XMPP was always a bit weird for my taste and I doubt it would ever take off, but yea the idea was solid for the time.

And so, the comparison is apt. Facebook and other shit company cannot enter Fediverse, or they’ll destroy it. And I don’t mean just spoil it or poison it with some toxic users, no, I mean they will literally destroy it, or at least make it unusable to the degree that everyone will be forced out (some possibly transferring to the Facebook cesspit).

We’ve seen it time and time and again and again. People with the “wait and see” approach need only to look into the past, on the absolute wasteland of well-meaning open projects strangled by corporations.

That’s not even getting into the principal differences of approach even if it was somehow in good faith. Like how do you reconcile Facebook’s real name policy or WhatsApp’s reliance on phone numbers and data harvesting with something like Lemmy? This is fucking absurd.

Btw I get annoyed when people say there were no smartphones in 2005.

I would totally let them federate and then blanket ban them all. Seriously, don’t even let their content sync on instances like world (not worth hosting costs). This way the fediverse gets to consider all Facebook users as part of its own user count and I don’t have to see their garbage. We can have our cake and eat it.

Easy. Create a The_Donald or other controversial community on each of the bigger instances. Leftifts will go crazy with defederation and ultimately ruin it.

XMPP had one big problem - it was crap. It was crap on a protocol level, it was crap on app level. Everything about XMPP was crap. And I still don’t understand why Google was even using it. XMPP was a still born abomination and I’m glad it’s dead.

So Google created a chat client (Google Talk) based on XMPP, a federated protocol, and supported the standard until most people were using Google Talk instead of other XMPP clients. They then captured the lions share of XMPP chat usage, stopped caring about keeping up with XMPP developments, defederated and thus killed any interest in others maintaining a decentralized federated protocol for chat.

Years later, Twitter takes a dump on its users and everyone moves to other platforms including Mastodon, a decentralized federated microblogging platform. Meta announces that they are working to become fediverse compatible. The danger is that many people using other platforms including Mastodon will begin using Meta instead, and over time Meta, with the lion’s share of fediverse users, will defederate and kill the fediverse.

I’d say I seriously doubt this could happen, but it already has.

That was a great read. ICQ…man that takes me back. How do we let someone make money off the Fidiverse, without giving them any control? I’m new here but I am excited about the possibilities. Internet the way it was supposed to be. Still, it will never be the platform I want, without some investment. Who’s going to invest? Will it be an open, crowd-souce volunteer system? Will that ever make it good enough?