Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.
And THIS is why it’s totally sensible to defederate from Meta stuff once they implement ActivityPub in any way.
I feel like the discussion gives google a little bit too much credit for the decline in xmpp popularity. It leaves out the critical context in in how the way people used chat apps changed as we enter the 2010s. Clients like aim, msn yim, google talk and such were replaced by whatsapp, imessenger, telegram, signal, facebook, groupme and etc.
The modern chat ecosystem that took over was one that is based on phone number and phone # contacts list rather than usernames and emails, and they evolved as a next gen style of text messaging. Instead of popping in and out of chats with individuals or groups you’d be always on always connected.
The way people chatted had just shifted. AIM was bigger and more mainstream than google talk was and it had XMPP compatibility, but that didnt really matter because people were chatting differently.
I tend to agree. At some point, open source has to survive attempted corporatization. In the case of multiple large corporations playing in an open-source pool, the GPL functions as a bit of a MAD standoff.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was the origin of the term Embrace, Extend and Extend. MS Explorer is long dead, but Firefox persists. Even with Google starting shenanigans with Chrome, I don’t think they can push it that far.
If an open standard is truly open, then I think you have to accept that corporations are going to come and play, and an open source project needs to be ready to deal with it.
My specific concern in this case though is that Meta already dominates social media so thoroughly, and it would be the only large player in ActivityPub. At the very least, there needs to be a robust defence of maintaining an open standard over adjusting to accommodate Meta. Granted, the Linux kernel has survived years of Microsoft being the #1 contributor to kernel development. There’s even been rumblings about corporate representation on the Linux Foundation. All valid criticisms, but Linux keeps delivering.
Don’t know whether this is already known: https://fedipact.online
Why does commercialized discussions are not considered freedom?
I want to be free to avoid those discussions and not have them forced upon me. Call it freedom from commercialised discussions. It’s not something I want to see or engage with, so I would rather not use a platform with ads and such than tolerate them. If Lemmy becomes ad infested at any point, I’m going to go touch grass instead.
Interesting article, thanks for posting. I’ve used a few Matrix servers that use bridges to Discord and I’ve noticed a similar effect where they’ll occasionally go down for extended periods of time. As nice as the idea is to use Element over Discord it’s a lot easier to stick to the mainstream where people are and technical issues are at a minimum.
I’ll admit this part did go a bit over my head.
What Google did to XMPP was not new. In fact, in 1998, Microsoft engineer Vinod Vallopllil explicitly wrote a text titled “Blunting OSS attacks” where he suggested to “de-commoditize protocols & applications […]. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS project’s entry into the market.”
Microsoft put that theory in practice with the release of Windows 2000 which offered support for the Kerberos security protocol. But that protocol was extended. The specifications of those extensions could be freely downloaded but required to accept a license which forbid you to implement those extensions. As soon as you clicked “OK”, you could not work on any open source version of Kerberos. The goal was explicitly to kill any competing networking project such as Samba.
I’ll admit this part did go a bit over my head.
It’s referring to a strategy more commonly called ‘triple e’ or ‘embrace, extend, extinguish’ pioneered by Microsoft in the late 90’s. The gist of it was that MS would adopt open standards and create proprietary extensions to the standard that were only usable on their platform. This would break the ability of users of non MS software to communicate with those in Microsoft’s ecosystem and push users off those platforms.
Thanks for the response. I was more referring to that specific example. The article talked about Microsoft dealing with word processors and linked that Wikipedia page.
