MudMan

Hi, yes, I’m here. The user. Of both, in fact.

Both Bluesky and Mastodon have their quirks and their different cultures. The feature sets of their protocols may also be different, but they sure aren’t relevant to the experience at all, because federation is not a user-facing feature for the vast majority of the social media experience.

Stop cheerleading for social networks. Social networks are not your friends, including Mastodon or the rest of the “fediverse”.

Oh, hard disagree on the last part, at least.

As always in left-leaning spaces, the best way to disarm any threat of reform is to wait for whatever purity test over a random issue to trigger a schism, sit back and watch. It’s not even the first time it happens to Mastodon specifically.

In this case, a potential competitor that already has a reputation for being overcomplicated and having bad UX now needs an extra FAQ item called “can I interact with Threads from Mastodon?” and the answer is “it depends”.

It’s terrible, self-destructive and worse than either a yes or no call. Zuck boned Masto by federating a handful of employee accounts only AND he’s still going to get the plausible deniability in front of regulators from federating with whatever’s left. I’d be impressed if I thought Meta did it on purpose instead of it being entirely self-inflicted.

Huh. You’d think more instances were blocking, given the amount of buzz.

Being generallky in favor of letting individual users make this call that’s… mildly encouraging. Of course I happen to be in an instance that is blocking, so…

It’s worth noting that this still splits Mastodon pretty much in half. That’s arguably a bigger concern than anything else Meta may be doing. They may not even have to actually federate to break Mastodon, which is a very interesting dynamic.

I’ve been saying this from the go: users don’t need to know decentralization even exists until AFTER they are signed up.

What Mastodon needs is a proper migration flow that moves old posts and remote follows so users can decide if they want a new instance after they spend some time in the system and start to understand how it works. Any mention of decentralization on signup is a churn point, because decentralization doesn’t add any features to posting and reading posts. From a UX perspective, decentralization isn’t a feature.

Things are about to get messier once the big decision coming in becomes “do you want to see Threads or nah?”, which then actively requires thinking about a competing social media platform on the way into this one.

They didn’t “chicken out”, necessarily. It turns out that making huge social networks, and particularly for-profit ones, is not trivial. They connected a few accounts this week… but they also launched in the European Union this week, they weren’t even out worldwide until now.

But hey, don’t you worry, everybody is freaking out again. And if BlueSky ever finishes their own proprietary interoperability protocol and that is made AP-compatible on this end I’m sure we’ll have another hipster breakdown.

Oh, absolutely not. Let me be clear, I do not question that the author was involved in the project and interacted with Google. I do not question any of the factual details in the article and my argument is not that he’s lying. Total respect for him, his work at the time and even his opinions on how annoying and frustrating it was working with Google around.

What I’m saying is his perspective on the alleged failure of XMPP is specifically biased by his insider experience, that many of the examples he gives do not apply to AP, that the process he describes there is not EEE, that it’s not the reason XMPP and Google Talk failed and that, as he admits throughout the piece, XMPP didn’t in fact disappear or “die” after Talk’s failure or because of their intervention.

I swear, I’m so tired of naive takes about “good” and “bad” corporations.

Corporations are corporations. They are groups of people legally mandated to make money for their shareholders. They’re not individuals.

So yeah, I’m fairly confident that them taking steps towards joining ActivityPub is some mix of high ranking people thnking interoperability is cool, some other high ranking people thinking that may smooth over what seems like an immediate future full of legal challenges, particularly in Europe and some other people thinking that as long as all the newcomers to the Twitter corpse party are interoperable they can flex their superior resources and development.

Because that’s how groups of people behave.

But I’m also very confident that nobody looked at the rounding error that is the fediverse userbase, disproportionally made up of FOSS true believers and fringe infosec nerds and went “we need to plot their demise”. That’s not a thing that groups of people concerned with building userbases in the billions talk about.

Hah. Alright, it’s not deader than it would have been had Google not stepped in and then stepped out. We’re grading “dead” late 2000s instant messaging apps on a bit of a curve here.

Huh. I was just saying up here that I don’t think anybody genuinely believes the fediverse is a Meta competitor, but… guess I was wrong.

Mastodon does not have the upper hand by any metric. Threads alone has an order of magnitude more active users than the entire fediverse and Meta has multiple platforms with billions of users (and have signaled that they want Threads to reach that size).

