this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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People are concerned because there were examples of such things going horribly wrong, most notably with Google and XMPP.
Way back in the day, Google announced that its Talk messenger will support XMPP, which made decentralization fans very happy - finally, they can communicate with everyone from the comfort of their decentralized instance!..oh.
Google started implementing features in Talk that are incompatible with XMPP, and then dropped XMPP support altogether, ending up deprecating Talk in favor of Google-only Hangouts. This forced many XMPP users to get into Google's ecosystem, since the people they contacted through XMPP were mostly just using Google Talk, and they couldn't be contacted through XMPP any more. As a result, XMPP became worse off than it started and got practically forgotten by all but 1,5 nerds who keep it alive.
now most of their contacts were in defederated Google to which they now didn't have access.
this ☝️. Those of us who remember what happened then, understand the potential dangers of federating with a juggernaut like META.
We should tread lightly!
Is it even true? I doubt XMPP was ever popular outside of google's talk.
Xmpp's popularity isn't the point.
The point is google intentionally killed it
How do you define if a communication protocol is dead? I use XMPP everyday, it works just well.
Also, I doubt that Google wanted to destroy XMPP. They simply needed a chat then noticed it's crap for mobile devices. They wanted to offer their users seemless migration to the new proprietary protocol.
I was sad that Google stopped to use an official standard, but there are many better free options left.
XMPP works great on mobile devices today. Google could have easily developed and published such extensions themselves.
Not even a little bit. XMPP was rubbish.
Why? It works great for me and my contacts. I use it for all my personal messaging.
When Google started using XMPP in Talk, 20 years ago, it was crap. I haven’t used it in probably 15 years but it wasn’t great then either.
Then it must have gotten a lot better in the meantime then. I discovered it ~2020 while searching for alternatives to WhatsApp and realizing that other walled gardens cannot be the answer since they have the same problem as WhatsApp. I think we should revive the idea of an universal internet standard for instant messaging.
No it's not in the least bit, but because people keep reposting that angry blog post by someone who was personally involved and wanted someone to blame so they blamed Google (as if XMPP needed any outside help to fail to catch on, they could do it on their own perfectly fine), people believe that narrative and then get sold on Meta wanting to the same with the Fediverse. As if they could give a flying fart (just like with Google and XMPP).
If they don't care about Fediverse they wouldn't join it in the first place. It isn't just meaningless but actually harmful - people can gain access to the content on their service without being subject to their extensive surveillance and ads. Add to this all the regular problems with federation.
As for Google and XMPP, back in the days it was happening Google were playing good guys - they had infamous "don't be evil" motto, supported various open standards and open-source projects (they still do so to some extend of course). I think for them it wasn't really an intent to 'kill' XMPP, it just XMPP was too dependant on google so they suffered a lot when the company decided to stop federation.
No it didn't
Wrong again.
This. I don't care what Google or Meta do, I will never use their services.