It’s easier to get involved on smaller communities about stuff that interest you than big, generic communities. I hope now that lemmy is starting to grow more and more, we’ll see more of the former.

You’d still be classified as a lurker if you comment and post rarely.

Honestly, users that can’t be bothered to check and subscribe to all knitting communities (which is really easy) will be snatched away from the first corporate alternative with more polish.

Open source applications rarely beat corporate ones in polish and ease of use; these aren’t the battles we have to fight. Lemmy is already near identical to reddit once you sign up and subscribe to the communities that interest you.

I never argued that Google helped XMPP, I’m arguing that it isn’t applicable to the “extend, embrace, extinguish” crap that people keep parroting

I can agree to that. Does Facebook want to join the fediverse with the sole reason to kill it? Probably not – but the fediverse stands to gain little to nothing from their involvement, so we should be as vigilant as possible with them. If the result from that is that some people end up believing that Meta’s out to EEE the fediverse then eh, whatever.

I don’t have plans to visit other instances, manage multiple credentials. Either I get to see it all from one place. Or these other places will functionally but exist for me.

You don’t have to manage multiple credentials. You can visit and subscribe to /c/knitting on another instance as long as your instance is not blocking it, or blocked by it.

If I subscribe to /c/knitting I mean I want every /c/knitting on every single instance in existence.

Would you? The point of having multiple instances is that /c/knitting@gaming.lemmy will be mostly about knits inspired by gaming, /c/knitting@memes.lemmy will be mostly about knits inspired by memes and so on. You may not want all of them. This is a bit of a stretched argument, but I want to showcase an example where fragmenting communities on a per server basis can be useful.

I know that for generic communities or hobbies it can be annoying, but it isn’t that hard to find the largest /c/knitting and subscribe to that, no matter the instance. Reddit’s centralized approach is more convenient, but we’ve seen the price we have to pay for that convenience.

You’re missing the point of having a decentralized network. As long as people are allowed to spin up their own instance, duplicate communities are bound to exist. You can view both of them or choose which one you prefer.

What you describe is a big problem for generic communities such as YouShouldKnow, NoStupidQuestions etc and even hobbies where most of the people practicing them aren’t good with tech.

For more niche stuff Lemmy works better because if you want to talk about, say, communism you can go to lemmygrad.ml and instantly get a front page with communities about communism. If Lemmy continues to grow I expect we’ll see more themed instances pop up (e.g. about gaming, technology, fitness) and Lemmy’s advantages over Reddit will be seen more clearly.

Agree with everything except the tracking; that’s got to be built into it since day one, unless they didn’t manage to hit their harvesting goals by the stated release date, which they want to hit in order to compete with twitter asap

Can you explain how Google helped XMPP even in the slightest way? Because that’s what I’m arguing against.

The only thing I can come up with is the increased popularity, which is shaky because tech-naive users wouldn’t know or care about Google Talk’s underlying protocol. Also, considering the rest of what Google did with XMPP, like making it hard for their servers to be interoperable with others, or their slow adoption of new features, it’s clear to me that Google getting involved was a net negative for XMPP. I don’t think I’m assuming anything to arrive on that conclusion.

Talking about any alternative scenario is always speculation, but I believe the “How to kill decentralized networks” post that’s been going around lately puts it nicely:

One thing is sure: if Google had not joined, XMPP would not be worse than it is today.

It’s true that instances don’t need to grow exponentially (or at all), but most mods/admins want to maintain their community and not see it dwindle down to nothing. People used to interacting with instances run by Facebook or other corporations (which most of their friends or family will use) might get upset if the federation link with them gets severed. If they do, they’ll either pressure the instance admin to comply with the corporations and federate with them again, or switch to the corporations’ instances. Both of these scenarios are bad for the future of the fediverse.

The classic enshittification story.

How is it different than Twitter or Mastodon?

How convoluted the protocol is doesn’t really matter as long as someone creates an easy tool to spin up your own server.

I think the XMPP comparison stills stands: Google was able to steer how the protocol developed, or which version of the protocol people used because they had the majority of the users and other servers wanted to still be able to interact with them.

Suppose that Facebook joins the fediverse and most large instances federate with them. All is great, then Facebook starts to make demands to other instances in order to keep federating with them, e.g. no posts about protests. Because a large share of ActivityPub activity will be on Threads, naive users would prefer instances that federate with it, so instance mods will be incentivized to comply with Facebook’s demands to attract new users and maintain their current one and… you see where this is going. The only way to deal with this is to deny Facebook this kind of leverage in the first place, either by blocking them instantly or at their first mishap or demand.

That’s the problem though. If XMPP had grew organically then it would fare much better. With how it happened, XMPP’s growth was mostly because of Google, and that put a lot of pressure to other servers and the protocol’s development to cater to them, because they had the majority of the users in their platform.

If they don’t give a shit about the fediverse why do they want to join it? Only Facebook can win from this.