Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse.
If you’re a server admin, please defederate Meta’s domain “threads.net”
If you don’t run your own server, please ask your server admin to defederate “threads.net”.
Yeah dude let’s just federate with an instance maintained by a corporation that has undoubtedly caused a genocide in Myanmar by turning a blind eye to a far-right hate speech group that caused an entire fucking minority to flee into another country.
I don’t get why people are supporting and saying “oh it must be up to the user” like bro this is the company we’re dealing with. Fuck that fuck threads fuck zuckerberg i don’t want his shit cancer near something that’s going well so far.
Israel have been successfully pressuring meta to remove and shadow ban accounts sympathetic to Palestinians. The level of censorship is crazy.
OK, I’ll bite. You got something more substantial than “I read it on the internet” to back that up? One reputable source on your accusation? Not sayin’ you’re lying/wrong, just asking for some verifiable proof.
Numerous actual popular accounts and news sources have been suspended. It was major news in the Arabic-speaking world in October. Meta even apologized for auto-translating Palestinian as “terrorist.”
Hate to say it but that’s a fail on producing a reliable source.
Did you want specific accounts?
Palestinian Shebab News Agency has facebook pages shut down
@Eye.on.palestine on IG suspended by Meta, then back up after a backlash.
#IStandWithPalestine and #FreePalestine getting censored by Facebook
Thanks, that’s much better.
You know, you have access to search engines too. You don’t need to be lazy and treat the rest of the Internet as your personal stenographer/research assistant.
Fucking HELL, despite how increasingly easy it is to find information, it cannot keep pace with just how utterly fucking lazy people are getting.
You don’t have to humor the troll. We all have the internet we are all free to independently verify.
At the moment this is coming from secondary sources from within meta so there are no articles about it that I’m aware of. But Palestinians and activists constantly have their content removed, account reach limited, and comments removed (which has happened to me multiple times). People also have their accounts threatened and removed.
These actions are visible constantly, meta have been doing this since the start. For example, when you go to someone’s stories at the top it might show 4 or 5 stories, but when you click through to their profile there’ll be 20+.
Some people I follow don’t even show up at the top anymore and I have to access their stories via their profile page or if I’ve messaged them recently.
After (as of this reply) eight hours, you have produced nothing more than anecdotal evidence if not outright invented. I must assume at this point you are spreading disinformation for whatever your goals may be to that end.
Thank you for wasting everybody’s time.
Go look for yourself instead of being condescending.
What are you some conspiracy nut? /s
If they want to hang out with us, they can make an account somewhere other than thread, bam, done!
If they want to hang out with us, they can make an account somewhere other than thread, bam, done!
“make another account somewhere” isn’t really what federation is about.
Indeed it is, they’re not saying you have to make an account on that person’s server, they’re saying that you can make it on a different server, that’s the point of federation you can join other servers that are connected to them. It’s not to be fully open without any limitations, because if it were then content moderation would be impossible.
Services like Nostr have this problem, they are like the wild West where anything goes and you can’t do anything about it. To some people that seems great but the fact of the matter is those services are filled with right-wing trolls and crypto scammers (likely plenty of other nasty stuff as well) because they cannot be moderated.
Mastodon, Kbin, the new Lemmy 0.19 release allow on a per user basis to block entire domains, so I don’t see how this is a “you can’t do anything about it” situation. Just let users decide.
Lemmy 0.19’s instance blocking does not filter users, only communities, in addition it does not solve the problems of content polution because it does not limit interaction from blocked malicious users in any way, just hides them (it only really works under the assumption that they’re not malicious users and the blocker is just throwing a fit). For these reasons it is not and cannot be seen as an a replacement to defederation.
Also as I already said users are 100% free to decide, they decide by choosing their instances. If you don’t like it you’re free to host your own or move to a more open protocol like Nostr. The idea of federation was built around the idea of communicating with certain instances and blocking others, not about users individually choosing the servers they connect with, Some servers do operate democratically but in the end the fediverse is designed around servers so servers have every right to choose.
