cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/719121

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

  • I think there is one main difference between xmpp and activitypub. A chat protocol gets better the more users it has. So the users were the killer app. xmpp arguably wasn’t much worse off after Google left than before it got there.

    Mastodon is a bit like this, in that lots of users are probably looking for the same type of content from the same users as they got on Twitter.

    kbin/lemmy are a lot less like that. I just need enough people to surface interesting content and have a meaningful conversation. And I’ve already (mostly) got that now. If meta brought all of their users to link sharing it would probably get worse with clout-chasing, organic marketing, and low effort crap.