Evan Prodromou
I am not open to your ahistorical take on Google Chat and XMPP.
Google didn't do anything wrong by using an open standard.
They didn't do anything wrong by building a good interface that people liked to use.
And they didn't do anything wrong by disconnecting from the network when the spam and harassment outweighed the benefit to their users.
We, the XMPP community, failed to capitalize on success by diversifying the network. It's our own fault not enough nodes were there.
pettter
@evan Google didn't disconnect from the network, the network disconnected from Google, because they refused to implement TLS on s2s connections.
How's that for an ahistorical take?
Tim Chambers
@evan This is important as many are misconstruing why XMPP failed, Evan gets it right.
natriumchloride
@evan i don't know enough to weight in on whether 'google extinguished xmpp' is an ahistorical take but some of the reaction to threads does seem like panicking and nothing more. Since i assume this is a post about that
Tom Ritchford
There is zero hard information of any type.
What percentage of the traffic was spam or harassing? Was it 10%, 1% or 0.0001%? How much effort did dealing with this take? Why couldn't the spam protection mechanisms of gmail be used to the same purpose?
If they wanted to be transparent at the time or any time since, they could. It has been proven in court repeatedly that Google are deliberate monopolists. There is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Evan Prodromou
Hey, Tom.
Businesses try to make money. That's what they are for.
The open XMPP connection for GChat wasn't making them any money. Users on GChat weren't clamoring for it. They were complaining about the spam coming through.
We didn't have enough other networks connected to make being on the federation a business necessity.
Compare email: most email addresses aren't on Gmail. If they disconnected from other servers, it would be unacceptable for their users.
damon
@TomSwirly @colo_lee @evan You keep saying that, what evidence do you have of EEE besides people's blogposts? Really go back and ask people about their experiences with it, go back and read about people's thoughts on their experiences, not just your opinions and those that align with you.
Tom Ritchford
@colo_lee @evan Can you explain what "stepping up" would have been, exactly, and who exactly are the people who didn't do it?
What solid evidence do we have that "not stepping up" caused Google and FB to silently and gradually stop supporting XMPP, except a single unsupported and unspecific statement by a Google spokesperson vaguely blaming Spam, with no details or numbers?
If Google had broken email for the same reason, would you have agreed?
Lee Fife
@evan This message requires a certain amount of maturity and seriousness to hear. Puts responsibility on the folks who didn't step up. Which is part of why there's so much resistance to this truthbomb.
Evan Prodromou
@TomSwirly @damon @colo_lee in the case of XMPP, stepping up meant getting more servers installed and implemented. At schools, churches, libraries, businesses, households. Having a diverse, resilient, heterogeneous network.
Evan Prodromou
@TomSwirly @anclement @dilmandila
Article 19: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
Article 27: "Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits."
Tom Ritchford
> Participation in the social web is a human right.
Really? https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
No, it is not a violation of "human rights" if, say, my instance or all instances choose not to federate with Threads.
That you bring "human rights" into the issue is a measure of the poverty of your actual argument. And I might add that Facebook has complete disregard for human rights.
Evan Prodromou
@anclement @dilmandila human beings aren't eyeballs.
Participation in the social web is a human right.
We will not be changing the ActivityPub spec to keep people trapped in walled gardens and out of the social web.
Andrew Clement
@dilmandila @evan but Meta brings eyeballs and users to the the fediverse. It also brings brands to the fediverse. I know a lot of people may not like those things.
But rather than block and run away, shouldn't we try and address the issues in the standard?
Dilman Dila
@anclement @evan "Supernodes" are okay if they are not predators with a track record like meta. We know how meta runs its social networks and we ran away from its playforms for something different.
Andrew Clement
@evan the should have worked with Google to fix the issue.
I've already seen a lot of people quick to push Threads off the fedi rather than deal with the issues it might create
Evan Prodromou
That huge audience of GChat users was an immense asset, and we fumbled it.
Evan Prodromou
If you'd like to draw some conclusions about ActivityPub from this, it should not be that a network should disallow supernodes, but that we have to counterbalance them with a wide diversity of other nodes of different sizes with different value propositions.
Evan Prodromou
@TomSwirly @anclement @dilmandila you have a right to decide who you interact with. I 100% support that and I will fight to make sure you can always exercise it. But all people have a right to be on the fediverse, even if they can't have a conversation with Tom Swirly.
Evan Prodromou
@TomSwirly what you're ignoring is the topology of the network. Google could turn off XMPP for GChat because there weren't enough people on the network to make it a business necessity. Google cannot do that with email, because there are enough people on servers outside Gmail that they can't turn off SMTP without pissing off their customers.
Tom Ritchford
@evan Spam and harassment also existed in email, at orders of magnitude greater levels, and yet Google did not try to kill open email standards but simply solved the issue.
They rolled out Gmail on April 1, 2004, with a good spam checker that improved over time, and didn't get into XMPP until much later.
You present no evidence of the claim that "spam and harassment outweighed the benefits". No evidence appears to exist except a single press release, bereft of even a single number.
Skeptical.
Evan Prodromou
@uhuru what am I reading wrong? I'm talking about GChat.
uhuru de sud
@evan
"And they didn't do anything wrong by disconnecting from the network when the spam and harassment outweighed the benefit to their users."
Thats what some instances are trying to prevent here. disconnect from a major spam, harassment & "you're the product", ad platform.
harassment from meta "bots" to those who block threads, has started....
ads too.
so, maybe you're reading it all wrong...
2c
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