this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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XMPP wasn't even remotely popular until Google integrated with it, I tried Jabber back in the day lol. Google brought the users it lost, you can't argue this was an attempt to kill it. At worst it's the same as before Google integrated.
That's the problem though. If XMPP had grew organically then it would fare much better. With how it happened, XMPP's growth was mostly because of Google, and that put a lot of pressure to other servers and the protocol's development to cater to them, because they had the majority of the users in their platform.
This is pure speculation at best, but since we're speculating I strongly disagree. The internet overall didn't care about open source software in the early 00s, and most people still don't today. Corporate freeware that can spend more on a polished product is going to win over the general population every time.
Talking about any alternative scenario is always speculation, but I believe the "How to kill decentralized networks" post that's been going around lately puts it nicely:
You missed rest of my comment. You, and this article, are speculating on made up assumptions, and frankly silly assumptions. Open source software is almost never more popular than freeware counterparts. Saying "oh maybe it would've been this time" is ridiculous.
Can you explain how Google helped XMPP even in the slightest way? Because that's what I'm arguing against.
The only thing I can come up with is the increased popularity, which is shaky because tech-naive users wouldn't know or care about Google Talk's underlying protocol. Also, considering the rest of what Google did with XMPP, like making it hard for their servers to be interoperable with others, or their slow adoption of new features, it's clear to me that Google getting involved was a net negative for XMPP. I don't think I'm assuming anything to arrive on that conclusion.
I never argued that Google helped XMPP, I'm arguing that it isn't applicable to the "extend, embrace, extinguish" crap that people keep parroting like it's an actual playbook used by tech companies and not just some silly nonsense created by some middle manager at Microsoft 30 years ago lol. The users Google brought they took, at worst it was net neutral.
Because they forked their own deviations of XMPP to work with the updates made to Google Talk. It's original state was left untouched and by no means "extinguished". This is just another example of corporate freeware winning over open sourced because of a more polished product.
I assume you mean Jingle which they adopted in 2007? Why would slow adoption of XMPP features into Google Talk affect non Google Talk XMPP users? They were always free to use XMPP without Google Talk, just as we're free to stay on Lemmy/kbin/Mastadon without Threads.
I can agree to that. Does Facebook want to join the fediverse with the sole reason to kill it? Probably not -- but the fediverse stands to gain little to nothing from their involvement, so we should be as vigilant as possible with them. If the result from that is that some people end up believing that Meta's out to EEE the fediverse then eh, whatever.
I'm all for being vigilant and skeptical, but I was personally hoping this would be a place where people practiced more critical thinking skills than Reddit. We've seen what misinformation based paranoia and outrage does, and allowing that mindset here regardless of the direction just furthers it in my opinion.
Now that being said, Facebook helped build that culture of misinformation and outrage so, you know, can't help but feel a bit of dramatic irony lol, but I still think it's worth trying to shut down and work to make this a place where people think through things logically.