- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- fediverse@lemmy.world
With Meta starting to actually implement ActivityPub, I think it would be a good idea to remind everyone of what they are most likely going to do.
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Man, I’m not gonna relitigate this but no, Google Talk didn’t kill XMPP. XMPP is not, in fact, dead. WhatsApp killed Google Talk and pretty much every other competitor and XMPP would have been in that boat with or without Google Talk.
This is gonna keep coming up, it’s gonna keep being wrong and I’m really not gonna bother picking this fight each and every single time.
Well, people like to think that the fediverse is a genuine threat to Meta. And they like to feel they’re doing important work defending it from Meta. So this will indeed pop up again, and again, and again.
They do? I mean, a few times I did have to point out that Meta has multiple products breaking 2 billion active users, so the “fediverse” is a drop in the ocean, but not many people seem to stick with that argument after a quick bout of googling.
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Do you REALLY think that will be their end game?
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Why can’t it be both? It’s useful now for that reason and if it does grow they are in a position to kill it or absorb it.
And Reddit killed phpBB (kind of).
And phpBB killed the newsgroups.
Etc.You are right. Convenience killed the previous “protocol”.
Did you bother to read the article or did you only decide to write this argument w/o any substantial basis?
Oh, I read it when it came out back in June. Many times, as it kept being shared as an explanation of the first Threads backlash.
It’s full of incorrect assessments and false equivalences.
Threads doesn’t really have the volume (yet) to subsume ActivityPub. The process it describes for standards drifting towards the corporate actor doesn’t apply to ActivityPub, which is engineered from the ground up to support multiple apps with differnent functionality (hence me writing this in Kbin and others reading it in Lemmy and being able to link it and follow it from Mastodon), the article only acknowledges that XMPP survived and kept on going at the very end as a throwaway and doesn’t justify how it “never recovered” and, like I said, it doesn’t acknowledge the real reasons Talk and every Google successor to Talk struggled and collapsed.
So yes, I read it. Past the headline and everything. I just didn’t take it at face value. This piece keeps getting shared because XMPP wasn’t ever that big to begin with, so this sounds erudite and informed while the similar arguments being made at the time about SMTP and RSS were more obviously identifiable as being wrong for the same reasons.
For mastodon if it can help:
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Open your favorite text editor and write threads.net
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Save it as csv
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On your profile on Mastodon, click “edit profile” and scroll to “import/export”.
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Choose “import”, it will open a menu.
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In this menu be sure to click on “Following list” and choose “Domain blocking list”.
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Browse and select your CSV
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Click upload
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Absolutely no problem!
By chance, the instances (for or protecting minorities) I’m on are all defederated of threads.
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Nothing good will come of federating with meta, the fediverse should simply stay out of their reach and realize whatever potential it may have.
I think there might be another way to hurt it though that this article doesn’t seem to mention. Funnily enough, it’s also a theme of an asterix and obelix comic book, which the introduction referenced. This way would be monetization. Threads might try to “help” the fediverse by feeding the bigger instances money, therefore the hosts of the instances would be more open to negotiations with meta and accepting of their policies.
I will compare this to YouTube which started paying all it’s big creators until they became dependent on the platform for a living and then started slowly implementing more and more rules that limit their freedom of expression. Remember how much PewDiePie used to swear in his getting over it videos? In another “pew news” or whatever it was called video I happened to watch he directly mentioned that he censors himself because he isn’t going to put his job on the line just to say “fuck”. Profit invites creators to comply with YouTube’s regulations even if they aren’t enforced violently always.
The same pattern was used in the asterix comic I mention above. Ceasar decides to open a building complex almost next to the problematic for him village and so the residents flood the markets and are shocked at the low prices compared to Rome. As a result, the villagers start increasing prices and advertising their goods and services, neglecting their previous morals and ethos. In the end, however, the Romans lose again after (panoramix, I think?) makes them realize how much separation this has caused them, living only for their business. As a result they kick the Romans out of their village, once again united, and Caesar’s plans fail.
I think both these stories could serve as a potential warning to anyone who might consider selling themselves out if meta adopts such a policy.
