more meta (embrace, extend, extinguish)
I'm seeing some Embrace, Extend, Extinguish hand wringing circulate this morning.
I don't want to write another blog post, folks won't stop boosting the last one.
So it's post time. I'll keep it brief.
If Google, or some other big player, shows up in this space, retro.social will defederate immediately.
Before any worrying signs, before any extensions to the standard.
I'll defederate and move on with my life.
M.S is already too big. I already have them silenced instance wide. If any existing player tries to join in with bluster, they'll find themselves banned here (and, I imagine, across 90% of the small instances.)
They still can't stop me from running my own mail server, even if they mark most of my outgoing mail as spam.
So, at the least, we're not going anywhere.
re: more meta (embrace, extend, extinguish)
re: more meta (embrace, extend, extinguish)
re: more meta (embrace, extend, extinguish)
@probgoblin @ajroach42 It's going to depend heavily on the culture - a federated system alone is not enough.
What killed XMPP, for example, was not just Google adopting it for GTalk, but that being lauded by much of the community as "XMPP is mainstream now!", resulting in people using GTalk to chat on XMPP because it was the most usable/accessible client, and so once GTalk got deprecated, that pretty much instantly killed the whole network.
The two crucial errors there were a) Google was accepted as a desirable network participant, and b) non-Google clients were insufficiently accessible. As long as those mistakes are avoided, fedi does stand a good chance of surviving EEE.
re: more meta (embrace, extend, extinguish)
@probgoblin @ajroach42 Oh, believe me, I've talked XMPP's folks ears off for years about the poor UX and how that was harming adoption.
But no, that definitely wasn't the only reason - it was already dead (for its intended purpose) before Discord and such showed up on the scene, just the 'UX delta' with proprietary platforms has been steadily increasing ever since.
The two issues feed into each other, really; bad UX was a problem from the start, and that's what allowed GTalk to become popular as an XMPP client very quickly, being actually reasonably usable.
But the other way around, Google tearing a large strip off the network has significantly cut down on the amount of people that *could* have been fixing the UX, and led to some problematic "outcast" internal community dynamics further preventing it from improving...
So by now it is all miles removed from the 'state of the art', and community inertia means that it'll probably remain that way forever, despite a handful of clients trying to be better :/
re: more meta (embrace, extend, extinguish)
I feel like Google proved the protocol could be used at scale for enterprise level stuff, which got Zoom, Cisco, Grindr, WhatsApp and others to make use of it and then the FOSS side of the equation looked at that adoption and decided to crank out software that looks like it would be at home on Windows 98.
XMPP is one of those interesting cases where if it held on a little longer it may have had a revival (and still may with Matrix breathing some life into the messaging space) if crowd funding was a thing and they could make a good case on why you want to use XMPP, through a modern looking/behaving app, over Discord.
We tend to forget people value usability over principles.