path: root/doc/history.md

RedMatrix History
=================

RedMatrix is a collaborative effort by the RedMatrix community and based on work introduced in Friendica by the Friendica community. The core design, the project mission, and software base itself was written primarily by Mike Macgirvin and is the culmination of more than a decade of actual software design using this platform and an evolving vision of the role of communication software in our lives. Many others have contributed to this work, both conceptually and in terms of actual code (way too many to list).

##Mike Macgirvin -- Biography
 
Mike Macgirvin is an American software engineer now living in Australia. He spent his early adult years designing and repairing semiconductor fabrication equipment for a number of companies as a self-described "machine wizard". In 1985 he became a research engineer at Stanford University and soon became a Unix systems administrator writing communication software and utilities and becoming an expert in emerging internet technologies. He authored an email "client" called "ML" which pioneered some advanced concepts in encryption, the ability to filter message streams into different "views", and multi-protocol support. In 1996 he went to Netscape Communications to become tech lead on their Messaging Server and integrate this with Collabra (groupware) into a comprehensive communications server package. He stayed on after Netscape was acquired by America Online and was tech manager of the Groups@AOL project until 2001. 

During a layoff round, Mike was let go from America Online in August 2001 and purchased a music store in Mountain View, California later to be known as "Sonica Music Company". Sonica folded in late 2006. He returned to working on software full-time and was employed briefly at Symantec before moving to Australia in early 2007. He is currently employed as a Computer Systems Officer at the University of Wollongong. 


##RedMatrix - The Early Years

The software which went into creating RedMatrix has been through three distinct historical phases. It began in 2003 when Mike Macgirvin was looking for a content management system to power the website for his music store and found the available solutions to be lacking in various respects. The project was born as the "PurpleHaze weblog" under the nom de plume "Nerdware Communications". It was a multi-user PHP/MySQL CMS which provided blogs, forums, photo albums, events and more. Initially it provided the basis for a social community and shopping for customers of the store, but was also linked to Mike's personal weblog running on another domain. The distinguishing characteristic of this software was the ability for so-called "normal users" to re-assemble the components and choose different content feeds - and in essence create their own personal "multi-user CMS" as a view. Their custom view was able to communicate with anybody else that used the system, but could be partitioned so that adult sites and motorcycle enthusiast sites would not be visible to each other and not clash (or in this case Mike's personal website and the music store website). This software was developed primarily from 2003 until 2008.

In 2006 this software was used as the prototype for Symantec's "safeweb" reputation and community site. It was developed and enhanced until about 2008. A rewrite took place in 2008 named "Reflection" but work stagnated as the community dwindled. The need for content management systems and communications software dropped dramatically during this time as humans flocked to the new social aggregrators - Facebook and Twitter.  


##Mistpark/Friendica

In early 2010, Mike left Facebook, concerned at the company's increasing hold and control of personal information. In his words "Companies die. We watched it happen in the dot-com years. When they do, their databases are sold to the highest bidder.". Mike used some remnants of the old CMS project to create a decentralised social communications platform. This was launched in July 2010 as "Mistpark". The name was chosen as a tribute to his new home in the Southern Highlands of Australia. The key innovation in this project was the ability to authenticate remotely and invisibly to other decentralised instances of the software so to allow remote viewing of private photos and provide "wall-to-wall" posting across website instances. The lack of simple remote identity *provenance* was a serious limitation of other decentralised communication protocols.

In late 2010, the name was changed to "Friendika". The name Friendika had some symbolic issues, since the suffix was common with "swastika" and "Amerika", both having negative connotations, however the dot-com domain was available. Friendica was in fact the first choice but the 'friendica.com' domain name was already registered. It became available a year later and the project was renamed to Friendica in late 2011. 

The software also took on a new role - cross-service federation; which was first introduced in August and September 2010. Federation allowed the software to "behave as" a StatusNet site and friends and messages could communicate to the other service from their own platforms. It was also hoped to provide federation with Diaspora - a project with similar scope being developed in secret in New York and first released in November of that year. Over the course of the next year, the federation ability was extended to provide integrated communications from RSS feeds, to and from email, StatusNet, Facebook, Twitter, and the emerging Diaspora project. The software provided a single "view" of your entire social space no matter what provider you or your friends used. StatusNet and Diaspora were supported natively so that one account could access any of these services. Facebook and Twitter used "API federation" which required the person to have an account on those services with which to link.

