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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I never argued that Google helped XMPP, I’m arguing that it isn’t applicable to the “extend, embrace, extinguish” crap that people keep parroting

    I can agree to that. Does Facebook want to join the fediverse with the sole reason to kill it? Probably not – but the fediverse stands to gain little to nothing from their involvement, so we should be as vigilant as possible with them. If the result from that is that some people end up believing that Meta’s out to EEE the fediverse then eh, whatever.



  • Can you explain how Google helped XMPP even in the slightest way? Because that’s what I’m arguing against.

    The only thing I can come up with is the increased popularity, which is shaky because tech-naive users wouldn’t know or care about Google Talk’s underlying protocol. Also, considering the rest of what Google did with XMPP, like making it hard for their servers to be interoperable with others, or their slow adoption of new features, it’s clear to me that Google getting involved was a net negative for XMPP. I don’t think I’m assuming anything to arrive on that conclusion.



  • It’s true that instances don’t need to grow exponentially (or at all), but most mods/admins want to maintain their community and not see it dwindle down to nothing. People used to interacting with instances run by Facebook or other corporations (which most of their friends or family will use) might get upset if the federation link with them gets severed. If they do, they’ll either pressure the instance admin to comply with the corporations and federate with them again, or switch to the corporations’ instances. Both of these scenarios are bad for the future of the fediverse.




  • How convoluted the protocol is doesn’t really matter as long as someone creates an easy tool to spin up your own server.

    I think the XMPP comparison stills stands: Google was able to steer how the protocol developed, or which version of the protocol people used because they had the majority of the users and other servers wanted to still be able to interact with them.

    Suppose that Facebook joins the fediverse and most large instances federate with them. All is great, then Facebook starts to make demands to other instances in order to keep federating with them, e.g. no posts about protests. Because a large share of ActivityPub activity will be on Threads, naive users would prefer instances that federate with it, so instance mods will be incentivized to comply with Facebook’s demands to attract new users and maintain their current one and… you see where this is going. The only way to deal with this is to deny Facebook this kind of leverage in the first place, either by blocking them instantly or at their first mishap or demand.