The importance of open standard federation for chat

Element will participate in the Building Sovereign Digital Workspace discussion track at UN Open Source Week. We’ve been invited to present a session titled: “The importance of open standard federation for chat.”

A genuine open standard is the single most important part of ensuring digitally sovereign communications between multiple separate organisations. 

It was the primary motivation that drove Matthew Hodgson and Amandine Le Pape to create the open, decentralised Matrix standard. Their key insight was that almost all communications apps - messengers, collaboration tools or voice and video - were proprietary. That restraint left all such products as individual technology silos, locking people in - or out - of a specific vendor platform. That is the very opposite of the communications power behind the telephone network (with all its interconnections) and the open web. 

With Matrix, Matthew and Amandine set about creating the missing communication layer of the open Web, with the aim of enabling everyone to communicate through an open standard; one powerful enough to democratise communication and give end-users the independence to communicate on their own terms, rather than at the behest of a Big Tech giant.

Email highlights the shortcomings of proprietary real time communications platforms

Modern day communications platforms built on proprietary or vendor-specific protocols all have the same core weakness of being vendor-locked and therefore entirely unsuited for communications between multiple separate organisations, with the vendor-lock ultimately driving towards a monopoly.

Let’s take a national government as an example. It is a decentralised collection of thousands of separate organisations. There’s simply no way that all of those organisations - all with unique requirements - can use the same proprietary communications platform. It’s not realistic that all those organisations would sign up to the same vendor and, if they did, it would mean handing over a significant amount of control to a single (possibly foreign-controlled) entity creating new vulnerabilities. And there’s no way a single frontend client (aka chat app) can serve such a broad range of end-user requirements; defence, blue light, healthcare, education, office, home…

The likes of Microsoft Teams, Slack, Threema, Webex, Wire or any other vendor-locked system are simply not flexible enough to operate across multiple organisations. That’s why email remains the dominant interoperable form of communication for use between multiple organisations - despite being slow, clunky and insecure (66% of tech leaders feel email is 'not very well suited' for enabling secure and reliable communications with partners: The Future of Secure Communications).

What is an open standard for federated chat?

The definition of an open standard for federated chat is a simple one: it must be built on a vendor-neutral open standard API that enables clients and servers from different vendors to communicate. It’s crucial that the frontend client and the backend server are both interchangeable. This means a frontend from any vendor can operate with a backend from any vendor (or, indeed, either could be developed in-house). That’s vital in terms of ensuring complete digital sovereignty, freeing end-user organisations from relying on any particular vendor.

Anything else is proprietary federation. Solutions that can connect together to create a network, but only if all deployments use the same vendor’s product at either the front or back end. This is because it creates a 'walled garden' that serves no one other than the vendor. It’s worth noting that email, because of the open standard played by SMTP, enables the frontend client and the backend server to be interchangeable.

Existing open standards for federated chat are Matrix, XMPP, and (for old-timers) IRC.

Trustworthy real time communications between separate organisations

The use of sovereign, secure and vendor-agnostic interoperable real time communications can transform the way the public sector operates. Perhaps of most importance, it can bring instant and trustworthy communications between governments and NGOs in an increasingly volatile world.

A genuine decentralised open standard for real time communication puts every end-user organisation in control; from digital sovereignty (giving organisations total ownership of their digital footprint without depending on external suppliers), to a choice of server-side solutions, job role specific frontends, interoperability and open standard federation. 

That’s why Element is built on Matrix, and why we continue to contribute to the protocol so enthusiastically. An open standard for the entire communication layer, not just encryption, provides total independence for end-users’ organisations, supports nationwide and international federation and future-proofs IT decision makers’ investment choices.

Matrix goes far beyond typical SMTP email or XMPP style federation: conversations are replicated over the participating servers. All servers are of equal importance meaning no single server owns the conversation. As a result there is no single point of control or failure in the service: all communication is multilateral. 

If one server is compromised, or taken offline, conversations can continue on the remaining servers providing uninterrupted service availability. The protocol inherently deals with synchronising after server outages, ensuring data integrity.

