Strypey
Graphical interfaces are documentation with buttons.
The web is the documentation layer of the internet. Hyperlinking makes it documentation with buttons. So the web is also the native graphical interface of the net.
Webmail made email the first social layer of the web.
The fediverse adds another social layer to the web. As does the matrix network.
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Evan Prodromou
@strypey @blaine and @ralphm did the first federation between Twitter and Jaiku using XMPP, I think at a Foo Camp event (?).
Strypey
The jabber network seemed like a logical realtime social layer for the web. It almost was, when Goggle integrated open federation over XMPP with GMail's web chat, and experimented with extensions to add features like voice calls (Jingle) and collaboration (Wave).
But standards-friendly engineers like @rabble tried to build federated Titter on XMPP and couldn't stretch it to fit. Could Wave have worked?
XMPP social apps do exist, like Movim and Libervia. Could 2026 be the Year of Jabber?
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Ralph Meijer
Correct.
There was no technical reason for this to not continue to work. Wave's federation was built on XMPP PubSub, but although much hyped, the federation bit was just one person working on it part-time, and not really following standards either.
I built a federation of about ~60 social networking sites at @mediamatic using XMPP PubSub, including ActivityStreams quite successfully.
Evan Prodromou
@rabble @strypey @blaine @ralphm @kellan it was a great talk!
rabble
@strypey it was
@blaine and @ralphm who did the work on XMPP. I gave a talk about some of the ideas and OSCON with @kellan but never worked on the Twitter code base itself or the XMPP federation.
blaine
@strypey @ralphm @evan @rabble wasn't at Twitter and wasn't involved in the xmpp implementation. After I left (in May 2008), my understanding is that the ops team made a half-hearted attempt to keep the xmpp service going, but didn't have the capacity to devote time to it, so abandoned it. Unfortunately, their messaging on it was "xmpp doesn't scale" which was patently false, but it poisoned the water.
The complexity of the XMPP standards didn't help matters, of course.
Strypey
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@ralphm
> I built a federation of about ~60 social networking sites at @mediamatic using XMPP PubSub
Intriguing. Did you know this @rabble? What were the obstacles you hit with XMPP at Titter? I was wondering as long ago as 2017 why @evan didn't build StatusNet on XMPP.
Did/ does this MediaMatic infrastructure interop with Movim and Libervia stuff? What's the UX of that like?
Evan Prodromou
@strypey @rabble @blaine @ralphm @kellan
I'd been working on XMPP for years. I was well aware of XMPP.
StatusNet, now GNU Social, ran on commodity web hosting: PHP, MySQL. Like WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, SugarCRM.
I wanted our federation to work on the Web, with RESTful APIs. XMPP was complicated, and required separate hosting.
Strypey
@evan
> it was a great talk!
I presume we're talking about the 2008 talk summarised here;
https://archive.nytimes.com/open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/oscon-2008-day-01-sessions/
... which links to the slides here;
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/beyond-rest-building-data-services-with-xmpp-pubsub/525883
I note that this talk was given right around the time Identi.ca was launched. So again, I'm wondering what technical reasons @evan had for developing OStatus for StatusNet, and would the same decisions be made if they knew then what they know now about the state of XMPP at the time?
Evan Prodromou
@strypey @rabble @blaine @ralphm @kellan
You seem to be confused about the state of XMPP at Twitter.
There was an experiment federating text using PubSub between Jaiku and Twitter at FOO Camp in 2006 or 2007. I wasn't there; I only heard about it later. It never went to production.
Twitter *did* have a chat interface to Twitter over XMPP, similar to the way it used SMS. You could receive updates over XMPP, you could post, and you could reply. Identi.ca had a very similar system.
Evan Prodromou
@strypey @rabble @blaine @ralphm @kellan
There have been a few attempts to build federated social networks on top of XMPP. I can think of Movim and Buddycloud for now. I don't know if any of them are still active.
Evan Prodromou
Ralph Meijer
2008, but yes
Evan Prodromou
@ralphm @strypey @rabble @blaine @kellan
So, that'd be July 11-13, 2008? Identi.ca launched the previous week -- July 3rd. Very close in time!
Evan Prodromou
@strypey @rabble @blaine @ralphm @kellan I'm glad to hear it! I think it's an interesting way to connect to social networks. One of my backburner projects is to make an extension for Slack or Discord that gives your community Fediverse accounts and lets them send/receive with a chat interface.
Strypey
@evan
> You seem to be confused about the state of XMPP at Twitter
Very much so. I appreciate the clarification from all of you.
> There was an experiment federating text using PubSub between Jaiku and Twitter at FOO Camp in 2008
> Twitter ... could receive updates over XMPP, you could post, and you could reply. Identi.ca had a very similar system
I vaguely remember getting very excited about being able to post to my identi.ca account from my XMPP app : )
Evan Prodromou
@strypey I meant, a chat user interface for ActivityPub. I am not interested in these other ideas and I don't want to engage in continued conversation about them. Good luck, though.
Strypey
@evan
> I think it's an interesting way to connect to social networks
Absolutely! I'd love to be able to;
* post on a Movim instance using my XMPP account, and have it auto-posted on my Mastodon account
* post to my Mastodon account using my Matrix account and a room dedicated to that purpose (all messages sent to room become fediverse posts)
* use my Mastodon account to join in (low-traffic) XMPP/Matrix group chats, by @mentioning a group actor (a la Lemmy)
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