How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.

With Meta starting to actually implement ActivityPub, I think it would be a good idea to remind everyone of what they are most likely going to do.

  • Pasta Dental@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    This time I don’t think it is an extenguish scenario. I think this is more of a preventative move to one-up the EU on interoperability. They want to be able to say “look how good we are, we already were interoperable for x time!”. But of course this could also not be the case and they might just want to kill the network, but I even find that unlikely. Xmpp isn’t dead in fact I use it every day as my phone number for texts and calls and I quite like it. Super robust, I basically never saw any federation weirdness like you could see on mastodon or Lemmy. So in my eyes xmpp didn’t get killed, they got beat by someone who had ressources and made a better product. And it’s not that I don’t think meta can make a great product that users like, but I kind of think that, especially when the competition exists (xwixxer) compared to basically none for Facebook and Instagram

    • MudMan@kbin.social
      3·
      9 months ago

      Yup. This is pretty much right on the money.

      BlueSky and Threads are looking at interoperable protocols because they a) have engineers at home that think it’s cool, and b) see the writing on the wall about upcoming regulation and want to preempt it. This is probably good for other networks already based on interoperability, but there are definitely a ton of open questions.

      The article is 100% revisionist history written backwards to justify a knee-jerk conclusion and XMPP is indeed not dead. Or not any deader than anybody else that got washed away by WhatsApp winning the messaging wars over the 2010s.

      EDIT: Re-reading my own post, it’s too harsh. The article isn’t “100%” revisionist history, so much as a biased insider account. The revisionist history is largely coming from both the misattribution of what happened to a deliberate move from Google and the fact that it’s being misread and misquoted when people react to it.