I was there for that and you’re misremembering. Before Google, hardly anybody used XMPP or knew what it was. Google came, and then you could talk to Google users on XMPP but still regular users didn’t know what XMPP was, and could sometimes be confused why your e-mail was different. Google left, taking their XMPP users with them. XMPP is still XMPP to this day. Every instant messaging service from that era, including Google Talk, has pretty much died out. XMPP might actually be an exception because there were few users before and the relative decrease in users is probably much less than platforms with more memorable names and better advertising.
I used to use XMPP before Google “killed it”, and my story is that before Google had XMPP, I used XMPP gateways to talk to people on other platforms. Google integrated and I started using Google’s XMPP client on my phone because it was much better than any other XMPP client available at the time. Google discontinued XMPP support and I didn’t move back to another server, but it wasn’t because Google had killed XMPP. I don’t know if I ever had any native XMPP contacts, and I didn’t talk to anybody on AIM, MSN, etc anymore, and I still didn’t talk to anybody on native XMPP, so had no reason to use XMPP. I talked to a few people on Google Talk, people who had never used any other XMPP service, and then Google discontinued Google Talk because that era of instant messengers had apparently ended.
This plan to prevent the same thing from happening is really misguided. You can have few users now, few users later, and few users further in the future, or you can have few users now, many users later, and maybe few users again further in the future. People who are on non-Facebook platforms now are very unlikely to decide they like Facebook better and leave later if Facebook federates and then defederates.
The idea of everyone getting together to preemptively defederate Facebook is also very hypocritical. We have a decentralized, open system where anybody can start an instance and we tell people to find an instance with rules and content they like. Then the possibility of Facebook federation starts being talked about and suddenly we don’t want the same rules to apply to Facebook. People want Facebook globally blocked before they get a chance to federate, and primarily out of fear of Facebook the company or prejudice against Facebook users, not because of the technical concerns around scaling. If the rules only apply to small instances with small budgets, what happens if one of the instances starts to get too successful?
I was there for that and you’re misremembering. Before Google, hardly anybody used XMPP or knew what it was. Google came, and then you could talk to Google users on XMPP but still regular users didn’t know what XMPP was, and could sometimes be confused why your e-mail was different. Google left, taking their XMPP users with them. XMPP is still XMPP to this day. Every instant messaging service from that era, including Google Talk, has pretty much died out. XMPP might actually be an exception because there were few users before and the relative decrease in users is probably much less than platforms with more memorable names and better advertising.
I used to use XMPP before Google “killed it”, and my story is that before Google had XMPP, I used XMPP gateways to talk to people on other platforms. Google integrated and I started using Google’s XMPP client on my phone because it was much better than any other XMPP client available at the time. Google discontinued XMPP support and I didn’t move back to another server, but it wasn’t because Google had killed XMPP. I don’t know if I ever had any native XMPP contacts, and I didn’t talk to anybody on AIM, MSN, etc anymore, and I still didn’t talk to anybody on native XMPP, so had no reason to use XMPP. I talked to a few people on Google Talk, people who had never used any other XMPP service, and then Google discontinued Google Talk because that era of instant messengers had apparently ended.
This plan to prevent the same thing from happening is really misguided. You can have few users now, few users later, and few users further in the future, or you can have few users now, many users later, and maybe few users again further in the future. People who are on non-Facebook platforms now are very unlikely to decide they like Facebook better and leave later if Facebook federates and then defederates.
The idea of everyone getting together to preemptively defederate Facebook is also very hypocritical. We have a decentralized, open system where anybody can start an instance and we tell people to find an instance with rules and content they like. Then the possibility of Facebook federation starts being talked about and suddenly we don’t want the same rules to apply to Facebook. People want Facebook globally blocked before they get a chance to federate, and primarily out of fear of Facebook the company or prejudice against Facebook users, not because of the technical concerns around scaling. If the rules only apply to small instances with small budgets, what happens if one of the instances starts to get too successful?