bound to their home servers. This implies that a home server administrators could (1) impersonate a given user and (2) use that to hijack the room. So in practice, the home server is the trust anchor for rooms, not the user themselves. That said, if server B administrator hijack user joe on server B, they will hijack that room on that specific server. This will not (necessarily) affect users on the other servers, as servers could refuse parts of the updates or ban the compromised account (or server). It does seem like a major flaw that room credentials are bound to Matrix identifiers, as opposed to the E2E encryption credentials. In an encrypted room even with fully verified members, a compromised or hostile home server can still take over the room by impersonating an admin. That admin (or even a newly minted user) can then send events or listen on the conversations. This is even more frustrating when you consider that Matrix events are actually signed and therefore have some authentication attached to them, acting like some sort of Merkle tree (as it contains a link to previous events). That signature, however, is made from the homeserver PKI keys, not the client's E2E keys, which makes E2E feel like it has been "bolted on" later.

Availability While Matrix has a strong advantage over Signal in that it's decentralized (so anyone can run their own homeserver,), I couldn't find an easy way to run a "multi-primary" setup, or even a "redundant" setup (even if with a single primary backend), short of going full-on "replicate PostgreSQL and Redis data", which is not typically for the faint of heart.

How this works in IRC On IRC, it's quite easy to setup redundant nodes. All you need is:

1. a new machine (with it's own public address with an open port)
2. a shared secret (or certificate) between that machine and an existing one on the network
3. a connect block on both servers

That's it: the node will join the network and people can connect to it as usual and share the same user/namespace as the rest of the network. The servers take care of synchronizing state: you do not need to worry about replicating a database server. (Now, experienced IRC people will know there's a catch here: IRC doesn't have authentication built in, and relies on "services" which are basically bots that authenticate users (I'm simplifying, don't nitpick). If that service goes down, the network still works, but then people can't authenticate, and they can start doing nasty things like steal people's identity if they get knocked offline. But still: basic functionality still works: you can talk in rooms and with users that are on the reachable network.)

User identities Matrix is more complicated. Each "home server" has its own identity namespace: a specific user (say @anarcat:matrix.org) is bound to that specific home server. If that server goes down, that user is completely disconnected. They could register a new account elsewhere and reconnect, but then they basically lose all their configuration: contacts, joined channels are all lost. (Also notice how the Matrix IDs don't look like a typical user address like an email in XMPP. They at least did their homework and got the allocation for the scheme.)

Rooms Users talk to each other in "rooms", even in one-to-one communications. (Rooms are also used for other things like "spaces", they're basically used for everything, think "everything is a file" kind of tool.) For rooms, home servers act more like IRC nodes in that they keep a local state of the chat room and synchronize it with other servers. Users can keep talking inside a room if the server that originally hosts the room goes down. Rooms can have a local, server-specific "alias" so that, say, #room:matrix.org is also visible as #room:example.com on the example.com home server. Both addresses refer to the same room underlying room. (Finding this in the Element settings is not obvious though, because that "alias" are actually called a "local address" there. So to create such an alias (in Element), you need to go in the room settings' "General" section, "Show more" in "Local address", then add the alias name (e.g. foo), and then that room will be available on your example.com homeserver as #foo:example.com.) So a room doesn't belong to a server, it belongs to the federation, and anyone can join the room from any serer (if the room is public, or if invited otherwise). You can create a room on server A and when a user from server B joins, the room will be replicated on server B as well. If server A fails, server B will keep relaying traffic to connected users and servers. A room is therefore not fundamentally addressed with the above alias, instead ,it has a internal Matrix ID, which basically a random string. It has a server name attached to it, but that was made just to avoid collisions. That can get a little confusing. For example, the #fractal:gnome.org room is an alias on the gnome.org server, but the room ID is !hwiGbsdSTZIwSRfybq:matrix.org. That's because the room was created on matrix.org, but the preferred branding is gnome.org now. As an aside, rooms, by default, live forever, even after the last user quits. There's an admin API to delete rooms and a tombstone event to redirect to another one, but neither have a GUI yet. The latter is part of MSC1501 ("Room version upgrades") which allows a room admin to close a room, with a message and a pointer to another room.

