Recent searches
Search options
Administered by:
Just for the record: what Google/FB did to #XMPP was not 'embrace, extend, extinguish'. I bring this up because people are focusing on FB developing a divergent protocol/extensions. Maybe that's a valid concern, but it's unrelated to XMPP.
While Google Talk was actively developed, Google folk actively participated in the community. In fact they contributed important extensions such as Jingle, the protocol we still use today for audio/video calls in XMPP, and other bits and pieces.
(cont...)
The big problem was simply that these were the largest nodes on the network. They had so many users, they had nothing to lose by putting up the walls and shutting out what was (to them) a small minority.
The answer to this problem is nothing to do with the protocol, but just ensuring that the network is diverse and distributed, not centralized in one or two seats of power. Now how to actually do that, is a harder question. But it's the one we should be discussing.
For example, when I started work on Snikket, a project to make XMPP easier, I deliberately chose to focus on helping people establish small servers, based on existing social relationships. I specifically did not want to become just another large public service, partly due to what happened with Google Talk.
A large network of small nodes is more robust against disruption. It's what any healthy decentralized network should be aiming for. Applies to XMPP, Fediverse and the internet in general.
And to circle back to the start of the thread: if we can avoid reaching this super large node situation, the ease of an 'embrace, extend, extinguish' attack on the network protocol by such nodes is diminished significantly.
@mattj I remember the discussions bogged down around "we should require SSL".
Google screwed everyone over, not because of something they *did* but because they just didn't participate.
Who was going to be able to make a potentially incompatible change that cut off the largest set of users on the network?
Google eventually became just a set of "special exemption" rules in config files, so of course the experience degraded, leading right into "well nobody uses this anyway".
@mattj I don’t really fear Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. The far more successful attack method is Divide and Conquer. Or in the case of Google Talk it’s more like Divide and Ignore. That’s what could happen to the #fediverse too.
@mattj I'm confident that the Fedi has sufficient critical mass in terms of users, instances, community spirit and principled contributors/developers. Whilst facebook's possible foray into the Fediverse must be shunned for what they stand for, and will always strive towards, I am not concerned.
@mattj legislation is one possible route, especially in the EU. But I'd prefer to see a self-organising network of cooperatively owned and democratically governed nodes.
@mattj Thanks for the clarification. I've definitely been at fault for at least a partial mischaracterization of this, then.
cc for clarification @aeonofdiscord
@mattj At the time, Google Talk felt more like a brief window of interoperability, anyway. Before, there was AIM/ICQ (with a proprietary standard), and long before Google gave up on XMPP, almost everyone seemed to have switched over to Skype, which was proprietary, too (and was later acquired by Microsoft).