Also I’d like to address the “defederation will kill the fediverse” claims I’ve seen floating around. It won’t in fact it’s a dedicated feature of activitypub and has been in use since forever, instances are able to block ones that go against their values either due to the way those instances are operated or the users they allow on them. This is how it’s worked since the beginning and almost certainly how it will continue. Some users don’t like this and believe that they should be able to access stuff no matter what, failing to realize that they do not own the server their account is hosted on, accessing content on other servers via activitypub requires the content be copied over to your home server, and if the admins don’t want that they can block that server, you don’t really have a say in it because it isn’t your server. So either host your own where you do own it, or move to a more open protocol which exist for the purpose of user freedom and anti-censorship.
What do you think it’s about? Because from my perspective changing instances is kind of the entire defining feature that separates it from commercial platforms.
It’s about connecting communities and having fail saves, not bullying.
I feel like that’s exactly how it was billed to me, find somewhere that federates with who you want, and if that changes, you’re free to move
The choice of email providers is not about which one can exchange mails with GMail.
Some of the time it is though. Like Gmail has a pretty large list of IPs it won’t deliver email from. When self-hosting, it’s something you really do have to worry about.
The reason most people don’t worry about it is that most people only use a handful of free emails and organizations that provide email addresses for their users spend time worrying about it so users don’t have to.
When self-hosting, it’s something you really do have to worry about.
So erecting artificial walls is not positive then. Good we’re on the same page.
No. I definitely prefer email with good spam blocking. I’m not criticizing Google for blocking mail how they do. It’s pretty necessary. Which is also something you learn fairly quickly if you try to self host.
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Wtf does EEE mean, why must people assume everyone knows every acronym
This was being discussed actively months ago. People would say the full embrace, extend… then, but now there’s a somewhat fair assumption that most who are actually on Lemmy might have the reference by now.
All you have to do is say, "what does EEE mean? " without the second half of your statement - no need to get angry.
The point of the second half is to try to dissuade others from simply relying on initialisms. It causes introspection. Maybe accusing others of being angry is uncalled for? It’s possible to want to prompt introspection in others without being angry.
The problem is you come across as a demanding jackass and will likely receive a “fuck you” in response rather than the modified behaviour you think you’re engendering.
Using initialisms prompt self learning for those that will, and wilful ignorance for those that will not. No one is responsible for anyone elses individual lack of capacity. Funny how your situation only encourages introspection in one half of the conversation.
What is the point of ever asking a question on the Internet if it should always just be met with “do your own research”? For the record, I did Google around and I couldn’t find that Wikipedia article, and when I did see it in another comment, I didn’t still understand the concept. This comes across as incredibly gatekeeper-y. Don’t understand why I’m not “allowed” into the conversation because I’m being barred from context because I don’t understand an initialism and my research failed.
You are allowed, just ask what it means. Don’t be a whiney little bitch that people aren’t hand feeding you every scrap of information, nobody is cognizant of your ignorance so don’t blame yours on them.
I don’t believe the people saying “just wait and see” are genuine users. I have a hard time fathoming that after Meta’s atrocious history, as well as the history of what happens when large corporations get involved – I simply can’t believe these are more than paid shill accounts.
Or maybe I’m the one who’s naive, thinking that people can’t possibly be so foolish…
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupitiy, and I’m not so sure about the universe.” - attributed to Albert Einstein
Sadly you are naive. People truly are that foolish.
Sometimes it brings me fleeting moments of doomerism, where I think maybe it will be good when we humans are gone
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You’d be a moron to trust them obv, but how would Threads using ActivityPub extingush the Fediverse?
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Right, I’ve also yet to see what defederating from a hypthetical Threads instance could prevent.
They’re a really good open source contributor with a great track record, I know people don’t like saying good stuff about zuck related things but they’ve helped progress machine learning quite a bit. Pytourch is a great example iirc used in stable diffusion
Textbook FUD.
DECADES long? Facebook didn’t even exist 2 decades ago bud. We know they’re shit but you don’t need to go around exaggerating everything and being so dramatic.
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lemm.ee already made the decision, based off of the voice of the community to defederate from Threads
Lemmy.Ca admins blocked Threads about 5 months ago: https://lemmy.ca/comment/901551
You can confirm that Threads dot net is still blocked by Lemmy.Ca by going to https://lemmy.ca/instances and clicking on the “Blocked Instances” tab.
