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Mastodon's Eugen Rochko in talks with Meta?!😱
(news.ycombinator.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Oh bravo, you miserable dingus.
What does this mean for the fediverse? I presume because it's split up into a million loosely connected pieces, we should be largely insulated from corporate invasion and interference. You can't get us ALL, motherfuckers!
Meta joins, and makes it super easy to onramp from instabook
Meta slowly starts not following the protocol, forcing the protocol to adapt since they have 90%+ of the users
Eventually, Meta decides to abandon the protocol, and from the perspective of their users, we just went offline
Same playbook Google used (XMPP).
Us going offline as in we cant view meta and they cant view us? That seems like a fine outcome
The problem is human nature. Content, activity and funding for development will drop off very hard and it'll likely become like XMPP is today, aka bloated, a mess of standards and basically forgotten about.
Meta just want to suck all they can out of a promising technology and it isn't their first trip at the rodeo. See Occulus as well. People are right to want to keep Meta at arms length.
Don't spread FUD about XMPP, please 🙂. It works wonder, it's in fact everything I've ever wanted for personal/family chats and large IRC chatrooms alike. It also happens to be one of the easiest things I ever had to self-host thanks to how wonderful and batteries included ejabberd is. I have developed several clients and bots/integrations in several languages thanks to how versatile it is.
Fun fact, it has a PubSub component which is (IMO) technically superior to the fediverse more lightweight and more flexible.
If one thing, the great XMPP rediscovery is overdue if you ask me 😉
It's a wonder it works you mean.
I'm not trying to shit on XMPP, but there is no denying the countless issues third parties like Google and Meta have caused as well as the human factor and disagreements that have derailed its progress over its lifespan. It went from promising new communications tech that everyone* was going to use to something fairly niche now.
If anything gets "discovered" along these lines I hope it's Matrix and co now instead of what XMPP has become.
There's a lot of subjectivity and emotions there. So, let's look at the facts instead: XMPP is a very simple protocol at its core. You can literally implement RFC6120 in an afternoon. But you have no reason to, because of the many existing mature implementations, which takes us to the second important aspect (IMO): "liveliness". XMPP has many well maintained client AND server implementations and a rich and dynamic ecosystem. Unlike Matrix, Zulip, RocketChat, Mattermost, … it's not pushed forward by a single entity, which severely reduces the probability and effects a bad actor might introduce. XMPP is extensible in ways that makes it more future-proof and resilient than most alternatives.
Those not learning from history are doomed to repeat it, and if you ask me, Matrix is doing everything that XMPP did, but worse :) I only arrived to XMPP after fighting for the Matrix cause and deeming it a lost one. No time to elaborate, but the protocol itself is insane and its creators are experts in deception and empty promises.
Edit: more about Matrix https://programming.dev/comment/66569
I ask, please expand or provide some entry points for the XMPP for a complete newbie on the subject if you'd be so kind, please and thank you
No problem, what do you want to know? If you are here, it means that you already understand how federation works, i.e. you need to find a service provider/server on which to create your account, there are several sites to help you with that:
https://joinjabber.org/
https://providers.xmpp.net/#providers
then you'll end-up with a username like nick@server.tld and the password of your chosing, just like email, just like mastodon/lemmy. You will then log into using a client of your choice, and here as well you have plenty of choice: https://xmpp.org/getting-started/
If you are more of a power-user, I recommend Gajim, if you are on Android, Conversations/Cheogram are safe choices, if you are on i/macOS, siskin/beagleIM are decent, etc
thanks, I'll def check it out, sounds different
Really it isn't in practice 😉. And if you want to have a taste of it, are using Android, and want to skip the decision making steps for an onboarding experience like WhatsApp (where a central service discovers your contacts using your phone number), you could just install https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.quicksy.client
There are all kinds of options out there 🙂
Google didn’t add any proprietary extensions to XMPP, they just never updated their server software, while the ecosystem kept improving. For example, they stuck to SSL2 while nearly all nodes required TLS1.2 for federation.
Pretty much