this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Not only was it not very successful, it's an old outdated Microsoft playbook from the 90s/early 00s and was targeted at closed source competitors and freeware, not open source software where you can just fork out a separate version.
By all means block Meta instances if you want, but they have 3 billion users, they definitely don't give a shit about a "competitor" with a few hundred thousand users. If simply the presence of a corporation in the Fediverse is enough to destroy it, then it wasn't going to last long anyways. It's embarassing that "embrace, extend, extinguish" caught on around here just because it's a catchy alliteration.
In Microsoft's case I agree. However Google successfully used EEE to essentially kill of XMPP where they initially added XMPP support to Google Talk, then extended it with their own features which weren't up to spec, and then later killed off XMPP support.
So when's extinguish come in? XMPP still exists, google dropping support didn't kill XMPP, it just doesn't work with their app anymore. They weren't trying to kill XMPP, they were just going what Google does and dropping projects as soon as they aren't profitable.
Yes XMPP still exists but I'd argue compared to previously standard XMPP is no longer as widely spread. Where as previously you would have people talking to each other over different XMPP services, that kind of federation no longer exists. For example WhatsApp supports XMPP but good luck trying to talk to WhatsApp from another client.
XMPP was never popular to begin with, because it's a messaging service that relies on the people close to you using it, which was rare before Google Talk integrated. Corporate run apps brought direct and indirect usage, you can't argue this is an overall loss when they pulled away from XMPP, at worst it's the same as if they never integrated. The same is true for ActivityPub, whether everyone defederates or blocks Meta instances now or they stop supporting ActivityPub later makes no tangible difference.