Thanks, I actually forgot that one can check!
lemmy.dbzer0.com also blocked Threads
please take a look at the replies under zuck’s own post in threads.net and determine if that’s the type of content you want.
for those who don’t want to visit, majority of the commentators are bots. some advertising crypto, and others asking for money.
even if you think you can individually block those accounts, keep in mind the size of threads compared to fediverse.
for Lemmy: monthly active users are barely150K40K, while for threads it’s 100 million. there’s no chance you can control that inflow of bots.and if it still doesn’t convince you, you can read threads’ privacy policy, which states that they’ll gather all that pii if you interact with their content.
most of the internet is already bigtech, I don’t want Lemmy to become another arm of it. though I have faith in my instance maintainer and dessalines, the dev.
In favor of defederation. If I start seeing garbage from threads in my feed, I’m switching instances. I don’t want Meta pushing their divisive, hateful, misinformation all up in my feeds. Meta will kill fedi. We don’t need them.
Yeah. I’ll switch to an instance that is defederated from Threads, if mine doesn’t.
I left Meta’s other properties to avoid state sponsored hate speech. I won’t use a platform that gives hate speech a platform.
I don’t need to wait to know if Meta will do that. I already know.
I’m onboard with this as well. I can’t imagine this instance would federeate with Threads, and I respect the admins here a lot, but I’d lose that respect and trust immediately if we aren’t smart enough to defederate from Threads. We’ve seen what happens when these tech giants get their claws in anything.
Serious question though - how would you? Meta can’t push content in your feed. The only reason you’re going to see Meta in your feed is if the community here (or people you follow on mastodon) decide they want to show it.
If I start seeing garbage from threads in my feed, I’m switching instances.
You can just block the domain on a per-user basis for yourself instead of trying to control content what others see just because you don’t like it.
Has that facility been added to Lemmy yet, even?
Yes, the new release came out yesterday.
Let users decide because we’re fucking adults.
Great thing about the fediverse
People get to decide what they want from their platform
Surely you’re aware of the embrace, extend, extinguish corporate strategy.
People only get to decide what they want from their platform until facebook starts extending the spec. Then your client will become incompatible with some posts, and so on and so forth.
In summary, it’s a threat to the platform itself.
Exactly, I hereby decide that I would like to ignore corporate efforts to undermine this burgeoning new platform. I furthermore reserve the right to complain about the loss of said platform in future years by claiming that it’s everyone elses fault for allowing corporate encroachment.
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think jerboa lets you block instances
Yeah dude let’s just federate with an instance maintained by a corporation that has undoubtedly caused a genocide in Myanmar by turning a blind eye to a far-right hate speech group that caused an entire fucking minority to flee into another country.
I don’t get why people are supporting and saying “oh it must be up to the user” like bro this is the company we’re dealing with. Fuck that fuck threads fuck zuckerberg i don’t want his shit cancer near something that’s going well so far.
Imagine thinking Myanmar is facebooks fault. Wow.
Read up rookie
https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/how-facebook-is-complicit-in-myanmars-attacks-on-minorities/
I don’t know what version of reality you live in but i hope these articles are illuminating
I can’t imagine why you are getting push back. I can tell you are very passionate in your position and are on the right side of a complicated issue. The only reason I can think of is your idea hasn’t become mainstream yet and people hate it when they don’t know they should be upset.
Either way I have no skin in it and I agree that meta is garbage. Thank you for be passionate about something in this dispassionate world.
:3
I’d imagine is because Myanmars situation is way more complicated than Facebook “undoubtedly caused a genocide”.
Seems like it’s getting trivialized to shit on Facebook
Facebook deserves every ounce of shit it has coming to them.
True.
But do you believe the actual people commiting the genocide and manipulating Facebook shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions?
🙄 I guess the years of violence well before hand we their fault too. Imagine trying to tie years off violence and genocide to Facebook.
It’ll always be Burna to me.
It will always be … a name that doesn’t exist and has never existed?
(Hint: BURMA. It’s hard to sound smart when you can’t even get a single fucking name right! Especially the name that “it will always be” for you. Holy fucking shit!)
You wrote all that over an obvious typo? 🤣🤣🤣🤣
An “obvious” typo you missed when you wrote it. When you read it back after posting. In a post where you were putting on airs of being smarter than everybody.
I fucking love it when that happens and love to rub it in.
That one is actually public record, with
-
Facebook using their influence to set up in the country in a way that made it the dominant form of internet access for the country, enough that a large number of people considered Facebook=internet
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Facebook getting multiple reputable warnings about what was happening on the platform, what their advertising policies and algorithms were encouraging, and they chose to not act on them and instead continued to profit from it
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They finally did act after a whole lot of harm was done
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Their direct fault? No. But they sure as fuck share a lot of the blame in pouring gasoline on the fire.