Spaces Discovering rooms can be tricky: there is a per-server room directory, but Matrix.org people are trying to deprecate it in favor of "Spaces". Room directories were ripe for abuse: anyone can create a room, so anyone can show up in there. It's possible to restrict who can add aliases, but anyways directories were seen as too limited. In contrast, a "Space" is basically a room that's an index of other rooms (including other spaces), so existing moderation and administration mechanism that work in rooms can (somewhat) work in spaces as well. This enables a room directory that works across federation, regardless on which server they were originally created. New users can be added to a space or room automatically in Synapse. (Existing users can be told about the space with a server notice.) This gives admins a way to pre-populate a list of rooms on a server, which is useful to build clusters of related home servers, providing some sort of redundancy, at the room -- not user -- level.

Home servers So while you can workaround a home server going down at the room level, there's no such thing at the home server level, for user identities. So if you want those identities to be stable in the long term, you need to think about high availability. One limitation is that the domain name (e.g. matrix.example.com) must never change in the future, as renaming home servers is not supported. The documentation used to say you could "run a hot spare" but that has been removed. Last I heard, it was not possible to run a high-availability setup where multiple, separate locations could replace each other automatically. You can have high performance setups where the load gets distributed among workers, but those are based on a shared database (Redis and PostgreSQL) backend. So my guess is it would be possible to create a "warm" spare server of a matrix home server with regular PostgreSQL replication, but that is not documented in the Synapse manual. This sort of setup would also not be useful to deal with networking issues or denial of service attacks, as you will not be able to spread the load over multiple network locations easily. Redis and PostgreSQL heroes are welcome to provide their multi-primary solution in the comments. In the meantime, I'll just point out this is a solution that's handled somewhat more gracefully in IRC, by having the possibility of delegating the authentication layer.

Delegations If you do not want to run a Matrix server yourself, it's possible to delegate the entire thing to another server. There's a server discovery API which uses the .well-known pattern (or SRV records, but that's "not recommended" and a bit confusing) to delegate that service to another server. Be warned that the server still needs to be explicitly configured for your domain. You can't just put:

  "m.server": "matrix.org:443"  

... on https://example.com/.well-known/matrix/server and start using @you:example.com as a Matrix ID. That's because Matrix doesn't support "virtual hosting" and you'd still be connecting to rooms and people with your matrix.org identity, not example.com as you would normally expect. This is also why you cannot rename your home server. The server discovery API is what allows servers to find each other. Clients, on the other hand, use the client-server discovery API: this is what allows a given client to find your home server when you type your Matrix ID on login.

Performance The high availability discussion brushed over the performance of Matrix itself, but let's now dig into that.

Horizontal scalability There were serious scalability issues of the main Matrix server, Synapse, in the past. So the Matrix team has been working hard to improve its design. Since Synapse 1.22 the home server can horizontally scale to multiple workers (see this blog post for details) which can make it easier to scale large servers.

Other implementations There are other promising home servers implementations from a performance standpoint (dendrite, Golang, entered beta in late 2020; conduit, Rust, beta; others), but none of those are feature-complete so there's a trade-off to be made there. Synapse is also adding a lot of feature fast, so it's an open question whether the others will ever catch up. (I have heard that Dendrite might actually surpass Synapse in features within a few years, which would put Synapse in a more "LTS" situation.)

Latency Matrix can feel slow sometimes. For example, joining the "Matrix HQ" room in Element (from matrix.debian.social) takes a few minutes and then fails. That is because the home server has to sync the entire room state when you join the room. There was promising work on this announced in the lengthy 2021 retrospective, and some of that work landed (partial sync) in the 1.53 release already. Other improvements coming include sliding sync, lazy loading over federation, and fast room joins. So that's actually something that could be fixed in the fairly short term. But in general, communication in Matrix doesn't feel as "snappy" as on IRC or even Signal. It's hard to quantify this without instrumenting a full latency test bed (for example the tools I used in the terminal emulators latency tests), but even just typing in a web browser feels slower than typing in a xterm or Emacs for me. Even in conversations, I "feel" people don't immediately respond as fast. In fact, this could be an interesting double-blind experiment to make: have people guess whether they are talking to a person on Matrix, XMPP, or IRC, for example. My theory would be that people could notice that Matrix users are slower, if only because of the TCP round-trip time each message has to take.

