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) 

@ajroach42
I'm still not getting the hand wringing over this. The Fediverse survived the transation from one open standard to another (Ostatus to ActivityPub) and the only "threat" on the horizon is Blue Sky, which has so far released nothing of substance and made it clear that it won't play nice with ActivityPub which means it's dead in the water (and this isn't even getting into the technical challenges of what Jack wants to do, which are... significant).
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re: more meta (embrace, extend, extinguish) 

@ajroach42
EEE only really works if the extender is willing to foot the bill which, unless Google/Microsoft/Whoever is willing to offer a service like Mastohost for free, it will still require instance operators to **want** to switch to or set up their software and uh... that's not going to be wildly popular opinion for the people who would be doing so.

I mean, hell, right now I'm seeing people trying to figure out how to get off AWS/RDS and move to a less evil data storage option. The federated model seems like it's naturally resilient to big players because, at the end of the day, it requires someone to actually spin up and manage an instance, so their target market likely *hates* them.
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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) 

@joepie91 @ajroach42
XMPP is "dead" in the same way IRC is, in that it's used as the back end of some very large and important services that are (usually) defederated and run behind custom clients.

What killed XMPP on the consumer side wasn't Google adopting and abandoning it, it was that there was almost no effort in updating the clients to provide a modern user experience while Discord had tons of venture capital thrown at it to do just that.

Mastodon, Pleroma, PixelFed, et. al all look and function, for FOSS, pretty dang slick and mostly acceptable by 202x standards.
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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 :/

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re: more meta (embrace, extend, extinguish) 

@joepie91 @ajroach42
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.
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