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How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) (ploum.net)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Earlier today there was a post about rejecting Meta's intrusion in the fediverse, some don't see the danger in it or think it's unlikely that Meta can do any damage to the fediverse.

Someone posted this in the comments and I think it's extremely relevant and it deserves its own post so all can see it.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I am sad for XMPP, but Google and others adopting it and then shutting down their services were not the reason.

Skype is. It was proprietary, but so good that using anything else just didn't make sense.

I still remember using the old Skype as something unearthly easy and pleasant.

It was as lightweight as some lean XMPP or ICQ client, but without (or at least I don't remember them) text encoding problems, with fast file transfers, VoIP usable on bad channels, convenient GUI, user directory (just like ICQ, only XMPP didn't have that feature).

Now, it was a centralized service, but this was happening simultaneously to ICQ dying due to lame attempts at banning alternative clients, so the morale of depending on such a thing didn't quite settle in people's heads.

I mean, ICQ (or AIM, or whatever) UINs (or IDs, or whatever) were for many people their main ID in the Internet, a bit like mobile phone number. It all seemed eternal.

EDIT: Though the general idea of not federating with big proprietary services which do not behave well is solid. Sort of like many of Usenet servers do. Ah, well, Usenet itself is not that much alive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I honestly don't know and wouldn't dispute it, because at the time I was a small kid. I just went by what most people say online (including but not limited to this blog post)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Well, what this article says is relevant for a small subset of "geeks" when ICQ (or AIM etc) was dying, but many people still used it and similar services, so a simple IM of this kind was still accepted as normal, thus XMPP as the alternative.

Normies (like me) were mostly on Skype or between ICQ (or AIM etc) and Skype. That is, that move to Skype was often spearheaded by "geeks", after it was mostly over the more conservative people were "geeks" too, as it always happens.

Frankly I'd say what hurt XMPP most was its adoption by various social networks being advertised as a selling point. Like "look, it's a universal protocol, Google has it, Facebook has it, even ICQ had an undocumented XMPP endpoint for some periods of time when they were playing with it, ... <I can add 2 Russian search and email providers and 1 social network to this list, and possibly plenty others> ...".

So when those big proprietary services just decided they don't want it, what's described in the article happened. Basically XMPP enthusiasts made their bed and had to sleep in it. Only it shouldn't have. Many "geeks" of that time were uncritically in awe of Google and Facebook etc, we seem to start forgetting this. People would defend dropping XMPP by them, would hope that these companies together would make some other universal protocol, make up all sorts of unbelievable bullshit to believe that all these companies are cool and big and making future.