Transport Some courageous person actually made some tests of various messaging platforms on a congested network. His evaluation was basically:

• Briar: uses Tor, so unusable except locally
• Matrix: "struggled to send and receive messages", joining a room takes forever as it has to sync all history, "took 20-30 seconds for my messages to be sent and another 20 seconds for further responses"
• XMPP: "worked in real-time, full encryption, with nearly zero lag"

So that was interesting. I suspect IRC would have also fared better, but that's just a feeling. Other improvements to the transport layer include support for websocket and the CoAP proxy work from 2019 (targeting 100bps links), but both seem stalled at the time of writing. The Matrix people have also announced the pinecone p2p overlay network which aims at solving large, internet-scale routing problems. See also this talk at FOSDEM 2022.

Usability

Onboarding and workflow The workflow for joining a room, when you use Element web, is not great:

1. click on a link in a web browser
2. land on (say) https://matrix.to/#/#matrix-dev:matrix.org
3. offers "Element", yeah that's sounds great, let's click "Continue"
4. land on https://app.element.io/#/room%2F%23matrix-dev%3Amatrix.org and then you need to register, aaargh

As you might have guessed by now, there is a specification to solve this, but web browsers need to adopt it as well, so that's far from actually being solved. At least browsers generally know about the matrix: scheme, it's just not exactly clear what they should do with it, especially when the handler is just another web page (e.g. Element web). In general, when compared with tools like Signal or WhatsApp, Matrix doesn't fare so well in terms of user discovery. I probably have some of my normal contacts that have a Matrix account as well, but there's really no way to know. It's kind of creepy when Signal tells you "this person is on Signal!" but it's also pretty cool that it works, and they actually implemented it pretty well. Registration is also less obvious: in Signal, the app confirms your phone number automatically. It's friction-less and quick. In Matrix, you need to learn about home servers, pick one, register (with a password! aargh!), and then setup encryption keys (not default), etc. It's a lot more friction. And look, I understand: giving away your phone number is a huge trade-off. I don't like it either. But it solves a real problem and makes encryption accessible to a ton more people. Matrix does have "identity servers" that can serve that purpose, but I don't feel confident sharing my phone number there. It doesn't help that the identity servers don't have private contact discovery: giving them your phone number is a more serious security compromise than with Signal. There's a catch-22 here too: because no one feels like giving away their phone numbers, no one does, and everyone assumes that stuff doesn't work anyways. Like it or not, Signal forcing people to divulge their phone number actually gives them critical mass that means actually a lot of my relatives are on Signal and I don't have to install crap like WhatsApp to talk with them.

5 minute clients evaluation Throughout all my tests I evaluated a handful of Matrix clients, mostly from Flathub because almost none of them are packaged in Debian. Right now I'm using Element, the flagship client from Matrix.org, in a web browser window, with the PopUp Window extension. This makes it look almost like a native app, and opens links in my main browser window (instead of a new tab in that separate window), which is nice. But I'm tired of buying memory to feed my web browser, so this indirection has to stop. Furthermore, I'm often getting completely logged off from Element, which means re-logging in, recovering my security keys, and reconfiguring my settings. That is extremely annoying. Coming from Irssi, Element is really "GUI-y" (pronounced "gooey"). Lots of clickety happening. To mark conversations as read, in particular, I need to click-click-click on all the tabs that have some activity. There's no "jump to latest message" or "mark all as read" functionality as far as I could tell. In Irssi the former is built-in (alt-a) and I made a custom /READ command for the latter:

/ALIAS READ script exec \$_->activity(0) for Irssi::windows

And yes, that's a Perl script in my IRC client. I am not aware of any Matrix client that does stuff like that, except maybe Weechat, if we can call it a Matrix client, or Irssi itself, now that it has a Matrix plugin (!). As for other clients, I have looked through the Matrix Client Matrix (confusing right?) to try to figure out which one to try, and, even after selecting Linux as a filter, the chart is just too wide to figure out anything. So I tried those, kind of randomly:

• Fractal
• Mirage
• Nheko
• Quaternion

Unfortunately, I lost my notes on those, I don't actually remember which one did what. I still have a session open with Mirage, so I guess that means it's the one I preferred, but I remember they were also all very GUI-y. Maybe I need to look at weechat-matrix or gomuks. At least Weechat is scriptable so I could continue playing the power-user. Right now my strategy with messaging (and that includes microblogging like Twitter or Mastodon) is that everything goes through my IRC client, so Weechat could actually fit well in there. Going with gomuks, on the other hand, would mean running it in parallel with Irssi or ... ditching IRC, which is a leap I'm not quite ready to take just yet. Oh, and basically none of those clients (except Nheko and Element) support VoIP, which is still kind of a second-class citizen in Matrix. It does not support large multimedia rooms, for example: Jitsi was used for FOSDEM instead of the native videoconferencing system.

