this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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You yourself said that the vast majority of users did not care about what protocol they used. They cared about using the chat app with the most user friendly interface, which was Google Talk.
XMPP is an implementation protocol, not a user facing feature.
And your point being exactly?
We are discussing if Google first benefitted from and then damaged the open XMPP federation, not some protocol implementation details.
That Google Talk would have taken all those users and become the dominant chat platform over XMPP based ones, regardless of whether or not they used XMPP to start with. Google Talk was always going to outcompete Jabber / AOL / MSN messenger because those platforms stopped investing in user facing features.
Google's XMPP server was Jabber. That's the main reason it got traction in the first place.
You are arguing retroactively. Back then was a vastly different situation, and you really seem to be too young to understand that. Large platforms like today simply did not exist yet.
Stop being a gatekeeping asshat, you have no idea how old I was, and it's patronizing and dumb as shit to claim that someone is young just cause they experienced a time period differently from you. Your memory and perception is not an infallible perfect record of major corporate and consumer trends.
YES. Because we are not talking about what is going to happen with Lemmy. We're talking about what DID happen with XMPP and Google Talk. We have the benefit of hindsight, and seeing that Jabber did not matter one iota compared to Gmail. If it did, you would be able to ask any person old enough to remember Jabber what they thought of it. You know what you'll get? Blank stares.
Gmail and Google Talk had millions of users, XMPP only had millions of users when Google Talk decided to keep it alive by supporting it.
Both were small upstarts at the time, with Jabber (via the Pidgin client) having significantly more pull in the influential tech demographic than Gmail as just another email service had at the time. Google Talk didn't even exist then.
People remember Gmail because it won. Memory is funny like that, as you say yourself 😏