this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Hi everyone, I am collecting preemptive pikachu faces for when meta inevitably attempts to screw the fediverse over. Please put them in replies to this comment so we don't clutter up the rest of the comments.
N.B.: The delays in the timeline were copied over verbatim. Historical conditions have to be taken into account, as the popular adoption of internet began in the late 2000s. So it is likely for the "extinguish" phase of Mastodon to happen much faster. I give it 5 years tops. And by 2030, we will all remember it as we now remember XMPP.
So it returned back to a state where it would have been without Google anyway.
All the Jabber clients and services combined were never even close to rivaling ICQ, AIM, MSN, Skype, or whatever else ruled the IM space back then.
The state before Google was "up and coming solution for federated chat"
The state after Google was "impractical solution that does not federate¹ properly, and is hard to set up²".
Those are not the same.
1: because of Google.
2: because of Google.
Users don't care about federation. For them, there is no such category as "federated chat". There is only "chat".
XMPP never had significant market share among the instant messengers of the time (except maybe as custom solutions for work chat, but not as a consumer service).
Yeah, of course it would have not ever been a mainstream thing for end users. But Google definitely nipped them in the bud, both by providing a (bogus) drive behind the XMPP development (and so, preventing anyone else from doing so), and also by kickstarting them into relative widespread use instead of letting them grow organically.
If they had, there is a possibility XMPP would have become a service provided by nerds for their friends and family as soon as 2010, like email, or more recently, nextcloud.
And it would have been a valid option for corporate solutions. But no, instead, we got slack. Thanks, Google.