Bots This falls a little aside the "usability" section, but I didn't know where to put this... There's a few Matrix bots out there, and you are likely going to be able to replace your existing bots with Matrix bots. It's true that IRC has a long and impressive history with lots of various bots doing various things, but given how young Matrix is, there's still a good variety:

• maubot: generic bot with tons of usual plugins like sed, dice, karma, xkcd, echo, rss, reminder, translate, react, exec, gitlab/github webhook receivers, weather, etc
• opsdroid: framework to implement "chat ops" in Matrix, connects with Matrix, GitHub, GitLab, Shell commands, Slack, etc
• matrix-nio: another framework, used to build lots more bots like:
  • hemppa: generic bot with various functionality like weather, RSS feeds, calendars, cron jobs, OpenStreetmaps lookups, URL title snarfing, wolfram alpha, astronomy pic of the day, Mastodon bridge, room bridging, oh dear
  • devops: ping, curl, etc
  • podbot: play podcast episodes from AntennaPod
  • cody: Python, Ruby, Javascript REPL
  • eno: generic bot, "personal assistant"
• mjolnir: moderation bot
• hookshot: bridge with GitLab/GitHub
• matrix-monitor-bot: latency monitor

One thing I haven't found an equivalent for is Debian's MeetBot. There's an archive bot but it doesn't have topics or a meeting chair, or HTML logs.

Working on Matrix As a developer, I find Matrix kind of intimidating. The specification is huge. The official specification itself looks somewhat digestable: it's only 6 APIs so that looks, at first, kind of reasonable. But whenever you start asking complicated questions about Matrix, you quickly fall into the Matrix Spec Change specification (which, yes, is a separate specification). And there are literally hundreds of MSCs flying around. It's hard to tell what's been adopted and what hasn't, and even harder to figure out if your specific client has implemented it. (One trendy answer to this problem is to "rewrite it in rust": Matrix are working on implementing a lot of those specifications in a matrix-rust-sdk that's designed to take the implementation details away from users.) Just taking the latest weekly Matrix report, you find that three new MSCs proposed, just last week! There's even a graph that shows the number of MSCs is progressing steadily, at 600+ proposals total, with the majority (300+) "new". I would guess the "merged" ones are at about 150. That's a lot of text which includes stuff like 3D worlds which, frankly, I don't think you should be working on when you have such important security and usability problems. (The internet as a whole, arguably, doesn't fare much better. RFC600 is a really obscure discussion about "INTERFACING AN ILLINOIS PLASMA TERMINAL TO THE ARPANET". Maybe that's how many MSCs will end up as well, left forgotten in the pits of history.) And that's the thing: maybe the Matrix people have a different objective than I have. They want to connect everything to everything, and make Matrix a generic transport for all sorts of applications, including virtual reality, collaborative editors, and so on. I just want secure, simple messaging. Possibly with good file transfers, and video calls. That it works with existing stuff is good, and it should be federated to remove the "Signal point of failure". So I'm a bit worried with the direction all those MSCs are taking, especially when you consider that clients other than Element are still struggling to keep up with basic features like end-to-end encryption or room discovery, never mind voice or spaces...

Conclusion Overall, Matrix is somehow in the space XMPP was a few years ago. It has a ton of features, pretty good clients, and a large community. It seems to have gained some of the momentum that XMPP has lost. It may have the most potential to replace Signal if something bad would happen to it (like, I don't know, getting banned or going nuts with cryptocurrency)... But it's really not there yet, and I don't see Matrix trying to get there either, which is a bit worrisome.