Because it was totally and we have the receipts? Imagine being that ignorant of world events.
Then go join threads.net? Nobody’s stopping you from doing that. That would put you on a server friendly to your beliefs.
Server admins also have opinions, and are not required to take a democratic vote and each individual user’s choice into account. They can decide for themselves, and they will, for good or ill. If you don’t like where it ends up, your user decision should be to fuck off to threads.
I don’t think that’s what they’re saying.
They’re saying that some users and admins might choose to wait and see
“Yes, Jeffrey has, in the past, killed and eaten gay men. But we should wait and see. It’s impolite not to invite him to the party!”
I don’t want to use their platform, but I get why some people might choose to stay federated so that there is incentive to pull people to mastodon and educate people about the issues
There’s enough nuance there that I’m not dead set on either side, and I think we still have the chance to defederate later if there’s an increase in spam and harmful content / disinformation.
“Jeffrey doesn’t always eat people. Just sometimes. We should totally go clubbing with him and spurn him later if he eats one of us.”
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The above is solvable if you block them I guess, but by default it will completely ruin everything.
Yes. One minute of a user’s time and all that’s gone.
Compare that with having to move instances due to admins blocking at the instance level.
You have the full right to decide, you can switch servers to one that chooses to, or open multiple accounts. That’s your choice. This isn’t Nostr, in the Fediverse instance blocking is normal and it happens without your input, but you know what does happen with your input? Registering your account on a server that fits your needs best, or as close as possible.
This is why I don’t understand all the hysteria about this.
If I don’t want to see Threads or I don’t want Threads to see me, I can go to a Threads account and click “block threads.net”.
But obviously that’s too complicated and it’s easier to just whinge to your instance admin about how Threads federation will be the death of us all. 🙄
If there was a bot that just flooded All with far right talking points, do you think admins ought to block that or leave it to the users?
What if it was far right mixed in with cat memes?
What if it started more slowly like a few posts an hour and then ramped up over 6 months to be 1000s of posts per hour?
Well, that’s spam. So obviously it would make sense to block that.
Sure, but where is the line between spam and threads content? If the content a community produces is heavily manipulated, isn’t that undesirable for all the same reasons as spam ?
This. Imagine begging daddy admin to protect you from mean Meta.
You understand that no matter how much you kneel down to service Meta, Zuck the Fuck won’t be trickling anything down on you that isn’t a bodily fluid, right?
And hey, I’m not going to kink-shame. Just pointing out that if that isn’t your specific kink, you might want to wake up to there being zero dollars trickling down to you.
What a meaningless, worthless comment. Letting Threads federate with the rest of the Fediverse doesn’t give Zuckerberg power over us (unless you’d care to explain how it does) - rather, it just gives its users and our users the ability to interacted. Why are you so interested in building walls?
I swear, I’m seeing the western equivalent of wumaos servicing Meta here. Only at least the wumaos got paid; it made sense. These idiots are doing the labour for free!
It seems like you didn’t read my comment, since yours has very little to do with it.
Say “I don’t know what a wumao is” without using those words.
Again, you are not replying to the content of my comment. You want socialism to be taken seriously as an ideology? Not making everything a shitpost could be a good place to start.
But there’s one thing my own experience with XMPP and OOXML taught me: if Meta joins the Fediverse, Meta will be the only one winning. In fact, reactions show that they are already winning: the Fediverse is split between blocking Meta or not. If that happens, this would mean a fragmented, frustrating two-tier fediverse with little appeal for newcomers.
How would defederation from meta lead to killin fediverse ?
Basic EEE strategy (embrace, extend, extinguish). For example, take XMPP. It was a wonderful federated chat protocol. Google joined it with its Google Talk application. All was well. Until it wasn’t. You see, Google added some “new features” that could be used only with the Google talk app and account. So people flocked to it. All is still well. But then google decides to close the gates - Google Talk is its own thing now and you can’t talk to people on other servers or with other apps. Take what hapoened wit XMPP. Google embraces XMPP with Giogle Talk. Google add some shiny “new features” that are exclusive to Google Talk (extend). Google cuts off XMPP access to other domains other than the Google Talk domain, thus finishing the extinguish phase.
