this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
116 points (98.3% liked)

Fediverse

17857 readers
1 users here now

A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

Getting started on Fediverse;

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
116
Threads: We've Seen This Before (self.fediverse)
submitted 2 years ago by confluence to c/[email protected]
30 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

We really shouldn't take this Meta thing lightly.

They could offer the slickest interface and keep people locked to their friends. That interface can use protocols that make it difficult/impossible for non-Threads instances to play ball (ooh this cool new feature is only available through the Threads app; Oh, mybasement.world.ml.xyz can't read that content). There are many ways to Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish, we've seen Meta do it before (e.g. XMPP), and I'm sure we haven't even thought of some ways Threads could EEE.

I think defederation from Meta's instances is probably our only option to protect what we have.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@CrazyDuck

  1. Developers in the chat space in G had decided to implement their own protocol for Hangouts, the "next generation" chat app. The consensus seemed to be that going with an in-house protocol would provide enough extra freedom to allow G to implement and ship features faster (whereas innovation on top of XMPP was deemed relatively hard).
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@CrazyDuck

  1. XMPP was, back then, considered unfit for the transition to mobile as it was a very 'chatty' protocol and that kills battery on mobile devices. I've heard this has been solved/worked around since? But I haven't looked into how this was achieved, if at all, and whether we could have taken that route instead back then.
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@CrazyDuck of course moving to a proprietary protocol doesn't mean that federation must die. Indeed we kept federation alive for users for a while by bridging gTalk (legacy, still supporting federation) and Hangouts (proprietary). It was the dream of at least a few (myself included) to open up the Hangouts API and/or build federation on top of it, but it was not prioritized -- I take part of the responsibility for that, even if I was just an individual contributor: I could have done it as a 20%.

[–] CrazyDuck 3 points 2 years ago

Thanks! It's extremely insightful to get a peek behind the scenes like this. Stuff like this always happens behind closed doors and threads like yours really help shine some light :)