This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance
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Basically the sequence of events as claimed by the author is that:
- XMPP, niche, small circles
- Google launches Talk that was XMPP compatible
- Millions joined Talk that could coop XMPP in theory
- The coop worked only sparingly and was unidirectional, i.e. Talk to XMPP ✅ but XMPP to Talk ❌
- Talk sucked up existing XMPP users as it was obviously a better option (bandwagon effect + unidirectional “compatibility” with XMPP)
- Talk defederated
This demonstrated exactly the importance of reciprocity. If they play dirty, kick them out asap.
The X in Xmpp is for extensible. I find issue that a protocol that is supposed to be extensible was killed by being extended.
Aye great read and very illuminating. We gotta protect the fediverse from corporate insidious destruction. This quote stood out to me:
And because there were far more Google talk users than “true XMPP” users, there was little room for “not caring about Google talk users”. Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. And started a long quest to create a messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I lost count after that).
But XMPP users were presumably still around and outlasted Google and their apps. We’ll be the same even if Facebook churns the protocol, because the whole point of being on Mastodon or KBin is to not be on Facebook.
you missed the point where the open source devs were in a constant race to adapt to all the google-“innovations” and actually troubleshoot on them which ends up demotivating
did Google force them to do that, or did the open source devs just make a mistake?
So how do you know who to trust?
I’m gonna throw this out there:
If Meta is going to join the fediverse (or implement something with activitypub) there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop them.
It’s an open protocol. They can use it.
The only thing we can do is force them to follow the AGPL and/or fork the code if they get crazy with change requests.
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