This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance
The X in Xmpp is for extensible. I find issue that a protocol that is supposed to be extensible was killed by being extended.
Can anyone with expertise explain the structural difference between Matrix and XMPP?
Great post by Ploum. Really sheds some light on how vicious these things can be and how federation will have to really push for openness and freedom.
BBS were so much fun back then. We had a local one in South Florida where we would all get on and we would have meet ups on weekends so we could talk in person and hang out. I used to log on with a 2400 baud modem which I upgraded to a 14k myself. It felt so fast at the time. I also would get on the telnet talkers and Irc to meet folks. I was a shy awkward teenager back then so meeting people on those services was great.
Back when AOL started getting popular my friends and I would hoard those installation disks so we could make new accounts when we needed to. Back then they would actually charge per hour to be online. We would use credit card generator programs to get online for free until they caught us and we had to make new accounts. Once AOL went unlimited it was a game changer. The bad part was it was hard getting on due to everyone jumping on.
I was interested until he brought up that matrix was just a reinvention of an existing idea. no, xmpp cannot do everything that matrix can. have you ever tried getting consistency of history in xmpp? it’s absolute garbage. his warnings about the fediverse are on point though. I do wonder if matrix will end up suffering the same fate when Reddit offers to federate with them. The matrix protocol is already brittle as it is, and compatibility even between good faith implementations of existing servers is hard.
