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> Google has, perhaps, the worst track record for chat clients and for killing their products in general. It’s a real shame how Jabber/XMPP users were effective

> Google has, perhaps, the worst track record for chat clients and for killing their products in general. It’s a real shame how Jabber/XMPP users were effectively “ghosted” by the far more numerous Google Talk userbase, but does this mean that we should ignore any efforts form big companies to support open standards forever now? Weren’t things good while everything did interoperate? Is it absolutely inevitable that Meta is going to do something terrible with ActivityPub? FB messenger (back when each chat was a pseudo-window at the bottom of the FB screen, and not its own app) also supported XMPP. you can't say (effectively) "i buy the XMPP argument, but this time it's not Google" because the XMPP argument applies equally well to FB.

tapoxi 3y ago
Messenger supported XMPP clients but didn't federate with other servers.
- kevincox 3y ago
  This is correct. Messenger never really was XMPP. It just had a client API based off of XMPP. There were a bunch of quriks and no federation. I suspect the idea was just that it provided a starting point for clients.
  - colinsane 3y ago
    my memory was just of running Pidgin and being able to reach everyone through it (google, FB, weirdo self-hosters). guess it must have had good multi-accounting support and i was relying on that. i assumed it was using the same code paths for all my contacts, but if not then i guess the "FB used XMPP" point would be almost entirely moot.
    - kevincox 3y ago
      I used FB Messenger over XMPP for the last handful of years before it was shut down using Pidgin and I'm pretty sure that's how it worked. You could talk to people on different networks but you needed your own FB account to talk on Messenger and you couldn't do group chats cross-network. GTalk and self-hosted XMPP could federate and you only needed one account and conversations could span servers.
riffraff 3y ago
But I'm both cases XMPP is still around, if you care for it. Neither Google nor Facebook extended it in a way that broke the protocol when they stopped supporting it. I look forward to being able to follow my friends who are on threads from my Mastodon account. If in a couple years meta stops supporting it, alas, we had two years.
- petre 3y ago
  They just used it to hijack XMPP users from the federated Jabber network onto their own platform. Google did at least. And that's what Meta is probably going after with Threads, growth using the fediverse userbase. Just say no and defederate it before they screw everything up again. Your next "friends" are going to be ad serving bots powered by AI trained on your feed.
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    > And that's what Meta is probably going after with Threads, growth using the fediverse userbase Facebook has 3 billion users, probably 90% of Mastodon users are on one of their services already. The entire Fediverse userbase is not just less than a percent of their userbase, but less than 1-2% of their annual growth, it doesn't even make a dent in the first derivative It probably doesn't pay for the Threads servers and salary costs if they vacuumed up every last Fediverse user. At the bottom of all these EEE conspiracies is always a completely inflated sense of self
    - petre 3y ago
      That only proves they can achieve growth without the fediverse, no need to ruin everything they touch for a mere 1 or 2% and fake it for being cool and supporting open standards to get the regulators off their backs. But then it's all about revenue, infinite growth and user data hoarding.
  - raydev 3y ago
    > that's what Meta is probably going after with Threads, growth using the fediverse userbase This seems like a terrible play given how small the fediverse userbase is.

tapoxi 3y ago

Messenger supported XMPP clients but didn't federate with other servers.

kevincox 3y ago
This is correct. Messenger never really was XMPP. It just had a client API based off of XMPP. There were a bunch of quriks and no federation. I suspect the idea was just that it provided a starting point for clients.
- colinsane 3y ago
  my memory was just of running Pidgin and being able to reach everyone through it (google, FB, weirdo self-hosters). guess it must have had good multi-accounting support and i was relying on that. i assumed it was using the same code paths for all my contacts, but if not then i guess the "FB used XMPP" point would be almost entirely moot.
  - kevincox 3y ago
    I used FB Messenger over XMPP for the last handful of years before it was shut down using Pidgin and I'm pretty sure that's how it worked. You could talk to people on different networks but you needed your own FB account to talk on Messenger and you couldn't do group chats cross-network. GTalk and self-hosted XMPP could federate and you only needed one account and conversations could span servers.

riffraff 3y ago

But I'm both cases XMPP is still around, if you care for it. Neither Google nor Facebook extended it in a way that broke the protocol when they stopped supporting it. I look forward to being able to follow my friends who are on threads from my Mastodon account. If in a couple years meta stops supporting it, alas, we had two years.

petre 3y ago
They just used it to hijack XMPP users from the federated Jabber network onto their own platform. Google did at least. And that's what Meta is probably going after with Threads, growth using the fediverse userbase. Just say no and defederate it before they screw everything up again. Your next "friends" are going to be ad serving bots powered by AI trained on your feed.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  > And that's what Meta is probably going after with Threads, growth using the fediverse userbase Facebook has 3 billion users, probably 90% of Mastodon users are on one of their services already. The entire Fediverse userbase is not just less than a percent of their userbase, but less than 1-2% of their annual growth, it doesn't even make a dent in the first derivative It probably doesn't pay for the Threads servers and salary costs if they vacuumed up every last Fediverse user. At the bottom of all these EEE conspiracies is always a completely inflated sense of self
  - petre 3y ago
    That only proves they can achieve growth without the fediverse, no need to ruin everything they touch for a mere 1 or 2% and fake it for being cool and supporting open standards to get the regulators off their backs. But then it's all about revenue, infinite growth and user data hoarding.
- raydev 3y ago
  > that's what Meta is probably going after with Threads, growth using the fediverse userbase This seems like a terrible play given how small the fediverse userbase is.