this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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It's different because for a while, there was no incentive for the average person to move to decentralised, libre XMPP when they could interact with the people there from Google Talk. If someone was on XMPP and asked a Talk user to come over, the odds they would be convinced were very small. Why would they when they can access it anyways?
Even if they didn't kill it, they certainly stalled it's growth, from the moment they federated.
Facebook will probably start not playing nice slowly, if they don't right away, so it'll be very hard to draw a line where they should be defederated, so larger instances and users may never end up defederating them thanks to blurred lines and constantly shifting goalposts. "We'll defederate when they don't play nice" is too vague to work when they move slowly and change things gradually.
When the vicious predator bares it's fangs, it's best to deal with it right away by running or fighting back, instead of trying to be friendly with it.
And how many of those Google Talk users would have created an XMPP account if there hadn't been any federation at all? If someone was on XMPP and asked a Talk user to come over, the odds they would be convinced were very small. Why would they when they can ask you to create a Google Talk account instead?
Why would someone create a Signal account when they can ask you to create a WhatsApp account instead?
People do it, because they're convinced of it for one reason or another. But it's a hell of a lot harder to convince someone to move when both are interoperable. Imagine if Signal and WhatsApp were federated together, do you think Signal would have nearly as much success as it does if WhatsApp users could just stay there to communicate with Signal users?