this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Both are open protocols for communication over the Internet. Both have been adopted by a large corporate interest.
Now, how are they different?
I asked how the circumstances are similar, not vague descriptions that suit your existing views. But sure.
XMPP was dogshit back in 2004. A good idea, but nowhere NEAR what it needed to be to actually get mainstream acceptance. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
There were very very few XMPP users in 2004. There are millions of ActivityPub users. If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here. We joined Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon because we don’t want to live in a centrally controlled/owned social platform. That won’t change just because we can suddenly interact with Threads users. In fact, if anything, once Threads users hear that we get the same shit they do without the ads, they might decide to join us instead.
Google killing off XMPP integration didn’t kill XMPP. It did that all on its own.
It's not about pulling the plug. It's about introducing proprietary features that break communication, forcing people off of an independent server and onto Threads.
If most of your IRL friends are on Threads and your experience with them has gotten janky due to Meta fucking with the protocol, it's going to be very difficult to not switch over to Threads.
Oh, and good luck trying to get your friends to switch over to some indie server they've never heard of. If you can do that, then you should run for president.
So basically, the worst thing Meta could do is what the defederators are actively campaigning for: To make it impossible for Threads and the Fediverse to communicate.
The difference is the stage at which they "advocate" for it.
People here are advocating for it now before Facebook has a chance to "embrace" us.
Facebook would only "advocate" for it after they've "embraced" us and started to "extend" ActivityPub with proprietary features that potentially caused issues with Lemmy users.
With the former, Lemmy continues on its own, growing naturally. With the latter, Lemmy users lose contact with communities they've become a part of and may be forced to move to Threads to continue interacting with their communities. That harms Lemmy's active userbase. Additionally, because of how big Threads is, it'd naturally have the largest communities, so other Lemmy users would start using them instead of communities on other instances. That means those communities would shrink and may even die off entirely. When Facebook cuts off ActivityPub support, that'll leave us with several small or abandoned communities. So we'd end up with a smaller userbase and fewer active communities.