Fediverse

One key difference between link aggregators (kbin/lemmy/reddit/digg) and microblogs (twitter/mastodon) on the one hand, vs social networks (facebook/myspace/diaspora/friendica) and instant messengers (aim/icq/xmpp/signal) on the other, is that the latter is highly dependent on your real-life social network, while the former is not. People using instant messengers and people on facebook want to use them to interact with their friends and family, so they have to use the platforms that those friends and family are on. On the other hand, people are happy to use link aggregators and microblogs as long as there are interesting people and communities to follow, even if they consist entirely of strangers.

Back in the early days of XMPP, when it was still known as "Jabber", I tried switching to it from AOL Instant Messenger. I told all of my contacts about it, and tried to get them to set up Jabber accounts. I was super excited that instant messaging was finally being standardized the way email was, and we wouldn't have to deal with AIM vs MSN messenger vs Yahoo messenger vs etc. I think I was also still bitter about being forced to switch from ICQ to AIM because all my friends had switched. I don't think I got a single person to start using Jabber, though. At one point I even declared that I was going to stop using AIM entirely, and that people would have to switch over so that we could keep talking to each other. Didn't work, of course. I just ended up not being able to talk to anyone until I finally went back to AIM.

A bunch of my friends use reddit, but we don't use the site to interact with each other in any meaningful way. This made switching to kbin really easy. Sure, I've told a few of them about it, but it doesn't really matter to me if they switch or not. As far as I'm aware, XMPP never really became it's own "thing" and experienced the kind of growth that the threadiverse has. Since we've passed the point of being self-sustaining, we can keep growing one user at a time, as individuals decide that they're tired of reddit and make the jump.

Because of this difference in dynamic, we're in a much better position against Meta than XMPP was against Google. The fact that we can even consider outright blocking Meta is a really good sign for us, regardless of whether we do so or not. Even if we do end up in a situation where 90% or even 99% of users are on Meta's platform, we can still refuse to allow them to compromise the ActivityPub protocol. Attempts to "embrace, extend, extinguish" will likely just result in non-blockading instances joining the anti-Meta blockade. With the connection to Meta severed, we'll just go back to enjoying the company of the 1 to 10% that remain, and that portion will likely be much larger than what we have now.