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.

So it returned back to a state where it would have been without Google anyway.

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.

• 1999, XMPP is born. 👶
• 2005, Google launches “Talk”, touted as a “great victory for XMPP”, with “large-scale XMPP services”.
• 2012, Google encourages “Talk” users to switch to “Hangouts”.
• 2013, Google drops open XMPP interoperability with other servers.
• 2015, Google begins shutting down “Talk” clients.
• 2017, previous phase is now complete, XMPP is virtually unheard of.
• 2022, Google shuts down all XMPP integration. XMPP is, for all intents an purposes, dead. 🪦

• 2016, Mastodon is born. 👶
• 2023, Meta launches “Thread”, touted as a great victory for Mastodon. ← You are here.
• 2030, Meta encourages “Thread” users to switch to “Fabric”.
• 2031, Meta drops open ActivityPub interoperability with other servers.
• 2033, Meta begins shutting down “Thread” clients.
• 2035, previous phase is now complete, Mastoson is virtually unheard of.
• 2040, Meta shuts down all Mastodon integration. Mastodon is, for all intents an purposes, dead. 🪦

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.

Yep, I’ve been enraged by this decision from day one. This is depressingly amateur. Let people join, let other developers make very cool apps, and then introduce a deeply breaking change in a minor version, and deploy it on the most active instance, with mere days of warning. Or “How to destroy all the progress made by Lemmy, in one small change”.

I get it if the devs and admins of Lemmy.ml are paying too much out of their own pocket, and if they want users to literally go away, to mitigate that cost.

But doing it in such an in such an insidious, demoralizing way, as opposed to being transparent with the costs and announcing (drastic) measures to mitigate that cost, is literally destroying most of the progress made so far, and driving most users back to reddit.

As of today, the list of most active servers of the fediverse has only one Lemmy server (Lemmy.world), in ninth position, and that is the only Lemmy server in that list, over four pages… The Lemmy instances used to be in the middle of the first first 10 instances, with Lemmy.ml leading the way.

Now, I guess the devs didn’t want to take those drastic measures, and tell people to they would be closing down their accounts, ordered by creation date, until the costs become bearable again. Because that would mean “admitting the Lemmy.ml experiment to show the world that people are, when given the opportunity, rising to the challenge, and putting in the effort, in true communist fashion, is actually a failure”. People aren’t ready for communism. Communism requires education, intelligence, and empathy/compassion. Our western societies are fostering the opposite traits. When we become educated, intelligent, and empathic or compassionate, it is in spite of our societies, not thanks to them.

Now, a few people opened instances, but it wasn’t enough, and fast enough, when the “reddit migration” happened, to absorb the insane influx of users to Lemmy.ml.

So I guess it is what it is, but it’s still sad and depressing…

This is just pointless drama. It’s an emotional shitshow with way too much ego from all participants. The reaction from the Dev is actually bad, but the OG CVE is equally bad.

On one hand, I don’t expect an app to let me inject code even as an admin. That’s just very bad form, and asking for trouble.

On the other hand, arguably, if an attacker has admin access, you’re toast. So that’s also hardly a CVE.

Now, all the involved people have terrible written expression, poor grammar, and are even omitting entire chunks of sentences.

And then there’s the content… Nah, this is just noise. Absolute junk. Sorry, but IMHO this has nothing to do in this community.

Please stop posting paywalled articles. Neither 1ft.io/12ft.io nor archive.ph could get the full text out of that one…

Could you post the full article here?

Still better than Jakøff. Heard he is a total wanker…

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Because in spite of the question (“private host” as opposed to “privacy friendly host”), people have commented in the context of privacy (probably because of the community we’re on); and in that context, the mere mention of github or gitlab is met with downvotes.

IMHO using github or gitlab for that isn’t much of a concern privacy wise (at least not more than browsing a website from the companies behind those services), but it surely is when it comes to data integrity (which is a totally separate concern, but people often confuse it with privacy, like they also do with security). I would not trust either service with that.

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I just made an account to check, it seems to be a bit “too good to be true” in terms of features, and raises a few red flags otherwise.

They give you a free tier where you can use your own domain, they have apps for all major platforms, and the web app is quite pushy (that’s the red flags): you have a list of tasks to do in order to get $10 credit for each task, like importing emails from gmail, downloading the app, etc (all those tasks carry a risk, privacy wise, depending on their code).

Given this behavior and the fact that the platform is from California, it reeks of investor and VC money, and I really wonder what’s their business plan, if they really do what they advertise. There’s a reason every platform that has solid encryption and respects privacy is either a donation based platform, pushing for donations (e.g. signal), or a paid platform with a pretty restricted free tier (or no free tier at all).

Personally I’m gonna close the account and not come back, I’m a bit weirded out, but I wouldn’t bet my bottom dollar that they are ill intended either…

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