With Meta starting to actually implement ActivityPub, I think it would be a good idea to remind everyone of what they are most likely going to do.
So Google used Microsoft’s “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy and looks like Facebook is aiming to use ut as well
If something killed XMPP for me - it was Matrix. On open source replacement that is not only more popular, but has more active development and it’s easier to use. No big company required. And since XMPP is still alive for its niche user base and EU is probably the reason for Threads federation - I don’t think this is the right hill to die on.
fwiw, XMPP/Slack/Discord/etc basically solve the same problem that IRC already solved. Software Engineers just reinvent the wheel again and again as everyone loves a green field.
That said, Meta cannot be trusted. They’re going to do a year or two of embrace and extend, pretending to be good citizens. Then they will invent some crisis that causes them to want to de-federate, likely that content on other servers is not moderated to their standards or that convoluted features of their extended protocol are not being met. This take seems pretty spot on to me.
No.
- I want to send messages to people who are not currently online (having a server stay online for you is a desparate hack and not a solution)
- I want to send media other than text
- I want my messages to be e2ee
- I want presence - e.g. know if someone is available, busy, away
- I want voice/video calls
and many more…
None of these were solved by IRC but by the others you mentioned.
We already talked about XMPP a few months ago, if anyone is interested in reading about some experiences with XMPP for more context.
No. There was nothing to extend and extinguish with XMPP. It was a dead on arrival protocol that nobody ever used seriously. I’ve been to the internet at that time and what people actually used was: AIM, ICQ, MSN and possibly even Yahoo!. (IRC for the nerds and Counter-Strike)
It was exactly the other way around. Nobody ever used XMPP, then Google opened federation on their first chat and suddenly someone was actually reachable via XMPP which was a cool thing for some nerds that were into XML then, but when Google noticed that it only imports problems with nothing to gain from the XMPP network they just shut it off.
At the time nobody cared because the people accidentally using XMPP didn’t give a shit about it because they used Google not XMPP in the first place.
For mastodon if it can help:
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Open your favorite text editor and write threads.net
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Save it as csv
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On your profile on Mastodon, click “edit profile” and scroll to “import/export”.
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Choose “import”, it will open a menu.
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In this menu be sure to click on “Following list” and choose “Domain blocking list”.
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Browse and select your CSV
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Click upload
