this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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I read it. Your points, especially about how they'll have to play by the rules, seem a bit naive. Theoretically, those points should have applied to Google and XMPP, but in reality, Google just threw their weight around and killed it anyways. It's very likely that Facebook will do the same.
Sorry if I seem a bit aggressive, I just don't want to see this thing we have die because of the influence of a megacorporation.
I don't see how Google killed XMPP. They removed it from their own application which is the exact same effect as not speaking an open protocol in the first place. Nobody forced other XMPP-based applications to change. You know what made me stop using XMPP and not keep my Jabber instance when I moved to a new server? Clunky applications and the fact that everyone I had in my contact list was also on another more comfortable platform (at first ICQ and MSN, later Discord) and prefered to contact me there.
If we federate with Threads, they may use their power to push changes to ActivityPub but nobody forces any of us to implement them, making them effectively irrelevant. If they do something that's incompatible with the rest of the fediverse, they effectively defederate from everyone else. So either way the end result is two separate sub-fediverses and the more popular one will win out. Hint: it's gonna be the one with billions of dollars of funding. If we let them in as long as they play by the rules, we have a chance to educate people on what's beyond Threads, it gives Meta something to lose if they defederate (their users' ability to talk to people in their friend lists). At least we don't lose anything that we wouldn't also lose by not talking to them in the first place.
When they removed XMPP, they disconnected the Google users from the rest of XMPP. And since it was the largest instance, XMPP as a whole basically died. People couldn't use XMPP to stay in touch anymore with people using Google's thing, and vice-versa, which XMPP as a whole kind of came to rely on. I don't know much more about XMPP, but anyways, most of my points are general and not XMPP-specific.
Also, cutting them off from the fediverse won't have the effect you're trying to say it will have. It'll just be it's own thing, just like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc are now. And the fediverse thrives in spite of them.
And please, stop assuming Facebook will play by the rules. They won't.
And how is this different from not using XMPP (or being defederated) in the first place? Their platform would still have become huge and pulled over users. People don't use a platform because they like the technology. They use it because it has people they want to talk to. Even google themselves had to accept that with their failed Google Wave which didn't even survive the closed beta because people who got an invite couldn't talk to their friends who didn't get one.
And I'm explicitly not assuming Facebook will play by the rules in the long run. I'm saying while they do, let's talk to them, even if it's just for a month. When they eventually start breaking the rules, we can still defederate and I assure you that we won't lose significantly more users than we would have if we had defederated earlier. Because why would we? We're on the side of the open-closed divide that values privacy and open source software. Our only reason to ever switch to Threads is to talk to people that aren't on Mastodon/Lemmy/Whatever. If that's a requirement for someone they have to do that either way. But for someone who starts out on Threads, we might suddenly create an incentive to create a Mastodon account to keep talking to their friends. They probably won't leave Threads but they will use both, pulling the fediverse into the public conciousnes.
It's different because for a while, there was no incentive for the average person to move to decentralised, libre XMPP when they could interact with the people there from Google Talk. If someone was on XMPP and asked a Talk user to come over, the odds they would be convinced were very small. Why would they when they can access it anyways?
Even if they didn't kill it, they certainly stalled it's growth, from the moment they federated.
Facebook will probably start not playing nice slowly, if they don't right away, so it'll be very hard to draw a line where they should be defederated, so larger instances and users may never end up defederating them thanks to blurred lines and constantly shifting goalposts. "We'll defederate when they don't play nice" is too vague to work when they move slowly and change things gradually.
When the vicious predator bares it's fangs, it's best to deal with it right away by running or fighting back, instead of trying to be friendly with it.
And how many of those Google Talk users would have created an XMPP account if there hadn't been any federation at all? If someone was on XMPP and asked a Talk user to come over, the odds they would be convinced were very small. Why would they when they can ask you to create a Google Talk account instead?
Why would someone create a Signal account when they can ask you to create a WhatsApp account instead?
People do it, because they're convinced of it for one reason or another. But it's a hell of a lot harder to convince someone to move when both are interoperable. Imagine if Signal and WhatsApp were federated together, do you think Signal would have nearly as much success as it does if WhatsApp users could just stay there to communicate with Signal users?