I totally get that people are irritated because they worry about Facebook using their influence to extinguish communities, but why would they extinguish? There is no profit incentive here on the side of small instances, and honestly, this doesn’t change that.
What I do think is a positive here, and what this does change, is that your average person actually can potentially interact with those of us on the fediverse. These are people that may take a decade to make the switch, but now they are actually able to meaningfully interact and be interacted with. I view that as a really big positive, because ultimately the problem with a lot of this, and the reason we aren’t all using Matrix right now to chat, is because sometimes the reality is that we need a critical mass to make a community worthwhile. I’m personally optimistic that this could be cool.
Just a quick disclaimer that I am not a Meta/FB fan. I also see a hugely destructive problem with the views platformed and amplified on Facebook, but I personally don’t see the algorithm as nearly as damaging as the Twitter amplification of voices, and I think I tend to be more optimistic about Threads not being as much of a harmful echo chamber.
Of course, reality was a bit less shiny. First of all, despites collaborating to develop the XMPP standard, Google was doing its own closed implementation that nobody could review. It turns out they were not always respecting the protocol they were developing. They were not implementing everything. This forced XMPP development to be slowed down, to adapt. Nice new features were not implemented or not used in XMPP clients because they were not compatible with Google Talk (avatars took an awful long time to come to XMPP). Federation was sometimes broken: for hours or days, there would not be communications possible between Google and regular XMPP servers. The XMPP community became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers, posting irregularities and downtime (I did it several times, which is probably what prompted the job offer).
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).
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
While XMPP still exist and is a very active community, it never recovered from this blow. Too high expectation with Google adoption led to a huge disappointment and a silent fall into oblivion. XMPP became niche. So niche that when group chats became all the rage (Slack, Discord), the free software community reinvented it (Matrix) to compete while group chats were already possible with XMPP. (Disclaimer: I’ve never studied the Matrix protocol so I have no idea how it technically compares with XMPP. I simply believe that it solves the same problem and compete in the same space as XMPP).
Would XMPP be different today if Google never joined it or was never considered as part of it? Nobody could say. But I’m convinced that it would have grown slower and, maybe, healthier. That it would be bigger and more important than it is today. That it would be the default decentralised communication platform. One thing is sure: if Google had not joined, XMPP would not be worse than it is today.
This is an interesting perspective, thanks. I of course would rather we have organic growth in the long-run, I just think in the short-term this could be good to add legitimacy to the space. It’s very possible I’m wrong, but I guess that’s up to every instance to decide for themselves.
Honestly what do you want more? The platform itself is still great like in the old days and improvement just depends on users like me and you who are willing to contribute to their vision of openness and freedom.
So instead of nagging and crying about the demise, you can simply use this platform yourself and tell people who are looking for security and protection on the internet about it.
I totally get that people are irritated because they worry about Facebook using their influence to extinguish communities, but why would they extinguish? There is no profit incentive here on the side of small instances, and honestly, this doesn’t change that.
What I do think is a positive here, and what this does change, is that your average person actually can potentially interact with those of us on the fediverse. These are people that may take a decade to make the switch, but now they are actually able to meaningfully interact and be interacted with. I view that as a really big positive, because ultimately the problem with a lot of this, and the reason we aren’t all using Matrix right now to chat, is because sometimes the reality is that we need a critical mass to make a community worthwhile. I’m personally optimistic that this could be cool.
Just a quick disclaimer that I am not a Meta/FB fan. I also see a hugely destructive problem with the views platformed and amplified on Facebook, but I personally don’t see the algorithm as nearly as damaging as the Twitter amplification of voices, and I think I tend to be more optimistic about Threads not being as much of a harmful echo chamber.
Because it is literally in the playbook.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I don’t see how you can reconcile Facebook is both “hugely destructive” but their algorithm “isn’t as damaging”? Like…what?
Just betting on FACEBOOK to do the right thing is laughable. Sorry if that’s harsh but damn man, where have you been the last…decade?
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This is a recent article on how Google might’ve helped killed XMPP. Same argument could apply to this meta<>fediverse situation.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is an interesting perspective, thanks. I of course would rather we have organic growth in the long-run, I just think in the short-term this could be good to add legitimacy to the space. It’s very possible I’m wrong, but I guess that’s up to every instance to decide for themselves.
So?
Honestly what do you want more? The platform itself is still great like in the old days and improvement just depends on users like me and you who are willing to contribute to their vision of openness and freedom.
So instead of nagging and crying about the demise, you can simply use this platform yourself and tell people who are looking for security and protection on the internet about it.
They want to exguinish the fediverse since once they do that they could force people to use their product. So yes a profit incentive