Looking back at history I'm also worried that we are repeating the errors of the past. The history of federated services is really fascinating:. IRC, FTP, HTTP, and SMTP were all created in the early days of the internet, and are all still around (except, arguably, FTP, which was removed from major browsers recently). All of them had to face serious challenges in growing their federation. IRC had numerous conflicts and forks, both at the technical level but also at the political level. The history of IRC is really something that anyone working on a federated system should study in detail, because they are bound to make the same mistakes if they are not familiar with it. The "short" version is:

• 1988: Finnish researcher publishes first IRC source code
• 1989: 40 servers worldwide, mostly universities
• 1990: EFnet ("eris-free network") fork which blocks the "open relay", named Eris - followers of Eris form the A-net, which promptly dissolves itself, with only EFnet remaining
• 1992: Undernet fork, which offered authentication ("services"), routing improvements and timestamp-based channel synchronisation
• 1994: DALnet fork, from Undernet, again on a technical disagreement
• 1995: Freenode founded
• 1996: IRCnet forks from EFnet, following a flame war of historical proportion, splitting the network between Europe and the Americas
• 1997: Quakenet founded
• 1999: (XMPP founded)
• 2001: 6 million users, OFTC founded
• 2002: DALnet peaks at 136,000 users
• 2003: IRC as a whole peaks at 10 million users, EFnet peaks at 141,000 users
• 2004: (Facebook founded), Undernet peaks at 159,000 users
• 2005: Quakenet peaks at 242,000 users, IRCnet peaks at 136,000 (Youtube founded)
• 2006: (Twitter founded)
• 2009: (WhatsApp, Pinterest founded)
• 2010: (TextSecure AKA Signal, Instagram founded)
• 2011: (Snapchat founded)
• ~2013: Freenode peaks at ~100,000 users
• 2016: IRCv3 standardisation effort started (TikTok founded)
• 2021: Freenode self-destructs, Libera chat founded
• 2022: Libera peaks at 50,000 users, OFTC peaks at 30,000 users

(The numbers were taken from the Wikipedia page and Netsplit.de. Note that I also include other networks launch in parenthesis for context.) Pretty dramatic, don't you think? Eventually, somehow, IRC became irrelevant for most people: few people are even aware of it now. With less than a million users active, it's smaller than Mastodon, XMPP, or Matrix at this point.¹ If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that infighting, lack of a standardization body, and a somewhat annoying protocol meant the network could not grow. It's also possible that the decentralised yet centralised structure of IRC networks limited their reliability and growth. But large social media companies have also taken over the space: observe how IRC numbers peak around the time the wave of large social media companies emerge, especially Facebook (2.9B users!!) and Twitter (400M users).

Where the federated services are in history Right now, Matrix, and Mastodon (and email!) are at the "pre-EFnet" stage: anyone can join the federation. Mastodon has started working on a global block list of fascist servers which is interesting, but it's still an open federation. Right now, Matrix is totally open, but matrix.org publishes a (federated) block list of hostile servers (#matrix-org-coc-bl:matrix.org, yes, of course it's a room). Interestingly, Email is also in that stage, where there are block lists of spammers, and it's a race between those blockers and spammers. Large email providers, obviously, are getting closer to the EFnet stage: you could consider they only accept email from themselves or between themselves. It's getting increasingly hard to deliver mail to Outlook and Gmail for example, partly because of bias against small providers, but also because they are including more and more machine-learning tools to sort through email and those systems are, fundamentally, unknowable. It's not quite the same as splitting the federation the way EFnet did, but the effect is similar. HTTP has somehow managed to live in a parallel universe, as it's technically still completely federated: anyone can start a web server if they have a public IP address and anyone can connect to it. The catch, of course, is how you find the darn thing. Which is how Google became one of the most powerful corporations on earth, and how they became the gatekeepers of human knowledge online. I have only briefly mentioned XMPP here, and my XMPP fans will undoubtedly comment on that, but I think it's somewhere in the middle of all of this. It was co-opted by Facebook and Google, and both corporations have abandoned it to its fate. I remember fondly the days where I could do instant messaging with my contacts who had a Gmail account. Those days are gone, and I don't talk to anyone over Jabber anymore, unfortunately. And this is a threat that Matrix still has to face. It's also the threat Email is currently facing. On the one hand corporations like Facebook want to completely destroy it and have mostly succeeded: many people just have an email account to register on things and talk to their friends over Instagram or (lately) TikTok (which, I know, is not Facebook, but they started that fire). On the other hand, you have corporations like Microsoft and Google who are still using and providing email services because, frankly, you still do need email for stuff, just like fax is still around but they are more and more isolated in their own silo. At this point, it's only a matter of time they reach critical mass and just decide that the risk of allowing external mail coming in is not worth the cost. They'll simply flip the switch and work on an allow-list principle. Then we'll have closed the loop and email will be dead, just like IRC is "dead" now. I wonder which path Matrix will take. Could it liberate us from these vicious cycles? Update: this generated some discussions on lobste.rs.

