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tsuujin

Have we leaned nothing from XMPP?

If Meta comes in now it’s far more likely that it isn’t going to enhance ActivityPub, it’s going to eat it.

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Here is a summary of what happened:

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo...

And honestly, the article this submission is about, is pretty weak.

> I don’t worry about Meta embracing ActivityPub and then extinguishing the fediverse as we know it.

"I don't worry" is not a very convincing argument.

Here's another "summary of what happened" vis-a-vis XMPP: niche protocol is still niche after big player enters and, eventually, exists the space.

XMPP is doing fine, and ActivityPub will be doing fine after Meta. People crying end of the world for them are just using different - and wrong IMHO - metrics for what "dead" means.

I want to be able to use Mastodon to talk to as many people as possible. I'm really failing to see how that's a bad thing. I'm not going to stop using Mastodon.

That was the brief glory of XMPP ("Jabber") mentioned above. There was a couple years where you had nearly every Gmail user and Facebook user (and more) available in the IM client of your choice via XMPP, and then the "next day" where everyone was gone, XMPP was a ghost town and declared "dead" and you again needed separate apps to talk to "Google friends" versus "Facebook friends" versus the other two nerds that even knew what XMPP was in the first place and were too strong advocates of open standards to install new apps. Sure, it was mostly just the three of you that knew what was lost when you had to install new apps when XMPP "died", but it was clear what murdered it was the dozen or so friends that used XMPP before all that but "chose a side" and were now "Google friends" or "Facebook friends".

You may not plan to leave Mastodon, but there's lots of people "just waiting on that Bluesky invite" or "I'd prefer to use Facebook if they supported ActivityPub" and there is a real fear that "everyone" will choose sides again and the sides won't really include Mastodon because Mastodon doesn't have a marketing budget and Mastodon isn't "cool" and Mastodon is "too nerdy".

We can't say for sure that it would happen again that way, but it is dark reminder that it happened once in a big way and that some of the same culprits were there when it happened.

> "I'd prefer to use Facebook if they supported ActivityPub"

This seems a very unlikely thing. The relatively few people on Earth who might say that seem unlikely to say it.

To be fair, Facebook never federated with XMPP. They just allowed you to use a XMPP client to log into their own network for a while.

Google did though, and pulled the described bait-and-switch when depreciating Google Talk in favor of Hangouts (remember those?).

> Google did though, and pulled the described bait-and-switch when depreciating Google Talk in favor of Hangouts (remember those?).

I feel like this really backfired for Google though! Hangouts does not have a large user base, at least relative to Google's scale.

Isn't Hangouts dead now? I though Google's new thing was "Meet".

Last I heard Meet is dead and there is a new Hangouts which is a rebranded Allo with zombie chunks of Meet, I think?

I feel like every description of Google's chat application strategy ends with the punchline, "The Aristocrats!"

> I feel like this really backfired for Google though!

Yeah, it did. They handled it really bad. From my experience, back in the Google Talk days I could easily reach my family, friends and people at work via XMPP just because Gmail integration was excellent - no indoctrination required, they were already there checking their e-mails. Once Google forced the switch to Hangouts, it sadly became easier to reach them via Facebook. Nobody really cared to use Hangouts anymore, especially when people started to switch from PCs to smartphones where Hangouts wasn't integrated into Gmail at all, and XMPP defederation meant that I didn't have any reason to stay there either.

>I want to be able to use Mastodon to talk to as many people as possible.

Have you seen Facebook lately? It's basically the place where all the boomers that watch Fox News shitpost

I rather mastodon have the barrier to entry for the lowest common denominator

My feed is filled with leftivists who come on every 6 months to post if facebook continues to do x they will boycott. Next issue rinse and repeat. I thought they were boycotting..

> Have you seen Facebook lately? It's basically the place where all the boomers that watch Fox News shitpost

So don't follow those people.

> Have we leaned nothing from XMPP?

Hopefully we've learnt that a) "everything is an extension" is a terrible way to design a protocol b) a protocol can be bad enough to destroy everything built on it.

Finally someone sharing my views on XMPP. I can’t believe how many apologists XMPP has given how terrible it is as a protocol.

Hahah, that is probably the one lesson that ActivityPub has NOT learned from XMPP.

ActivityPub can support new vocabulary through an extension mechanism based on JSON-LD, and I honestly am curious to see where serious efforts in this direction will take us. So far only the group interested in code forges were doing any extension work, but I haven't tracked them closely.

Nobody learned anything from the original "Eternal September" and this is much worse a prospect than that.

if any system/protocol/platform what have you can't withstand someone like Meta coming in you're going to get eaten anyway, it's just survival of the fittest. Either the ActivityPub network is robust enough to accommodate Meta and retain its features or it isn't.

If it isn't then it's a waste of time and someone needs to write a protocol that's more hostile to takeover in its very design, but I don't see what the point of haphazardly blocking FB does or relying on someone not being evil.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Protocols should encode "legal preambles" in their handshakes that forbid unilateral extensions, eg.

  > SYN 
  < SYN ACK

  > GET / 
  < HTTP/2 200

could become,

  > PROTOCOL/v1 HELLO
  < PROTOCOL/v1 ACK
  > I-AGREE-TO-TERMS https://open-protocols-or-something.org/protocol-name/v1
  < I-AGREE-TO-TERMS https://open-protocols-or-something.org/protocol-name/v2

Breaking the rules could hold the company liable, and not including the contract in the protocol preamble or handshake renders talking impossible.

In this case, more like Embrace, Extend, Exsanguinate.

Exsanguinate is actually an interesting way to phrase it for this type of take over. Much like with Jabber, Meta would never aim to acquire competitors out of business. They'll just try to grow enough domestic traffic that they can break compatibility with Mastadon and gain full control over the protocol. Exsanguinate feels like a more accurate term for this sort of a parasitic take over.

Oh God, that's horrifying. I'm also surprised it hasn't happened... although technically it has, with all websites saying "by registering you agree to this unbearably long and confusing terms of usage document that we know you're not going to read".

> Oh God, that's horrifying.

The legal terms would be for corporations, developers, and implementers, not end users.

We might have had open, interoperable chat today had we done something like this to protect our protocols.

If email and HTTP had been developed much later (ie. in the 2000s), we'd probably have unilateral corporate control of those protocols too. And by god, Google is certainly trying.

Yes. Most users moved to smartphones and XMPP didn't work well on them.

Personally, I think it'd be kinda neat to meet Zuckerberg. Not that I admire the guy, but I'll have a cool story to tell about how he came to my house and smashed all my laptops to extinguish my activitypub code.

this happens on the simpsons, but it's bill gates not mark zuckerberg

bill shows up with a couple 'assistants' to 'buy' homer's 'internet business', and when homer takes the deal the 'assistants' immediately start smashing and breaking random stuff.

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