This is a core problem of distributed systems though. Signal even cites this as their reason to not federate with anyone.

Once you get decentralization going you need everyone to stay kind of up to date or stuff will just not work.

It is not. Discord’s protocol has been tailormade to suit Discord and the developers will not give a single thought about keeping it stable because only the Discord server&client are meant to use it.

An XMPP developer would likely have been delusional about the protocol he himself developed. But at the time I can assure you XMPP was completely irrelevant. AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo! and maybe IRC were the tools of the day back then.

Because of actual competition (which XMPP had absolutely no part in) multi protocol messengers had their golden age then.

No.

• I want to send messages to people who are not currently online (having a server stay online for you is a desparate hack and not a solution)
• I want to send media other than text
• I want my messages to be e2ee
• I want presence - e.g. know if someone is available, busy, away
• I want voice/video calls

and many more…

None of these were solved by IRC but by the others you mentioned.

Also Matrix can bridge to XMPP, of course you wouldn’t because nobody uses XMPP.

No. There was nothing to extend and extinguish with XMPP. It was a dead on arrival protocol that nobody ever used seriously. I’ve been to the internet at that time and what people actually used was: AIM, ICQ, MSN and possibly even Yahoo!. (IRC for the nerds and Counter-Strike)

It was exactly the other way around. Nobody ever used XMPP, then Google opened federation on their first chat and suddenly someone was actually reachable via XMPP which was a cool thing for some nerds that were into XML then, but when Google noticed that it only imports problems with nothing to gain from the XMPP network they just shut it off.

At the time nobody cared because the people accidentally using XMPP didn’t give a shit about it because they used Google not XMPP in the first place.

I mean even Reddit wasn’t really “endless” for me. On particularly boring days I could definitely reach the end of content that interests me.

If the fediverse idea doesn’t work out and it’s yet another company the cycle is bound to continue.

A big chance is in front of us to break the cycle!

You are right, it could work but it is in no way certain.

Depends on how many volunteers you have who are actually willing to donate

I’ve been using Mastodon for some time now so the Fediverse won’t lose me, the question is if my redditing can be migrated.

That is in part because the reddit algorithm doesn’t like thoughtful contributions. These take time and understanding of the discussed matter. When your metric is positive (upvote) interaction per timeframe you need easily digestable content that people immediately react to. If I have to carefully read and think about the content my vote/comment is far too late to be “hot” on reddit.

Discord has to pull this sometime becuase venture capital isn’t going to sustain it for eternity and “Nitro” makes next to nothing compared to cost. I just hope Matrix has the tech to save me when it hits.

Let’s see if the technology can improve fast enough to retain users.

There were and are to this day a ton of subs with similar content.

From an advertiser perspective it makes sense to sell to addicted people. Mission accomplished?

In the medium run federated instances will have to be financed somehow as well. We’ll see how that goes.

What do we do if it doesn’t? Just crawl back and apologize?

I kinda grew out of it. It was funny when I was an edgy teenager but it got progressively more cringeworthy as time progressed for me, even though the content may not have changed much.

A lot of that stuff isn’t original, and the deep conversations are, in my opinion, few and far between. Sure there are some communities whi h have this, but they’re not exactly over represented.

If you get the deep conversations and the conversationalists the fluff will follow.