this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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I don't consider being on Threads as being "on the fediverse". My definition of the fediverse is servers that follow the Activity Pub protocol to interact with each other. You might disagree with that definition, but Threads only lets us "follow" (view-only) certain of their accounts (only about 2000 out of millions) from Mastodon. Those accounts do not see any replies to their post from the fediverse, or any fediverse posts at all for that matter--we are invisible to them. So no, he's not "on the fediverse", he's on Threads. I doubt he knows the fediverse even exists.
Thing is, for federation to work, his team had to opt into it. The fact that his statuses and profile render natively in Mastodon and Akkoma are a pretty strong start.
I'd like to see Meta put their money where their mouths are, and finish the integration. I think we'll probably see that happen sooner rather than later.
Personally I hope they never do, though it does look likely. Like many pre-November '22 old-time Mastodon et.al. fedizens, I came to the fediverse specifically because I didn't want to have anything with FB/Meta/Twitter or the other commercial, "engagement"-based, enshittified social media.
It feels like the fediverse is being gentrified, with half of it eagerly welcoming their new overlords (why don't they just join Threads?) and the other half resisting. The half that doesn't federate with Meta will move on, like people priced out of their own neighborhoods by gentrification, and become the new "real fediverse" where people can go to live free from corporate interference.
This isn't an existential problem. Just block threads.net.
As someone who has repeatedly seen cities become gentrified (first Peoria, Illinois, then San Francisco, then Phoenix), I get what you're trying to say, but also don't think it's an appropriate metaphor.
Frankly, I think this is a bit melodramatic. The Anti-Threads part of the Fediverse will stay in their isolated bubble with little to no change, while the rest of the network continues to grow or change. It's not like operational costs are skyrocketing, or that hosting will become any more scarce or more difficult. It's not like the servers have to move to a different neighborhood. Gentrification is predicated on the finiteness of physical space and affordable places to live.
This is probably news to you, but there's not even a coherent, all-encompassing definition for what the Fediverse even is. The idea that there's a "real Fediverse" vs "Fake Fediverse" glosses over all kinds of history and nuance. The best anyone's gotten to defining it is by specifying protocols and interoperability, but even that doesn't quite cover it.
The Fediverse isn't just the parts you like, minus the parts you don't like.
That remains to be seen. There are multiple ways a single huge instance could drive up costs for everyone else, especially when there isn't organic growth that allows developers to find creative workarounds to firehose problems.
Lemmy has been seeing federation-desync issues over the last couple of weeks due to a bug in kbin being amplified by Lemmy.world. I imaging a similar issue but with a fully federated Threads would simply ddos most fediverse instances out of existence.
Very good point
They slowly start it. When Google killed XMPP they also didn't do it within a week.
If Google killed XMPP, how come some enterprise communication products (off the top of my head I can name two that are successful at least in Europe) use it?
There is XMPP the protocol which is indeed still widely used by commercial entities, and there is XMPP the open federated network, also called Jabber, which is still alive but Google did kneecap it pretty hard back then.
XMPP as used in the enterprise communication product my employer uses (AFAIK based on the common open source implementation) sucks as much on mobile as Xabber which I used back in the day. I get notifications 30 minutes late if at all. That thing killed itself by not adapting to smartphones.
That's a bad implementation then. Modern open-source XMPP works great on mobile, no problems with notifications at all on Android. iOS is more of a mixed bag, but that is solely Apple's fault and applies to all messengers other than iMessage.
The issue was the state of mobile clients when XMPP died in the mainstream and state of the art was crap like Xabber. Conversations was better but too little, too late.
Telegram works flawlessly pretty much everywhere, including iOS which my mom uses.
Well, Monal on iOS doesn't work worse than Telegram on iOS, so then apparently it's flawless as well. I am not an iOS user, but I heard complaints about Telegram on iOS as well regarding notifications.
Again: The current state is irrelevant when discussing the time frame when Google allegedly killed it. The state of Jabber and its clients was just abhorrently bad back in the day. That was the reason the world moved to WhatsApp. Google Talk has always been a niche product. That's why it's dead.
It's not dead, and works fine. I am not disagreeing that it had a serious set-back but that's water down the river.
Also WhatsApp is using a slightly modified version of XMPP, so your argument is a bit funny :)
Obviously modified enough to work better with mobile when it launched than Jabber's state of the art back then.
Again: Google did not kill Jabber. Jabber achieved its downfall on its own by being bettered by proprietary services that just worked better on mobile devices BACK THEN.
Google Talk was never Jabber. The Google Jabber integration was way before that in Gmail. Google Talk was what came after Google decided to abandon Jabber.
And yes Google very much held Jabber back by having the largest user-base in their Gmail integration and refusing to even implement SSL for that let alone supporting any other innovations like better mobile support. If Google had actually supported Jabber instead of sabotaging it, we would not have this discussion.
Wikipedia says otherwise.
Google kills messaging services all the time and launches new, incompatible ones. Google did not sabotage Jabber, they sabotage their own chat services all the time.
Wikipedia is not a good source on this. By the time Google's XMPP based messaging product was renamed "Google Talk" it had long ceased to be compatible with the wider Jabber federation.
While I agree that Google does also sabotage their own messengers, it was deeply involved in XMPP specs development and other stuff around the ecosystem in the beginning, and then just quietly began to blockage urgently needed changes as they were unwilling to implement them in their system.
But I guess this discussion has reached the end of being useful as you clearly have a lack of understanding what actually happened back then.
If I can follow some mainstream entertainment accounts from Mastodon, I'm fine with that. I dislike having to log onto Twitter or Threads just to find out what some motorsports teams are up to.