---

1. According to Wikipedia, there are currently about 500 distinct IRC networks operating, on about 1,000 servers, serving over 250,000 users. In contrast, Mastodon seems to be around 5 million users, Matrix.org claimed at FOSDEM 2021 to have about 28 million globally visible accounts, and Signal lays claim to over 40 million souls. XMPP claims to have "millions" of users on the xmpp.org homepage but the FAQ says they don't actually know. On the proprietary silo side of the fence, this page says
   • Facebook: 2.9 billion users
   • WhatsApp: 2B
   • Instagram: 1.4B
   • TikTok: 1B
   • Snapchat: 500M
   • Pinterest: 480M
   • Twitter: 397M
   Notable omission from that list: Youtube, with its mind-boggling 2.6 billion users... Those are not the kind of numbers you just "need to convince a brother or sister" to grow the network...

• Prepare a parallel grid deployment with the new operating system.
• Ask our users (tool developers) to evaluate a newer version of their runtime and programming languages.
• Introduce a migration window and coordinate a quick migration.
• Finally, drop the old operating system from grid servers.

So, you are upgrading the Debian release

• You are migrating to Debian 11 Bullseye, no?
• No, we re migrating to Debian 10 Buster
• Wait, but Debian 11 Bullseye exists!
• Yes, we know! Let me explain

We re migrating the grid from Debian 9 Stretch to Debian 10 Buster, but perhaps we should be migrating from Debian 9 Stretch to Debian 11 Bullseye directly. This is a legitimate concern, and we discussed it in September 2021. Back then, our reasoning was that skipping to Debian 11 Bullseye would be more difficult for our users, especially because greater jump in version numbers for the underlying runtimes. Additionally, all the migration work started before Debian 11 Bullseye was released. Our original intention was for the migration to be completed before the release. For a couple of reasons the project was delayed, and when it was time to restart the project we decided to continue with the original idea. We had some work done to get Debian 10 Buster working correctly with the grid, and supporting Debian 11 Bullseye would require an additional effort. We didn t even check if Grid Engine could be installed in the latest Debian release. For the grid, in general, the engineering effort to do a N+1 upgrade is lower than doing a N+2 upgrade. If we had tried a N+2 upgrade directly, things would have been much slower and difficult for us, and for our users. In that sense, our conclusion was to not skip Debian 10 Buster.

We no longer want to run Grid Engine In a previous blog post we shared information about our desired future for Grid Engine in Toolforge. Our intention is to discontinue our usage of this technology.

No grid? What about my tools? Traditionally there have been two main workflows or use cases that were supported in the grid, but not in our Kubernetes backend:

• Running jobs, long-running bots and other scheduled tasks.
• Mixing runtime environments (for example, a nodejs app that runs some python code).

The good news is that work to handle the continuity of such use cases has already started. This takes the form of two main efforts:

• The Toolforge buildpacks project to support arbitrary runtime environments.
• The Toolforge Jobs Framework to support jobs, scheduled tasks, etc.

In particular, the Toolforge Jobs Framework has been available for a while in an open beta phase. We did some initial design and implementation, then deployed it in Toolforge for some users to try it and report bugs, report missing features, etc. These are complex, and feature-rich projects, and they deserve a dedicated blog post. More information on each will be shared in the future. For now, it is worth noting that both initiatives have some degree of development already. The conclusion Knowing all the moving parts, we were faced with a few hard questions when deciding how to approach the Debian 9 Stretch deprecation:

• Should we not upgrade the grid, and focus on Kubernetes instead? Let Debian 9 Stretch be the last supported version on the grid?
• What is the impact of these decisions on the technical community? What is best for our users?

The choices we made are already known in the community. A couple of weeks ago we announced the Debian 9 Stretch Grid Engine deprecation. In parallel to this migration, we decided to promote the new Toolforge Jobs Framework, even if it s still in beta phase. This new option should help users to future-proof their tool, and reduce maintenance effort. An early migration to Kubernetes now will avoid any more future grid problems. We truly hope that Debian 10 Buster is the last version we have for the grid, but as they say, hope is not a good strategy when it comes to engineering. What we will do is to work really hard in bringing Toolforge to the service level we want, and that means to keep developing and enabling more Kubernetes-based functionalities. Stay tuned for more upcoming blog posts with additional information about Toolforge. This post was originally published in the Wikimedia Tech blog, authored by Arturo Borrero Gonzalez.