Just replace Google with Meta/Facebook/Zuckerberg, Google Talk with Threads and XMPP with ActivityPub/Mastodon/Lemmy and you can see how it could happen. The XMPP Wikipedia page has it covered very well, and there’s a dedicated Embrace, extend, extinguish page on Wikipedia if you want to read more.
I think we are on same page, I am aginst federating with threads
If anything meta integrates here I’m out.
Let’s not defederate from every corporate player. Some of them can probably respect reasonable rules of civility.
But fuck Meta. We already know how this plays out.
We know there’s a huge wave of hatred and misinformation incoming. We’ve seen it on their other platforms.
When Tumblr came out about the idea of opening up and using activity pub people were in favor of that idea. It’s not just hating companies, Facebook really has a bad track record when it comes to abusive practices and also extremely poor content moderation (you can find right wing hate speech on Facebook despite them having policies against it, people report it and nothing happens).
There was an interesting paired poll done, asking about federation with Threads and federation with Tumblr.
66% of people were wary of or actively opposed federating with Threads. Fewer than 20% were wary of or actively opposed federating with Tumblr.
It’s not “defederate from every corporate player”. It’s passing this message on to Meta:
Currently, I think there are two main branches of ActivityPub implementations: Microblogs(Mastodon and its forks, the microblog portion of kbin), which are user centric, and group based aggregators(Lemmy, Kbin, peertube, future Pixelfed), both of which are valid implementations, however, they don’t really work well with each other.
So, I believe that the threat of Threads to Lemmy instances is really overblown for the simple reason that there is no way for a Lemmy user to browse microblog contents through federation to begin with, whether it be Mastodon or Threads.
There’s a list of people that have agreed to block it at https://fedipact.online/
We should avoid making blanket demands like this to the fediverse as a whole. I happen to support your position, but we should take into account the diverse nature of the social web.
Instead of making demands, explain your reasoning and leave each community to make up their own mind. This is the beautiful nature of the social web; we have broken decision making down into many smaller units instead of one mega instance/corporation.
Find a community that resonates with your own thinking on this issue, and over time a thousand different servers will gather experiences and a picture will start to form; was federation with Meta a good or a bad thing?
0.19 allows users themselves to block instances…
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True
Meta is a threat to the platform though.
They are a threat to humanity as a whole
So do preemptively defederate when any corporation makes a new instance?
I’ve seen strong support for Tumblr federation adoption, so no. Context is important.
How about users make decisions for themselves and block Threads if they want?
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I think the issue here is users data will be on threads server which god knows how it will be used. To train AI? To target ads ? Nobody knows so better everyone block threads and keep internet safe as these companies have destroyed internet.
Public Mastodon posts are already indexed by search engines.
Indexing by search engines and what Meta harvests are astronomically different - I fail to see your point.
If I am on Mastodon, there is nothing that Threads can collect from me that they can not get already. My posts are public, Meta or anyone else doesn’t need permission to look at them.
The only risk is if I am sending direct messages to someone on Threads from Mastodon, then obviously Meta has a copy. ActivityPub is not E2E encrypted, you shouldn’t be using it for private communication at all, the threat model is the same between Threads and any other Mastodon server.
Alright, fair enough, but why would anyone allow meta even an inch of space into a ‘free’ platform? Have you seen the numerous ( and to be fair, much better articulated) comments on this very thread concerning “EEE”? Don’t you think it’s alarming how many people support Meta joining?
I’m thinking of it from a grand scale: Folks in this thread are essentially saying “awe, c’mon, it’s probably okay if Zuck’s mega-corp puts it’s foot in the door of a burgeoning federated forum community; what could go wrong?”
Hey- let’s talk in five years and see what happens- yeah?
I’m okay with Threads federating because there are a some people I know who won’t use Mastodon but will use Threads, and I would like to talk to them without downloading Threads. That’s probably true for most of the people supporting it, or they just think it should be up to individuals instead of the admin making unilateral decisions about who you’re allowed to talk with.
Threads joining would also introduce a far wider group of people to Fedi that isn’t just “nerds who like Linux and/or programming”, which is the bulk of people using Mastodon (and Lemmy, for that matter) right now. I’m not really concerned about EEE because there will always be a huge chunk of people using the FOSS platforms.