You can absolutely argue that ActivityPub is a tech trendsetter and has an edge over BlueSky in that it’s already up and running. You can’t seriously argue that Mastodon or the fediverse are a threat, a competitor or have an advantage over Threads or Meta. One of the biggest hints that Meta isn’t going for “EEE” here is that it’s probably not worth the effort.

They do? I mean, a few times I did have to point out that Meta has multiple products breaking 2 billion active users, so the “fediverse” is a drop in the ocean, but not many people seem to stick with that argument after a quick bout of googling.

It absolutely matters under ActivityPub because, as I said earlier, it comes down to the client to manage the incoming packets. If Meta is out of date with the protocol but the rest of the federation is not (and retains backwards compatibility at all), then everybody else gets nicely formatted but feature-limited Meta content and they get garbled stuff.

It’s only relevant if we get garbled stuff and they get nicely formatted content. Which should be entirely avoidable if they “pull down”.

So no, not the same. And crucially people are still misquoting the article and the article is still misrepresenting the so-called “EEE” strategy.

Yeah, it does acknowledge that it still exists and has a solid community at the very bottom.

I do excuse it, it’s an article from an insider with an axe to grind that is bummed out that the Google integration didn’t make them win the IM wars and that Google was bad at supporting a secondary app, as they do. That’s legit.

But as a breakdown for a mallicious plan from Meta to “EEE” ActivityPub… well, it’s not even pretending to be that.

That is already how ActivityPub apps work.

It’s also not what happened to XMPP and, interestingly, not what the article claims happened to XMPP, even. You’ll note in the postmortem about it the recollection is that Google was too slow to adopt features and fix bugs, not the other way around.

I guess once you get enough confirmation bias in play you can embrace, expand and extinguish both by doing that and the opposite of that.

Yup. This is pretty much right on the money.

BlueSky and Threads are looking at interoperable protocols because they a) have engineers at home that think it’s cool, and b) see the writing on the wall about upcoming regulation and want to preempt it. This is probably good for other networks already based on interoperability, but there are definitely a ton of open questions.

The article is 100% revisionist history written backwards to justify a knee-jerk conclusion and XMPP is indeed not dead. Or not any deader than anybody else that got washed away by WhatsApp winning the messaging wars over the 2010s.

EDIT: Re-reading my own post, it’s too harsh. The article isn’t “100%” revisionist history, so much as a biased insider account. The revisionist history is largely coming from both the misattribution of what happened to a deliberate move from Google and the fact that it’s being misread and misquoted when people react to it.

Oh, I read it when it came out back in June. Many times, as it kept being shared as an explanation of the first Threads backlash.

It’s full of incorrect assessments and false equivalences.

Threads doesn’t really have the volume (yet) to subsume ActivityPub. The process it describes for standards drifting towards the corporate actor doesn’t apply to ActivityPub, which is engineered from the ground up to support multiple apps with differnent functionality (hence me writing this in Kbin and others reading it in Lemmy and being able to link it and follow it from Mastodon), the article only acknowledges that XMPP survived and kept on going at the very end as a throwaway and doesn’t justify how it “never recovered” and, like I said, it doesn’t acknowledge the real reasons Talk and every Google successor to Talk struggled and collapsed.

So yes, I read it. Past the headline and everything. I just didn’t take it at face value. This piece keeps getting shared because XMPP wasn’t ever that big to begin with, so this sounds erudite and informed while the similar arguments being made at the time about SMTP and RSS were more obviously identifiable as being wrong for the same reasons.

Man, I’m not gonna relitigate this but no, Google Talk didn’t kill XMPP. XMPP is not, in fact, dead. WhatsApp killed Google Talk and pretty much every other competitor and XMPP would have been in that boat with or without Google Talk.

This is gonna keep coming up, it’s gonna keep being wrong and I’m really not gonna bother picking this fight each and every single time.

A few of these are interesting and accurate (email comparisons), a few are pretty obvious and widely distributed already (privacy challenges), a few are a bit of a straw man argument (not sure “algorithms are bad” is a thing) and a few I’d caveat a little bit (quote tweets).

Going through all that would mean a whole response piece, though, so I’m more than happy to vaguely nod and move on.