Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I’m not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.
All I can say is that, I started using Jabber before GTalk federation, but ultimately Google made me leave Jabber.
What actually happened is that some friends who originally were on Jabber switched to GTalk, because later Google added it to Gmail, making it more convenient.
So essentially when they defederated, my network was pretty empty.
Because thats not how human nature works. Convenience tramps everything and almost noone is as ideologically driven as they think they are.
Then the only real solution is to disallow big companies from making convenient products. At some point the onus has to be put on the average user. Throwing your hands up and saying “the normies are too stupid to consider their own self interest” may be true but it is also an unsolvable problem if they choose to never put any thought into their own lives and problems.
Because GTalk integrated with Gmail and with ability to still having access to other friends was much more convenient and they didn’t care about who owns their favorite instant messaging network. And majority of their friends were also on Google.
The truth is that only purists will stay, and most people (even tech people) don’t give damn about being locked out.
Google also broke things in a subtle way. You could see the person is online, if they messaged you you would get their message, if you messaged them, your message would show as delivered, but never get to them.
So first thing you thought that maybe they are just busy. When you started suspecting something is not right then it made you think that maybe there’s an issue with Jabber etc
I don’t think the defederation was ever announced, it was more like a bug that was never fixed.