Meta does not give a shit to absorb the fedi. We are like a thousandth of their size, just a blip on their radar. I have no idea where people get this idea of self importance that Meta cares about their 10 user server.
Might be because of Threads, and Meta seeking to use ActivityPub themselves.
I don’t disagree with you though; I don’t think the fedi is big enough at the moment to register as more than a blip on their radar, as you said.
Microsoft was using Embrace Extend, and Destroy against Linux 25 yrs ago when it was a blip compared to MS.
This tactic is designed to be used against potential opponents before they become a real threat.
It costs peanuts to eliminate a weed in your yard when it first sprouts.
It also gets the jump on your neighbours who might be interested in this little weed as well.
Also you can’t have unmonetized weeds popping up everywhere they might inject colour and variety into your barren add riddled hellscape.
If they didn’t why would they develop tools to federate? It’s obvious that the threads project was sped up significantly following musk’s obliteration of Twitter, so they wouldn’t go out of their way to implement such a feature if they didn’t have a very specific reason for it.
A company’s goal is maximization of profit, so don’t assume they intend anything else. The activitypub userbase is too small to be a significant addition to their userbase but in this way they can destroy it before it escapes their control. They don’t take risks. Mastodon could seriously compete with threads and it’s gaining popularity. If one more big boom happens it might be too late to stop the fediverse from competing with meta in the most cost efficient way possible. Do not be lured in by the false sense of security, meta wants us to help maximize their profit. We aren’t doing that right now so Meta wants to stop us (or limit us, whatever they deem more profitable)
Meta’s involvement is to “poison pill” fediverse if it really starts to take off. Or just outright buy the bigger/best parts and leave the rest wither…
This time I don’t think it is an extenguish scenario. I think this is more of a preventative move to one-up the EU on interoperability. They want to be able to say “look how good we are, we already were interoperable for x time!”. But of course this could also not be the case and they might just want to kill the network, but I even find that unlikely. Xmpp isn’t dead in fact I use it every day as my phone number for texts and calls and I quite like it. Super robust, I basically never saw any federation weirdness like you could see on mastodon or Lemmy. So in my eyes xmpp didn’t get killed, they got beat by someone who had ressources and made a better product. And it’s not that I don’t think meta can make a great product that users like, but I kind of think that, especially when the competition exists (xwixxer) compared to basically none for Facebook and Instagram
Yup. This is pretty much right on the money.
BlueSky and Threads are looking at interoperable protocols because they a) have engineers at home that think it’s cool, and b) see the writing on the wall about upcoming regulation and want to preempt it. This is probably good for other networks already based on interoperability, but there are definitely a ton of open questions.
The article is 100% revisionist history written backwards to justify a knee-jerk conclusion and XMPP is indeed not dead. Or not any deader than anybody else that got washed away by WhatsApp winning the messaging wars over the 2010s.
EDIT: Re-reading my own post, it’s too harsh. The article isn’t “100%” revisionist history, so much as a biased insider account. The revisionist history is largely coming from both the misattribution of what happened to a deliberate move from Google and the fact that it’s being misread and misquoted when people react to it.
Also, Mammoth 2. The new app developed by
Googlefor browsing Mastodont contents. I’m definitely not worry at all by that.EDIT
Glad to be wrong on this one.
It’s developedby Google?
I thought it was developed by mozilla
All-in on open source and the Fediverse, with support from Mozilla, Marc Benioff, Long Journey Ventures, and others.
Don’t know if the “others” may include google.
Closed source - apple only garbage. HARD PASS
articles like these are why mastodon and the fediverse will continue to be irrelevant and niche
As opposed to being crushed under the corporate machine?
as opposed to having 100m users in less than a year compared to 1.5m in 7 years
So Google used Microsoft’s “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy and looks like Facebook is aiming to use ut as well
Every corp is aiming at that. It’s a strategy that worked very well for MS (and the CIA).
These days, we just call it “the stages of enshitification”. And basically every large tech company is doing something like that
No, that article is full of bull shit.
XMPP still works great btw. It was hard to convince everyone to get an address, but now 95% of my messages are over XMPP. To me compatibility with internet standards is a hard requirement.