While a standard such as MLS is welcome and practical, it’s limited to end-to-encryption only. MLS doesn’t make the entire platform an open standard, just the encryption layer. The actual language a vendor product speaks over MLS can still remain proprietary, and can still lock users in.

Advantages of the decentralised Matrix open standard

1. Interoperability

• Different chat platforms can communicate with each other using a shared protocol
• Enables communications between separate organisations (like email)
• Avoids the need for everyone to be on the same proprietary platform

2. Digital sovereignty

• An end-user organisation can be vendor agnostic when choosing from an open standard based ecosystem
• Frontend clients can be ‘mixed and matched’ for different types of workers 
• A solution can be self-hosted, or hosted by any trusted partners

3. Custom control

• A deployment can embed specific policies and workflow built on a standard open API
• Federations can be private or public, and contain rules-based management
• A deployment can support cross-domain communication thanks to the common language of an open standard

4. Resilience and redundancy

• A network is more robust as there is no central server or single point of control
• A good decentralised protocol will support mesh networks, low bandwidth and other connectivity
• Deployments can include high availability, failover and redundancy

5. Transparency and security

• Open source for code transparency and an open platform to extend
• End-to-end encryption by default
• Secure by design with intrinsic zero trust

Open standard federation in action

One of the finest examples of modern day open standard federation is provided by the German healthcare industry’s creation of the TI-Messenger standard for real time messaging. It is an extension of the Matrix open standard that includes specifications for the German healthcare industry. More than 150,000 German healthcare organisations will migrate to TI-Messenger compliant real time communications (voice, video and messaging), enabling them to communicate securely across the entire healthcare ecosystem.

Those 150,000+ organisations can select from any vendor that is TI-Messenger compliant and, because they are all operating to the same standard, they are all interoperable and can be part of the same nationwide private federated network.

In terms of a frontend client (there are multiple TI-Messenger clients available; similar to there being a range of email clients, or several web browser options), a hospital is likely to choose a very different frontend from a healthcare insurance firm. Likewise a hyperscaler or huge insurance firm is likely to choose an advanced TI-Messenger backend, while an individual hospital or local pharmacy might opt for a more simple SaaS backend from a trusted service provider.

Perhaps most important, whatever choice an organisation makes today keeps the organisation technologically independent and future-proofed as it is easy for them to switch to another TI-Messenger compliant solution.

Compare that to a traditional vendor-locked communications platform with proprietary federation (something like Wire, Mattermost or Microsoft Teams). More than 150,000 organisations would need to purchase that same vendor platform, which would never happen and result in unsanctioned workarounds such as the use of consumer messaging apps. Even if the entire ecosystem did adopt a single vendor, that company would have a serious stranglehold over the entire German healthcare system (as would any successful cyber attack aimed at that vendor). This would create an instant monopoly for a profit-driven vendor that is left with zero incentive to innovate.

United through open standard federation

In an increasingly volatile world, the public sector is investing considerable time and resources in updating their sovereign and secure real time communications. As federated organisations themselves, they should understand the benefits of open standard federation better than most. By adopting Matrix they can ensure their technological independence and avoid getting vendor-locked in barbed wire.

Proprietary platforms don’t deliver because...

• They create an instant barrier to communicating with partner organisations (who might not use the same siloed platform) and it’s not realistic or sensible to expect every partner organisation to use the same vendor platform...
• ...Which leaves real time communications as an ‘internal communications only’ solution
• They end up forcing external parties to use ‘your’ video conferencing system (such as Webex or Zoom) which necessitates insecure guest access, especially on larger calls
• Locking into a proprietary platform leaves the customer hostage to changes in pricing and T&Cs 
• Discussion history becomes difficult to migrate
• Even within a single organisation, it’s unlikely a single vendor can create a frontend that’s ideally suited to a hybrid workforce, spanning frontline, office, mobile and home workers - whereas an open standard based system can support multiple client frontends, each of which can be optimised for specific job roles