this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Sometimes the only winning move is not to play. If people hadn't federated with google's XMPP back in the day, google wouldn't have had the same level of control it had to kill XMPP as a competitor.
We need to learn from the lessons of the past, and the past has resulted in the deaths of services when federating with corporations.
"We should debate them... And defeat them on the Marketplace of Ideas." Yeah, right.
I never said defeating them or out competing them should be the goal. The goal should be the survival of services. And corporations will kill these services.
I don't disagree with needing to not repeat past mistakes.
Hate to burst your bubble, but no-one was actually using XMPP with Google Talk except for open-source tech nerds.
And google stopped any chances of that ever happening. The Fediverse should just let itself grow gradually and naturally, as should have XMPP
How so? I don't see the EEE in Google discontinuing XMPP support tbh.
They piggy backed on rapidly growing XMPP and then became lazy with keeping compatible with the rest of the xmpp federation and at some point the s2s connection stopped being feasible as they never implemented TLS for it, and did't really care as most xmpp users were on their server anyways and thus did't use the s2s connection.
Its not a typical nefarious EEE story, but it did a lot of damage to the xmpp federation anyways.
This predates Google Talk and is rather about the XMPP Gmail integration. Back then XMPP was the hot topic in tech circles (Twitter was even prototyped to be XMPP based) and people were switching to it and recommending it to others to replace ICQ/MSN/AIM etc. However, often they recommended others to use the Google XMPP service as back then Google was still naively seen as the "Do no evil" good guy, having just started up recently and giving away free things like previously unheared off 1GB of email storage etc.
So the situation is not quite comparable to AP and Facebook (and XMPP is far from dead), but it is still possible to draw some lessons from it.
So what?
Means there's no incentive for Google to support it.
Then why did they once support XMPP?
Probably to experiment with it, or maybe it was a good idea back then. Definitely not to extinguish it lol
So it's just a coincidence that they ended up killing their competitors? Yeah right.
XMPP was never killed the way Netscape was by Microsoft lmao