How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
ploum.net
This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance
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What's missing from the article is an actual explanation of how Google "killed" xmpp. Did google force the independent XMPP client developers to not implement cool features or something? Is meta going to buy up and shut down all the independent mastodon instances?
If the problem is that Facebook might develop a superior UX, maybe the fediverse should work on a better UX instead of screaming about some scary boogeyman and how the users are too dumb to know any better?
google added things that only they knew about, which broke the other XMPP apps, driving people to install google talk instead. Sure, eventually people figured their shenanigans out and their apps started working again but the damage was done. Repeat that a few times so that most people were using google talk, then flip the switch and everything that's not google talk was basically a ghost town. People don't stick around in ghost towns
If Google can add stuff to the protocol that breaks other clients, that sounds like a bug with the protocol more than anything. Why was that even allowed