I’ve been hearing that Meta (Facebook) intends to join the fediverse. I have some very big concerns about that, as do apparently many others. There exists a group of instances called the fedipact which will not be federating with Meta, and I was wondering if this instance would be joining. So there is no ambiguity with this post: I have no desire to participate in any instance that is federated with Facebook, and will kindly pass on another Eternal September. Hope that doesn’t come off as aggressive, that’s just where I’m at.
I’m curious what the downside of being federated with an Instance run by Meta is? By federating with the network, Meta won’t miraculously gain some authoritarian control over the entire thing. In fact federating with Meta may well provide the largest opportunity ever to bring new users over to sites like Lemmy and Mastodon by way of exposing them to the potential perks of those sites over Thread.
I’m reading that Google chose XMPP to their Google Talk product, then later decided to drop the support of Google Talk in favor of Google Hangouts that wasn’t using XMPP. This affected Google Talk users who were using 3rd party clients to use Google Talk as they were forced to start using bloated Google Hangouts. But how did all this affect people using XMPP protocol for other than Google Talk?
I’m also seeing potential for growth here for services using activitypub, mainly for the microblogging service Mastodon, as that’s apparently a similar platform to Threads, or the other new player BlueSky, which also is going to use activitypub protocol.
I’m not a microblogger, but I’m seeing and clicking links to interesting tweets on chatrooms and websites I visit, and if they are going to be appearing through threads or bluesky in the future, and I am able to view them without having to access a bloated threads or bluesky app/website I see it as a good thing. If they one day defederate from mastodon instances for example and I can’t view them from the outside anymore, it sounds like it’s what happened with Google, then it’s just back to where it was before they came along, unless the whole show managed to draw people from mastodon (mostly) to threads/bluesky which I doubt.
I don’t know the exact details, But apparently, Google implemented xmpp wrong (possibly maliciously?) in a way where Google Talk users could see other xmpp servers’ content but those servers users could not see Google Talk content. Which meant that Google forced the Libre servers into obsolescence.
But how did all this affect people using XMPP protocol for other than Google Talk?
Google had custom patches to their XMPP implementation. In theory, every XMPP user can talk to every Google user now. In practice, this wasn’t true. Google eventually abandoned XMPP, but that left a sore feeling in the XMPP user base. Basically, people felt like “XMPP just doesn’t work, it’s s*it”. If you’re coder, you’d know that’s not true, but not everyone is, so it basically left XMPP with a bad name.
In short, XMPP would have been much better off if Google never laid hands on it. Now, no one want’s to touch the code base to actually make a better version, cuz then you’d have to write in the readme that it’s based on XMPP, and again, no one will wanna touch it. That’s why people are reinventing the weel about many of these technologies, because no one wants to take on burden that XMPP carries with it.
I’m also seeing potential for growth here for services using activitypub, mainly for the microblogging service Mastodon, as that’s apparently a similar platform to Threads, or the other new player BlueSky, which also is going to use activitypub protocol.
Take a look at the telemetries Threads gathers and everything becomes evident. You’re signing away your privacy basically. I wouldn’t wanna be near that thing if it was the last social media platform on earth.
I still use XMPP regularly to this day. It exists and is even a standard now. Whether or not Google uses it. One of the smaller virtual world services that I use has an XMPP backend to allow you to receive and send instant messages into their grid even when you aren’t officially logged in.
Not to sound elitist but one of the main reasons I want nothing to do with it is the almost guaranteed influx of normies and casuals. Additionally, Meta does not want to see the fediverse or any other social network grow, they want everyone to use their network and pay them.
I must say, your first reason is kind of asshole, I can understand wanting some communities to remain niche to an extent, but for the whole service just because casuals would join… I don’t know, it feels like useless gatekeeping, especially if those people were still bringing content.
They will have the money to run more bigger faster severs. The risk is the majority start to use those severs as home, then communities end up there, then Facebook end up controlling the communities.
So the threat is Meta offering a better service that draws a user base? Is that flexibility not the entire thesis of fediverse platforms?
Further, if Meta is able to provide a service that users see as so fundamentally better, then they should get a large portion of the population. That’s the nature of a competitive market.
That is the “embrace” part of embrace, extend, extinguish. It is great at first, but once they have that base all in one place it will be monetized and there will be none of the smaller sites left.
