vacuumflower
Living in Russia, I have mixed feelings about this slow controlled collapse TBF.
For Russia itself, maybe things being over after a couple of months (or years) of civil war starting in 1999 would be better.
But for everybody else, of course, there are bigger risks associated with that. Not really something nuclear even, just economically less pleasant.
Well, what this article says is relevant for a small subset of “geeks” when ICQ (or AIM etc) was dying, but many people still used it and similar services, so a simple IM of this kind was still accepted as normal, thus XMPP as the alternative.
Normies (like me) were mostly on Skype or between ICQ (or AIM etc) and Skype. That is, that move to Skype was often spearheaded by “geeks”, after it was mostly over the more conservative people were “geeks” too, as it always happens.
Frankly I’d say what hurt XMPP most was its adoption by various social networks being advertised as a selling point. Like “look, it’s a universal protocol, Google has it, Facebook has it, even ICQ had an undocumented XMPP endpoint for some periods of time when they were playing with it, … <I can add 2 Russian search and email providers and 1 social network to this list, and possibly plenty others> …”.
So when those big proprietary services just decided they don’t want it, what’s described in the article happened. Basically XMPP enthusiasts made their bed and had to sleep in it. Only it shouldn’t have. Many “geeks” of that time were uncritically in awe of Google and Facebook etc, we seem to start forgetting this. People would defend dropping XMPP by them, would hope that these companies together would make some other universal protocol, make up all sorts of unbelievable bullshit to believe that all these companies are cool and big and making future.
Well, many Chinese and Japanese plainly consider all non-Asians (and many Asians) savages. Racism is normalized there. Hierarchical centralized clan-based societies and thus certain lack of agility in social ties and traditions.
I mean, they are not much more racist that Middle-Eastern people. Just the Middle-East is (I know this may sound funny) socially more progressive in many places.
I am sad for XMPP, but Google and others adopting it and then shutting down their services were not the reason.
Skype is. It was proprietary, but so good that using anything else just didn’t make sense.
I still remember using the old Skype as something unearthly easy and pleasant.
It was as lightweight as some lean XMPP or ICQ client, but without (or at least I don’t remember them) text encoding problems, with fast file transfers, VoIP usable on bad channels, convenient GUI, user directory (just like ICQ, only XMPP didn’t have that feature).
Now, it was a centralized service, but this was happening simultaneously to ICQ dying due to lame attempts at banning alternative clients, so the morale of depending on such a thing didn’t quite settle in people’s heads.
I mean, ICQ (or AIM, or whatever) UINs (or IDs, or whatever) were for many people their main ID in the Internet, a bit like mobile phone number. It all seemed eternal.
EDIT: Though the general idea of not federating with big proprietary services which do not behave well is solid. Sort of like many of Usenet servers do. Ah, well, Usenet itself is not that much alive.
Nobody and nothing living forever is one of the reasons centralization is bad. But humans sadly like to flock.
RH is approaching the end of its life cycle. First they were hackers. Then they became a useful and aspiring business. Then RPM-based distributions were what made Linux not marginal anymore (though probably this also has something to do with Mandrake’s success). Then they became something in the center of things, connected to everything happening with Linux and other Unix-like systems (at least on desktop). Then they realized that and started milking that slowly. Then they became arrogant.
That quote seems more like Usenet. But yes.
Would be nice to have the same identity for Lemmy, XMPP, Diaspora and whatever else.
A good thing in general, maybe this will help improve compatibility with old stuff and its old bugs, cause it’ll be simpler to emulate those bugs with cleaner code.
BTW, has anyone managed to run Rogue Squadron 3D under Wine? I’m just interested, I’m having that menu input bug not allowing to do anything.
I came to Reddit in 2019, it felt nice then (avoided anything but tech discussions, though). Since 2020 it has been consistently getting worse, maybe before that too.
Anyway, centralization is bad. I’m not coming back.
As others have said, lack of privacy is what makes BitTorrent not the best tool.
Other things may be inconvenient (like good old XDCC or using Google Disk for piracy), or “invisible Joe” (like ed2k, gnutella and Usenet, due to all of these just not being sufficiently monitored by law enforcement or neighbors interested in your porn taste) cases.
And Freenet, I2P (with iMule and what else there is, there was some sharing thing similar to ed2k in experience), RetroShare are not sufficiently popular.
In general good things are not popular.
My point is, let’s wait for Locutus and whether it succeeds in transforming the Web.