this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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The Ploum article again. Please explain how the circumstances with XMPP and ActivityPub are remotely similar.
Both are open protocols for communication over the Internet. Both have been adopted by a large corporate interest.
Now, how are they different?
I asked how the circumstances are similar, not vague descriptions that suit your existing views. But sure.
XMPP was dogshit back in 2004. A good idea, but nowhere NEAR what it needed to be to actually get mainstream acceptance. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
There were very very few XMPP users in 2004. There are millions of ActivityPub users. If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here. We joined Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon because we don’t want to live in a centrally controlled/owned social platform. That won’t change just because we can suddenly interact with Threads users. In fact, if anything, once Threads users hear that we get the same shit they do without the ads, they might decide to join us instead.
Google killing off XMPP integration didn’t kill XMPP. It did that all on its own.
It's not about pulling the plug. It's about introducing proprietary features that break communication, forcing people off of an independent server and onto Threads.
If most of your IRL friends are on Threads and your experience with them has gotten janky due to Meta fucking with the protocol, it's going to be very difficult to not switch over to Threads.
Oh, and good luck trying to get your friends to switch over to some indie server they've never heard of. If you can do that, then you should run for president.
So basically, the worst thing Meta could do is what the defederators are actively campaigning for: To make it impossible for Threads and the Fediverse to communicate.
The difference is the stage at which they "advocate" for it.
People here are advocating for it now before Facebook has a chance to "embrace" us.
Facebook would only "advocate" for it after they've "embraced" us and started to "extend" ActivityPub with proprietary features that potentially caused issues with Lemmy users.
With the former, Lemmy continues on its own, growing naturally. With the latter, Lemmy users lose contact with communities they've become a part of and may be forced to move to Threads to continue interacting with their communities. That harms Lemmy's active userbase. Additionally, because of how big Threads is, it'd naturally have the largest communities, so other Lemmy users would start using them instead of communities on other instances. That means those communities would shrink and may even die off entirely. When Facebook cuts off ActivityPub support, that'll leave us with several small or abandoned communities. So we'd end up with a smaller userbase and fewer active communities.
We are all here because we don’t want to be a part of a corporate controlled social platform. Threads theoretically making it more difficult to communicate with their users - something we can’t do at all today - is not going to suddenly change our minds.
If your friends are on Threads now and you’re on Activity Pub then that problem already exists. If they start seeing all sorts of cool content - without any ads - coming from “that Lemmy thing” then yes absolutely a good number will switch. Not all, because some people are lazy, or don’t care, or fearful of different technology, but that’s not going to change just because Threads is federated.
They are different because most users weren't aware of XMPP. They weren't making a conscious choice to use an open standard. The fediverse, on the other hand, has grown specifically because people are seeing the value of an open ecosystem.
When google started removing XMPP support, users weren't aware and didn't care (other than losing contact with a few holdouts). If Meta implements AP support and then removes that support or modifies it so that it breaks some of expectations of the fediverse, most users will move to instances that don't use Meta extensions. Meta can not take your instance or make it use their extensions, so an open fediverse will always exist.
Well that and the story while not "wrong", is definitely hyperbolic. The author even stated after stating that Google killed XMPP that they didn't. So which is it? I'm not a dev, but an avid open source fan. i first tried Linux in 1995. Started using jabber itself in 1999 through Gaim. Later pidgin and psi clients in 2001-2. There were a ton of problems beyond Google. As far as clients were concerned there was no reference version. And there really were no large professionally run servers like mastodon.social or lemmy.world. People, myself included put too much hope in the Google basket. It was a massive unearned win in user count. That was just as easily lost. And kept people from focusing on the core service. Yes Google was never a good steward. Corporations never are. But the lack of official clients and servers, plus their decision to persue IETF standardization had as big or bigger impact on the services development and adoption.
The moral of the story isn't that Google or anyone else can kill an open source project. Microsoft Google and many more have tried and failed. The moral is that we shouldn't cater to them or give them special treatment. They aren't the key to success.