By July 2012, Twitter and Facebook had both changed their terms of service and essentially outlawed "API federation" in the way Friendica was using it. Diaspora announced they were changing their protocol and would not maintain compatibility nor provide any warning when compatibility would break (or documentation on the proposed changes). The creator of StatusNet was also leaving his project to create something new (pump.io). As the software's primary visible feature was "federation", this created a bit of a crisis. The federated social web was crumbling. Also of concern was that independent and decentralised social websites shut down frequently leaving all their members to have to start over again on another site. Mike realised he did not want to be held hostage to the decisions that other projects and companies and independent websites make. Friendica lacked autonomy and the ability to stand on its own. 

Mike had been working on this project for some time and there were a number of things which needed re-writing, including the base communication protocol protocol which Friendica used (DFRN or the "Distributed Friends and Relations Network" protocol). These ideas were starting to emerge as a different method of communication he called "zot". Zot began as a way to create a common language for federated websites, but there was no interest in this ability and as mentioned, the federated web was crumbling. The first version was soon scrapped and zot was re-designed and re-ignited as a streamlined communication protocol which was location-independent; e.g. not tied to any website. This would allow people to carry on unaffected if their website operator shut down temporarily or permanently. They wouldn't have to make friends all over again, and permissions of everything on the system wouldn't have to be changed to allow bob@site1 to see something that was private to him, even though he was now bob@site2. This was a serious problem with decentralisation. People moved and their online identities were lost and had to be re-created from scratch and existing relationships destroyed and had to be created all over again. 


##RedMatrix

In July 2012, Mike left the Friendica project and began "full-time" (he was and is still employed doing other work) development of "zot" and a new base project called "red". Red is Spanish for "network". It wasn't really a "social network" and especially not a "federated social network". It was just Red (technically "la red"), or "the network". Work began by removing all the "federation" components and going back to basics - communication and remote authentication. It was a major re-write and took roughly six months before even basic communication was re-established. It was also no longer compatible with Friendica - which had been given to the "Friendica community" and by this time was developing separately on its own track.

It became clear during this time that the single most compelling feature of the project wasn't the social network, but the authentication layer and decentralised access control mechanisms. Combined with zot's location independence it created a new model for software which had never existed previously - decentralised identity-aware web publishing and single sign-on to any compatible provider across the web. These weren't *evolutionary*, they were **revolutionary**. One of the biggest flaws of the modern web is the reliance on different passwords for every service you use, or reliance on a single provider if you were to tie them to - say your Facebook login. Facebook can remove your account at any time. Gone. If you rely on their authentication for all your websites, your entire online identity - gone. This is what was missing from Friendica - a compelling software feature which could stand on its own, without requiring a social network and especially without requiring a federated social network with all the mentioned external dependencies.   

An early visitor to the project noted that he had some difficulty finding the project on Google because of the choice of name - "red". Yes, this was a poor decision in retrospect. We were buried on page 23,712 of the search results. The concept that was emerging around this identity-aware publishing was that of "a matrix of inter-connected thought streams", since we didn't have a concept of "people" and "friends". All were just connected "channels" with different ways to connect. So "Red Matrix" was chosen to give it a searchable name. It had nothing to do with the Matrix film and red and blue pills, though that is frequently cited (erronously); and in fact isn't a bad analogy.  

The concept of identity-aware content was alien to anything that existed previously on the web, so to make it useful we had to provide the ability to use it for content. This brought back concepts from the old "Content Management System" on which the software was originally based. To get it up and running quickly we created a markup language for webpages called "Comanche" which let you describe a page in high-level terms based on bbcode tags. We also added WebDAV so you could put decentralised access control on files and drag/drop from your operating system. So now you could have private photos, webpages, files, events, conversations, chatrooms - and they are visible to those you choose - no matter what site they use. All they need is zot. And your viewers could move to another site or just pop up at a different site any time they want and we don't care. And it also had a built-in social network and lots of additional privacy and encryption features which were added even before the Snowden revelations gave them added urgency.

Over time a few federation components re-emerged. The ability to view RSS feeds was important to many people. Diaspora never really managed to re-write their protocol, so that was re-implemented and allowed RedMatrix to connect with Diaspora and Friendica again (Friendica still had their Diaspora protocol intact, so this was the most common language now remaining on the free web - despite its faults). Diaspora communications aren't able to make use of the advanced identity features, but they work for basic communications. 

That brings us up to the present. Where will RedMatrix go from here? I don't know. That's up to you.