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Comment by colinsane | Hacker News Reader

> Google has, perhaps, the worst track record for chat clients and for killing their products in general. It’s a real shame how Jabber/XMPP users were effectively “ghosted” by the far more numerous Google Talk userbase, but does this mean that we should ignore any efforts form big companies to support open standards forever now? Weren’t things good while everything did interoperate? Is it absolutely inevitable that Meta is going to do something terrible with ActivityPub?

FB messenger (back when each chat was a pseudo-window at the bottom of the FB screen, and not its own app) also supported XMPP. you can't say (effectively) "i buy the XMPP argument, but this time it's not Google" because the XMPP argument applies equally well to FB.

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But I'm both cases XMPP is still around, if you care for it. Neither Google nor Facebook extended it in a way that broke the protocol when they stopped supporting it.

I look forward to being able to follow my friends who are on threads from my Mastodon account. If in a couple years meta stops supporting it, alas, we had two years.

> But I'm both cases XMPP is still around, if you care for it.

great: then DM me at xmpp:colin@uninsane.org and lets talk more.

if this were 2008, your browser would render that as a link and clicking it would put us in direct contact, because likely than not you'd have an account somewhere. all i want is for that experience again.

but chances are you don't have an XMPP setup anymore, in which case my invitation above is useless. the specific protocol (XMPP, Matrix, Activity Pub ..) is less relevant to this: it's the social experience (and norms) which matters.

today, Activity Pub is growing back into those shoes which XMPP used to occupy. i can drop my handle at the end of a tech-related blog and people do take up the invitation. this year, (ex-)coworkers and IRL friends are actually using it. give it a decade, and maybe that invitation would be familiar even to my parents. 10 years sounds long, until you consider that's about as long as we've been without such a thing already.

and so it's like this: 1) how much credence do you put on that hypothetical future? 2) how much of a risk does FB pose to it? because if you believe we're on a good path, and that FB has even a 20% risk of derailing us from that path, then why risk it?

Around 2008 I was indeed running my own XMPP server for a while. I didn’t give up on it because Google was temporarily-xmpp-compatible-and-then-not though - I gave up on it because all of the apps were terrible :P

Conversations, Cheogram and plenty more have solid user experiences, video calling, and services like jmp.chat provide gateways to other communication platforms.

The Jabber ecosystem has not stood still, it is competitive with other over the top messages and calling options.

They just used it to hijack XMPP users from the federated Jabber network onto their own platform. Google did at least. And that's what Meta is probably going after with Threads, growth using the fediverse userbase. Just say no and defederate it before they screw everything up again. Your next "friends" are going to be ad serving bots powered by AI trained on your feed.

> And that's what Meta is probably going after with Threads, growth using the fediverse userbase

Facebook has 3 billion users, probably 90% of Mastodon users are on one of their services already. The entire Fediverse userbase is not just less than a percent of their userbase, but less than 1-2% of their annual growth, it doesn't even make a dent in the first derivative

It probably doesn't pay for the Threads servers and salary costs if they vacuumed up every last Fediverse user. At the bottom of all these EEE conspiracies is always a completely inflated sense of self

That only proves they can achieve growth without the fediverse, no need to ruin everything they touch for a mere 1 or 2% and fake it for being cool and supporting open standards to get the regulators off their backs. But then it's all about revenue, infinite growth and user data hoarding.

> that's what Meta is probably going after with Threads, growth using the fediverse userbase

This seems like a terrible play given how small the fediverse userbase is.

They are targeting the enthusiasts . Then the enthusiasts do the rest. It's a good tactic.

Sounds like they forgot to do their market studies.

The whole boondoggle is happening because many Fedi instances are ran by those very same enthusiasts. They chose to settle on Fedi for various reasons, and I’m pretty sure Meta transgresses most of those reasons.

Personally, I don’t care too much whether my server federates or not, but I’m a very casual user.

Two federated protocols co-opted by them have a similar story to tell. Email, besides XMPP. Both still work. But both are impractical if you want to selfhost. XMPP lost a huge portion of its users. And the vast majority of email users are on just two providers who either send mails from outside into the spambox or drop it silently. The logical conclusion is to not let these big players on to the federated network if you care about the federated nature or userbase of these networks.

It got much much harder to run an email server because all the hoops that had to be jumped through to reduce spam made it a nightmare. I'm not sure I really blame Google/Microsoft for that.

I have a pretty decent experience on Fastmail and had at one point reasonable experience on Protonmail as well (except that they could never manage to import my enormous 20 year archive of email :D). Most every ISP in the world still offers email, friends and family that have those addresses still manage to get their emails through. There are also plenty of newsletter hosts mail services that don't get dropped or put in spam.

Granted those aren't self-hosting, but these other hosting options just reinforce that it's more a matter of spam prevention than it is evil companies being evil (to be clear, I accept they are evil, and they do evil things all the time).

XMPP never had a strong federated ecosystem of users that existed outside of GChat.

ActivityPub already has a few million users and a thriving federation

Messenger supported XMPP clients but didn't federate with other servers.

This is correct. Messenger never really was XMPP. It just had a client API based off of XMPP. There were a bunch of quriks and no federation. I suspect the idea was just that it provided a starting point for clients.

my memory was just of running Pidgin and being able to reach everyone through it (google, FB, weirdo self-hosters). guess it must have had good multi-accounting support and i was relying on that. i assumed it was using the same code paths for all my contacts, but if not then i guess the "FB used XMPP" point would be almost entirely moot.

I used FB Messenger over XMPP for the last handful of years before it was shut down using Pidgin and I'm pretty sure that's how it worked. You could talk to people on different networks but you needed your own FB account to talk on Messenger and you couldn't do group chats cross-network.

GTalk and self-hosted XMPP could federate and you only needed one account and conversations could span servers.

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