this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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I think people are a bit confused about how this supposed "embrace, extend, and extinguish" thing is supposed to work, as well as how the proposed pushback is supposed to work and even how federation is supposed to work.
As others say, tracking is trivial and doesn't require federation. "Losing access to their userbase" is what's being proposed here as a solution, not a threat. And last I checked Google did not "extinguish" email and nobody using other email providers lost access to Gmail users.
I think people are reacting to "Meta bad" and assuming "anti-Meta good" without having a good grasp of why or how those things are supposed to function.
To the email point, it's actually much more difficult to set up your own email than it used to be, exactly because google servers will not accept email from unknown providers that don't meet their own standards. It didn't extinguish email, true, but it did help centralize it around a handful of providers that can keep up to date with google's whims to get reliable deliverability.
Come on, we're going to pretend that there aren't legitimate reasons for that beyond an alleged takeover of email by Google? It's like the memetic XMPP example, fallacious twice over. Not only have netiher XMPP nor email been "extinguished", but a lot of the effects people have noticed are atributable to other elements beyond Google's intervention.
In this case if you're going to assume incoming email filters are "Google's whims" and not the fact that email as a whole exists solely for in-company communication and spam I'm gonna say your read on the situation is at least a little bit disingenuous.
I mean google's whims as in they're making decisions on their own and everyone else just has to go with it. I'd rather these problems were solved collectively.
I think it's a little silly to define extinguish as literally destroyed. I think of it as a permanent wound. With XMPP, the belief by people that both networks would inter-operate and the subsequent change left a permanent wound on XMPP adoption. I'm not sure how things would've gone otherwise, and I'm equally skeptical of the people holding onto that as the sole reason for XMPP's failures, but it certainly was an inflection point for them.
Did XMPP fail harder or less hard than everything else used for messaging in 2005? Because that's when that happened. Was it better or worse to be embraced as a protocol by Google or to get purchased by Microsoft like Skype? Did Microsoft Messenger, which was EVERYWHERE back then do better or worse?
I think if you don't mean "extinguish" as "deliberately destroyed", then you're talking about a hypothetical where a piece of software would, in your opinion, have done better if not for an event that did happen, and unless you have a time machine that's fundamentally a guess.
So yeah, I would vehemently disagree that Google has disrupted email. Spam farms disrupted email. The rise of instant messaging and web 2.0 disrupted email. Google had a massive stake in their email business and tried to protect it by pushing back against at least one of those things. And they kinda failed.
So yeah, I haven't seen compelling evidence that big companies using open source software or protocols is a bad thing for open source software or protocols. What I've seen is evidence that they either become proprietary alternatives (Android/Chrome OS as versions of Linux) or they coexist and do better or worse as the market would have them (email, Blender, Linux itself).
My honest appraisal here is that people dislike Meta (rightfully so) and they enjoy the punk, independent vibe of the "fediverse" so while three months ago they were all "these capitalist dinosaurs need to accept that decentralized protocols are the future" now it's all "don't sell out to capitalist dinosaurs who want to buy out our decentralized protocols".
I get it, but it doesn't make much sense, seen dispassionately.