this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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How?
I've seen the article about Google and XMPP, but I don't agree with its analysis. It wasn't easy to find service providers offering XMPP accounts to the public in 2004. I do not believe that Google embraced, extended, and extinguished a thriving ecosystem; there never was a thriving XMPP ecosystem.
There is a thriving ecosystem for federated microblogging, and federated discussions. While I'm sure Meta would like us to join their service, I'm not sure how allowing their users to interact with us will have that effect, nor how blocking that communication protects against it.
You must have been pretty young back then or ignorant. It was trivial to find a public XMPP server in 2004 and there were dozens of bridges that connected ICQ/IRC/AIM/MSN/Yahoo without the need of multi-clients which were popular at the time. Sounds pretty thriving to me, but please tell me again how Meta and Google are gonna give you a pony this time
I was nearly 20 years younger than I am now and was definitely ignorant of free, public XMPP service providers, which is kind of the point. If someone tech-savvy enough to be running Linux on a laptop in 2004 and liked the idea of XMPP tried and failed to get started with it, what hope was there of attracting a mainstream audience? You could argue I didn't try hard enough, and you'd be right in a tautological sense. I did later use third-party XMPP clients for Google Chat.
I don't expect a Pony from Meta. Meta is a face-eating leopard and I expect it to try to eat my face. If blocking their users from seeing the pictures of birds I share on Mastodon prevents that, please tell me how it does. This isn't a rhetorical question; I self-host and can block, or not block whatever I want.
I've yet to see a convincing argument in favor of preemptive defederation or an explanation of what "Embrace Extend Extinguish" means in this particular scenario. There seems to be a lot of thinking that defederating "punishes" or handicaps Meta in some small way, which from my understanding is just not how it works at all.
I guess the preemptive block helps make the block easier for admins rather than ‘trying to do it’ once the service is embedded. Fact is Lemmy is doing ok without it so removing it isn’t going to make Lemmy worse than it was yesterday.
I don’t use threads so I don’t really see any personal benefit to blocking it, so I am a bit biased
Hating on Threads for no reason is the circlejerk of Lemmy.
I'm almost 50 myself. I'm logged in to XMPP right now. I've used it consistently since the early 2000. 20ish years minimum. There was never a thriving ecosystem of XMPP servers. There was a lot of choice, but nothing with a big name that would appeal to the average consumer. No jabber.social or jabber.world. And no critical mass of users. The transports were ultimately a frustrating gimmick. That Microsoft and AOL constantly broke. Leaving them unreliable and undesirable to recommend others to use.
When Google rolled out Google chat based on jabber/XMPP there was a lot of hopium going around that they'd be that big name to bring critical mass. Surprise! Hindsight says no. They "defederated" their servers. The jabber/XMPP development group themselves decided to persue standardization. Which largely meant an end to the active development of the service. Standards move much slower. Imperceptibly so. With Google out, the XMPP group pursuing standardization, no "official" servers, and the advent of services like Skype discord etc. The buzz and momentum behind XMPP imploded on it's own. Stymied by no one. Suffocated by it all.
No one killed XMPP. It simply stopped being relevant to most people.
Do you have any actual statistics, or is this just a "I remember how it was back in the Golden Age" anecdote?
Exactly. Any analysis of "embrace extend extinguish" WRT Google/XMPP needs to answer a simple question: how many daily active users did XMPP/Jabber have in 2004?
the same can be argued about the fediverse. the approximate number is 1.5 million of monthly active users, which is just an ant compared to Meta's.
So yeah, one could argue that it's pretty much the same situation in terms of numbers if not worse (I don't know the numbers but I'd bet that Meta has more users than Google talk ever had)
Jabber/XMPP had more daily active users than GMail. They used it as a trojan horse. Get off their tip
That would be quite easy given that Gmail launched in 2004 as invite-only and access has been somewhat limited well into 2007.
Geez, Fedipact people talking about XMPP prove time and time again that they're too young to remember that.
You aren't wrong. I'm not here to defend Google or Meta. But those remembering that Google killed XMPP are only remembering what they were told. Relevance "killed” XMPP. Google certainly wasn't it's white knight. But more than anything, the XMPP working groups gamble of pursuing standardization didn't result in mass adoption. When development slowed as it had to, to achieve standardization. Other services like Skype, discord, etc. All flourished and bloomed. Leaving XMPP largely irrelevant. It's still exists to this day however. And I'm logged into it this very moment. I've been logged in to an XMPP server of one sort or another nearly 24/7 365 for the last 20 years.
Basically every single invocation of "embrace, extend and extinguish" is a borderline fallacy that depends on an oversimplified world view.
XMPP/Jabber is even "funnier" because instant messaging as a whole is basically dead in favor of SMS and phone apps. The closest we get on that front is imessage and even that is mostly a US obsession.
Basically every "Oh mah gawdz, EEE is coming for us" article comes from a place of mass ignorance, at best.
As for Threads? I suspect that will eat Mastodon's lunch. Because it already is. People love giving Facebook even more information and already have their favorite usernames from instagram. Whereas they will never stop bitching about how hard it is to sign up for Mastodon.
And... that is fine. Mastodon is not twitter. It is better. A lot better.
That said? I wouldn't mind having access to Threads content. And I think there is a lot of room to use Matsodon/federation as a way for advertisers to take their power back, as it were, by controlling their own instances and being able to immediately cut off The Emerald Apartheid when he starts talking about The Jews again. But, if I ever do see a significant benefit to this, I can migrate to an instance that federates or even start my own. Rather than insisting that the ones I have accounts on do what I want.