Anything that touches the internet can be scraped. Mastodon DMs aren’t encrypted, and public posts are obviously public. There’s nothing stopping someone from using the API or any web crawler to harvest data on mastodon users anyway.
Not arguing for/against threads, tbh I don’t even use mastodon much because I don’t really like the idea of microblogging to begin with
I fully support this.
Why not just let the serial killer psychopath hang out in the mall, if people don’t want to hang out with them they don’t have to.
This is the way.
Okay. I’ve seen stuff like this on both mastodon, and here, but i haven’t heard about them doing anything that would actually harm the fediverse. I guess i don’t know what the problem is. I know they’ve got a negative reputation, and for good reason, but isn’t that the awesome part of threads being federated? We can follow and connect to people there without being part of their system, and therefor not susceptible to their bs? If I’m missing something please fill me in.
It is inevitable that Meta will try to kill the fediverse while chasing profits, there is no other possibility in their endgame.
If that is pushing ads into other instances or killing those instances entirely we don’t know yet but it will happen.
It has to because the shareholders must always have more.
I just don’t think it’s possible for something to kill the fediverse. And if it is possible, then it is a flaw in the design of the fediverse and needs to be fixed.
People have been writing about this ad nauseum. It’s the embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. Join fediverse, extend the spec with so that not all clients are compatible with all features, repeat as necessary until everyone is using your client, finally drop compatibility with other clients.
All activity pub needed to do was create a user rights guidelines that prevents profiting off the data. Meta wouldn’t have touched the Fediverse with the 10-foot pole, if that were the case.
Lololol and what legal mechanism are you going to use to enforce that?
ActivityPub is a protocol, not a fucking organization. It literally has no agency.
You can licence a protocol
ActivityPub can’t license anything. When you identify actual human beings in this conversation, perhaps you might have a point. So far you don’t.
First off, calm the hell down. You’re being needlessly antagonistic.
Secondly, it seems like the W3C is the publisher of the activity pub standard seems like they ducats what is an isnt compliant.
Seems like of was specifically authored by a team including Evan Prodromou according to the wiki.
If they wanted too, but like literally and open source software, it could have been given licencing requirements
Specifically, my research has turned up that implementations of these protocols can be licensed. Threads’ version of ActivityPub likely has its own licence. I think it would be safe to say that the creators of Lemmy and Mastodon specifically could have privacy rights dictated within their license implementation. That would nullify threads legal capabilities.
Give https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html a read. Might sway you, might not.
This is an excellent point. Thanks!
in that case considering meta is saying that it would take nearly a year to federate the platform we probably should defederate them.
What point in that linked blog swayed you? The circumstances are quite different. XMPP was dogshit when Google started working with it. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
I really don’t know enough to say one way or the other, but the fact that this is an established Microsoft practice swayed me. I can actually believe google didn’t intend to do what it did to xmpp as a log of google employees from the 2000’s speak highly of the company, but these executives are traded like nfl players, and i know enough about meta’s history to believe they may do this. Besides I’m still new to development, but i don’t see many other reasons why it would take meta nearly a year to fully launch federation.
Actually this just occurred to me, but isn’t it interesting which accounts were linked first?
Triple-E predates Microsoft. IBM was doing it before Bill Gates was a twinkle in the mailman’s eye.
Meta will be okay making money off lemmy indirectly for a while. Then, if they grow, they’ll want more than a toehold.
When it’s Facebook, trust that greed and power are the goals.
People are concerned because there were examples of such things going horribly wrong, most notably with Google and XMPP.
Way back in the day, Google announced that its Talk messenger will support XMPP, which made decentralization fans very happy - finally, they can communicate with everyone from the comfort of their decentralized instance!..oh.
Google started implementing features in Talk that are incompatible with XMPP, and then dropped XMPP support altogether, ending up deprecating Talk in favor of Google-only Hangouts. This forced many XMPP users to get into Google’s ecosystem, since the people they contacted through XMPP were mostly just using Google Talk, and they couldn’t be contacted through XMPP any more. As a result, XMPP became worse off than it started and got practically forgotten by all but 1,5 nerds who keep it alive.
now most of their contacts were in defederated Google to which they now didn’t have access.
this ☝️. Those of us who remember what happened then, understand the potential dangers of federating with a juggernaut like META.
We should tread lightly!
It’ll be successful and the current devs will lose the ability to unilaterally control the project.
So competition, that’s what they are afraid of.
