• 2 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Back in the day, like many people then, I had a couple of different accounts across multiple messaging platforms. 2 domestic ones, couple of international ones. It was a fun mess but people were tired of running multiple apps and so loads of multi-protocol apps were developed.

    Usually messaging protocols were simply reverse engineered and some apps also used plug-ins so that niche protocols could be added by community. Some also did gateways that translated proprietary protocols to XMPP.

    By the end of that era many platforms opened themselves up with XMPP. It was nice because most of those multi-protocol apps didn’t have to support as many different platforms explicitly.

    But that’s about it. I had a Google Talk account too and found it cute that I can use it to add my friends on other platforms. I was a nerdbut barely knew any other people that were utilizing it. Realistically it didn’t make any difference because you still had to use multi-protocol app for the ones that didn’t open.

    Soon platforms that were never on or barely on XMPP started to take over. Messenger was the biggest in my country and it was always a PITA on third party apps.

    Google Talk doing a rug pull on XMPP didn’t to anything meaningful to XMPP itself. It was never that big and simply remains a niche to this day.

    I too get an impression that a single article on XMPP Gtalk drama made round on Fediverse that many made their opinion solely on it.


  • I don’t think Mastodon allows user blocking instance either but I don’t see why that can not change in the future.

    I’m not sure forcing open source on other instances is the right way to go. I imagine that in the future there could be instances that offer more polished experience, maybe a really nice proprietary app, that are commercially funded. As long as we have open alternatives and interoperability then we should be fine. In terms of privacy it’s a matter of regulations.

    I also fully respect choice of some instances to defederate from commercial platforms but in a rational environment it would be akin to subset of Linux users opting to use free software only with no binary blobs and things like that. Perfectly reasonable thing to do if that’s what your ethics / philosophy dictates. Just don’t think it’s something that is a net benefit to average person.


  • Embrace, extend, extinguish.

    Embrace an open standard by using it yourself, start extending it at a pace competitors can’t (preferably obfuscating how it works), leave everyone behind.

    A good example is Microsoft Internet Explorer back in the day. Web technologies like HTML and CSS are open standards and at the time fairly straightforward. Once Microsoft hit critical mass by bundling IE with Windows they took leadership from Netscape and started adding more and more proprietary crap like ActiveX which some sites opted to use because everyone was using IE anyway and people using other browsers were forced to use IE. This was also a major issue for Linux users at the time.

    It took years of regulatory / antitrust pressure, tremendous effort from Mozilla and their browsers, as well as big players like Google and Apple embracing KHTML (later forked into WebKit and then Blink engines) to unscrew humanity from that depressing era of internet history.

    Web browsers working slightly differently is still an issue without anyone breaking compatibility on purpose. It was just so much worse when someone did it maliciously.



  • So many knee-jerk reactions.

    This is an open protocol with complete freedom to create apps and scripts. If this becomes an issue users could block certain interactions in a granular manner, for example block replies from certain instances.

    XMPP being thrown around as an example makes me think people who do it weren’t there to witness it. XMPP by itself wasn’t really used by many but there were also many more popular messaging platforms at the time. XMPP wasn’t killed because it wasn’t ever alive other than short golden era when it was mostly a way to open itself to third party clients (Gaim, Trillian, Adium etc) which was very nice.

    Next year EU is going to make all tech giants open in this way again. Mastodon can EEE Threads too by being a better implementation. It has no commercial pressure and Activity Pub and formatting tweets is not as complex as a web browser engine or a word processor document format which are way better examples of successful EEE.

    If you defederate you’ll end up exactly where XMPP is.







  • I knew this part would ruffle some feathers since whomever is reading it here is probably on board with Lemmy/Kbin.

    I do think that for many it’s too early but there’s now significant interest into making everything a bit more stable and streamlined. I think Mastodon is already there but it is suffering from bad rep from their own waves of migration. I’m a bit worried it’ll be the same for Lemmy.