Big companies aren't taking over the fediverse.
The fediverse is taking over big companies.
@evan that's what I'm hoping. I worry a little about EEE.
@jamesmarshall it's literally never worked
@evan @jamesmarshall except for every time it has? Like XMPP?
@arcade break that down for me. Who embraced, extended and extinguished XMPP?
@evan
Google embraced standards via XMPP in gtalk. They then extended them in proprietary ways, with Hangouts rather than gtalk. They then deprecated gtalk in favor of Hangouts, and will finally extinguish it.
@evan not only, nor even mainly due to XMPP, no.
My hypothesis is that they never cared about XMPP in the first place, but it was easy to deploy and gave them a nice PR boost from the techies that started promoting them with glee.
"No downside".
And then when enough users joined GTalk — partially brought in by the techies, partially calmed down by techies not warning them against it — they shut down XMPP s2s and moved away from the protocol eventually.
@evan there's a world of difference between "XMPP is what allowed GTalk to grow", which is absurd, and "Google used XMPP to help grow GTalk, and then dumped it", which is a pretty decent description of what happened IMVHO.
Either way, XMPP was far worse-off after that, in ways I do not believe it would have been if Google never touched it.
And if we are not careful, same might happen with fedi and P92.