Do you know what happens to protocols over time? They get extended with user facing features or they stop being used and die.
Once again, Meta got 100M users in a week, they do not need to support the fediverse. Stop acting like this is some calculation and not just them building the same basic features they have in their other platforms that users expect into their new one.
100M users in a week by turning every instagram account into a threads account; until its activated it remains a shadow account but still counts in their book.
And it would only be a protocol extension when it would be returned upstream, which I highly doubt that Facebook’s parent company Meta would do that.
There are literally, not exaggerating, over one billion Instagram accounts in existence. It's self-evidently not the case that they have just silently registered everybody a Threads account and are counting those numbers.
You know whats the big issue here is? That those who were nagged into trying Threads, can’t back out as it would kill their Instagram accounts as well. So all those conflated numbers will be dead in the water.
You know what's irrelevant to the current conversation about how they have so many users they don't need us?
How many fediverse accounts are there total? A couple hundred thousand? And how many of those are duplicates across instances?
Whether or not all those users stick is irrelevant, the user counts for lemmy / kbin also won't have all of them stick. The point is that they do not need us or our content. They can hit a bill without even supporting activitypub.
a) building their next social network on an open platform will let antitrust regulators off their back
and/or b) a Twitter clone sounds less sexy then a web3 / decentralized fediverse play. Meta has chased every other bandwagon (metaverse, ai, etc), it's entirely possible this is just them always chasing the hot new thing so that they don't miss out. They certainly aren't going to let themselves be Blackberry and refuse to change, they'd rather desperately copy every hot new thing and change quickly to always have an offering that appeals to their customers good enough
And it would only be a protocol extension when it would be returned upstream, which I highly doubt that Facebook’s parent company Meta would do that.
Oh yeah, Meta definitely never contributes anything back to the open source community, I type into a React frontend, that uses a GraphQl communication protocol to an API built using node, watchman, and a variety of other meta made or sponsored projects.
If all instagram users counted they would have 2 billion users. I dislike Meta as much as the next guy but let’s not pretend threads isn’t ridiculously popular.
This feels eerily like when a woman solves a technical problem for a client, but the client refuses to understand anything she says until a male coworker steps in and say those exact same words.
No, this feels like a massive corporation with massive marketing and market research departments succinctly breaking down a concept that most on the fediverse nerd out too much to do.
That’s pretty much underselling the marvel that is the fediverse and ActivityPub.
The same was with the Internet and how cloud computing works now, for the layman it’s just magic while the ones who know, know that it’s simply a remote/someone else’s computer.
EEE is not wrong or misrepresented. Google killed xmpp with google chat via EEE and this article is proof that its about to start happening again. Federating & Adding features that mastadon isnt compatible with is a precursor for EEE, just like Google chat did with xmpp. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. If youre naive enough to trust meta then you should just join threads instead.
Google dropping XMPP leading to the death of the protocol is a distortion of truth. Sure it hurted the XMPP federation back then, but this is just one aspect.
For one, XMPP had many competitors since the beginning including other open federated ones like IRC. XMPP was just a new standard with new interesting features. Most people used propietary messenger like AIM back then.
Imo the most critical reason why XMPP did not become mainstream, was because they slept through the early smartphone phase. iOS for a long time had no client compatible with XMPP servers. Smartphones nowadays dominate the global messenger market tho, which made federated XMPP helpless against the rise of WhatsApp, iMessage and so on.
In the desktop space XMPP never really overshadowed IRC significantly. IRC kept all the old tech nerds, while Discord now swallows all the younger nerds. Skype, Microsoft Teams and Zoom took the rest.
XMPP again slept through all of this. Jitsi and Matrix/Element rose up as new open standards because of that as well.
Google Talk was never that big in comparison. Even if Google had kept their XMPP implementation on life support to this day, I would doubt, that federated XMPP would be a big player even then.
Also towards the end, Google Talk had less XMPP extensions then the rest of the XMPP federation. That’s the opposite of “Extend”.
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