Yeah I kept thinking these people must be incredibly young if they think this is what happened. As if Google Talk was anyone’s problem (in the big picture), nevermind XMPP’s.
Comment on How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
MudMan@kbin.social 11 months ago
Man, I'm not gonna relitigate this but no, Google Talk didn't kill XMPP. XMPP is not, in fact, dead. WhatsApp killed Google Talk and pretty much every other competitor and XMPP would have been in that boat with or without Google Talk.
This is gonna keep coming up, it's gonna keep being wrong and I'm really not gonna bother picking this fight each and every single time.
Carighan@lemmy.world 11 months ago
lily33@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Well, people like to think that the fediverse is a genuine threat to Meta. And they like to feel they’re doing important work defending it from Meta. So this will indeed pop up again, and again, and again.
MudMan@kbin.social 11 months ago
They do? I mean, a few times I did have to point out that Meta has multiple products breaking 2 billion active users, so the "fediverse" is a drop in the ocean, but not many people seem to stick with that argument after a quick bout of googling.
helenslunch@feddit.nl 10 months ago
I mean I think it will be if they really to end up federating. Why sign up for an ad-ridden data-hoarding service when you can use services that don’t have that nonsense but still allows you to do all the things you want to do on social media?
Crashumbc@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Do you REALLY think that will be their end game?
helenslunch@feddit.nl 10 months ago
I don’t know what their endgame is. Maybe you have some better perspective than me?
Do you think they’re dedicating company resources to squash an entire network that makes up like . 001% of market share?
I think most likely the “endgame” is to avoid legal regulation. Something they can point to and say that they have valid competition, and that they’re actively supporting that competition. Which is great.
RTRedreovic@feddit.ch 11 months ago
Did you bother to read the article or did you only decide to write this argument w/o any substantial basis?
MudMan@kbin.social 11 months ago
Oh, I read it when it came out back in June. Many times, as it kept being shared as an explanation of the first Threads backlash.
It's full of incorrect assessments and false equivalences.
Threads doesn't really have the volume (yet) to subsume ActivityPub. The process it describes for standards drifting towards the corporate actor doesn't apply to ActivityPub, whcih is engineered from the ground up to support multiple apps with differnent functionality (hence me writing this in Kbin and others reading it in Lemmy and being able to link it and follow it from Mastodon), the article only acknowledges that XMPP survived and kept on going at the very end as a throaway and doesn't justify how it "never recovered" and, like I said, it doesn't acknowledge the real reasons Talk and every Google successor to Talk struggled and collapsed.
So yes, I read it. Past the headline and everything. I just didn't take it at face value. This piece keeps getting shared because XMPP wasn't ever that big to begin with, so this sounds erudite and informed while the similar arguments being made at the time about SMTP and RSS were more obviously identifiable as being wrong for the same reasons.
sudneo@lemmy.world 11 months ago
which is engineered from the ground up to support multiple apps with differnent functionality (hence me writing this in Kbin and others reading it in Lemmy and being able to link it and follow it from Mastodon)
I mean that’s basically what every protocol is. ActivityPub abstracts concepts, that apps implement in their own way (for example the concept of group). If you manage to deliver changes, even improvements, to the protocol, apps need to keep up and comply with it. This is what means “drifting towards the corporate actor”. I propose changes to the protocol to a rate that only me (the corporate actor) can keep up with. This way only my users will have certain features and eventually some apps will become incompatible with the recent version(s) of the protocol.
MudMan@kbin.social 11 months ago
That is already how ActivityPub apps work.
It's also not what happened to XMPP and, interestingly, not what the article claims happened to XMPP, even. You'll note in the postmortem about it the recollection is that Google was too slow to adopt features and fix bugs, not the other way around.
I guess once you get enough confirmation bias in play you can embrace, expand and extinguish both by doing that and the opposite of that.
amki@feddit.de 10 months ago
It is not. Discord’s protocol has been tailormade to suit Discord and the developers will not give a single thought about keeping it stable because only the Discord server&client are meant to use it.
Sphks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
And Reddit killed phpBB (kind of).
And phpBB killed the newsgroups.
Etc.You are right. Convenience killed the previous “protocol”.
yamanii@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Both you and the writer claim to have been there back then, but have wildly different ideas for what happened… Were you a dev on XMPP too?
MudMan@kbin.social 10 months ago
Oh, absolutely not. Let me be clear, I do not question that the author was involved in the project and interacted with Google. I do not question any of the factual details in the article and my argument is not that he's lying. Total respect for him, his work at the time and even his opinions on how annoying and frustrating it was working with Google around.
What I'm saying is his perspective on the alleged failure of XMPP is specifically biased by his insider experience, that many of the examples he gives do not apply to AP, that the process he describes there is not EEE, that it's not the reason XMPP and Google Talk failed and that, as he admits throughout the piece, XMPP didn't in fact disappear or "die" after Talk's failure or because of their intervention.
amki@feddit.de 10 months ago
An XMPP developer would likely have been delusional about the protocol he himself developed. But at the time I can assure you XMPP was completely irrelevant. AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo! and maybe IRC were the tools of the day back then.
Because of actual competition (which XMPP had absolutely no part in) multi protocol messengers had their golden age then.
Crashumbc@lemmy.world 10 months ago
As a newb techie back then. Using 4 of the ones you listed.
I never heard of XMPP and still don’t know what it was …
Kushan@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This needs to be higher for visibility. The story of Google killing XMPP is a good one but it’s utterly bullshit. XMPP was a mess, Google didn’t kill it, it killed itself by having fucked ecosystem that didn’t do anything better than numerous proprietary standards at the time.
It’s not like XMPP was EVER dominant, nor was Google talk - even man messenger was more popular at the time and that’s also dead.