Any journalist reading HN right now should see that this blog entry gives you material enough for a good, current story, maybe even a feature, and that its author in uniquely suited to comment because they were part of XMPP and in the middle of the OOXML debacle, so would make a great interview.
I'm not sure the same thing is on the horizon for the Fedi because it's in a different position. If facebook did join and suddenly we have a huge number of new people to talk to, many servers will block facebook on sight, and so will many individual users. So they'll never interact or be part of it from day one.
Let's say that over the next few months facebook add some cool new features to ActivityPub which don't work very well on Mastodon, are completely broken on Pixelfed and Lemmy's dev is actively against. These features are things that facebook users are accustomed to, and some pre-facebook Fedizens really like the idea of.
If facebook then decide to cease federating, except with instagram, twitter and tumblr, me as a Mastodon and Pixelfed user simply doesn't care. They can vanish for all I care. I have a bountiful network of pre-facebook Fedi people already. I'm sure Shiny New Features will lure some people back to those abusive platforms, but a substantial majority of the current active user base on the Fedi are there because we despise being abused by social media companies. The developer communities behind the software that I use will stick with their parts of the spec, forking it if need be.
We'll do without the shiny features for now, and we have plenty of friends, or at the very least, plenty of friends yet to find on the platform. The Fedi already has its critical mass of users, developer communities, and servers, using and creating the platforms for reasons which are purposefully against the abusive social media's aims. They will carry the current spec off on their own if they need to.
> If facebook did join and suddenly we have a huge number of new people to talk to, many servers will block facebook on sight, and so will many individual users. So they'll never interact or be part of it from day one.
Well, the debate about whether to preemptively block Meta, which has been raging among Mastodon users, is precisely the context in which the article was written: "if Meta joins the Fediverse, Meta will be the only one winning. In fact, reactions show that they are already winning: the Fediverse is split between blocking Meta or not."
That split is only a split in one sense. If me, on Fosstodon which blocks facebook, wants to read your posts on a server that doesn't block, we are not impeded.
That depends on whether or not instance blocks are transitive.
There's a suggestion made by some, myself included, that instances which fail to block Facebook should also be blocked. That is, costs of defection are increased.
It looks like we're back at some Open Source Licensing-like schema : an implementer should only be able to "extend" an open protocol if its extensions are themselves open !
I'm not sure how it can be done legally binding... Maybe with IP on the protocol himself (as a technology) or with TradeMark (any reference to the protocol is forbidden without strong conformance to the protocol). OSS really need to level up the legal game
Things like these are a liability for open source volunteers. I wouldn't want to volunteer in open source for no payment if I could be sued for changing anything. It needs to define open. Are third party captchas open? Is requiring facebook account open? Is closed AI based spam control open?
Actually, it would be exactly the same as some kind of (viral) Apache Licence: you can extend the protocol ONLY if your extension is open source too
It already worked (more or less) for software... why wouldn't it work for open protocol ? And it would avoid the "embrasse, extend, extinct" strategy used by Microsoft or Google to transform an open protocol into a closed proprietary using extension and the size of their user base...
I am not sure open source licenses would help, because the value of various platform came more from the data that they run with, and not so much the code. Especially with the increase use of AI, where there is a lot of value in the models, and those are not necessarily subject to redistribution clauses of open source licenses.
And if there were a license that says "you must also share all your data", it would imply compliant services can not hold private data, which makes it undesirable to companies and users alike.
Because it doesn't really make any sense. I can make my software compatible with yours completely against your will, and I can extend my software as I wish.
I came here just to share my appreciation to the writing. You beat me.
What a wonderful read. Very insightful. I had already read about this strategy before, but the way it is explained, the first-hand examples, and the depiction of what the true goals of decentralized networks should be is extremely clear and insightful.
It's very counter-intuitive to understand how adoption can go against the success of a software project, and it's also very easy to think that adoption is the goal, when in reality, maintaining (or organically evolving) the ethos of the software is the actual goal.
I wish I knew more people interested in reading what this writing talks about.
Yes. There are those who have read up on the history of what 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish' means and that the methods are different over the years and cleverly hidden by companies like Google, Meta and especially Microsoft but the strategy has always been the same.
That applies here in this case. But unfortunately, you have Mastodon cheerleaders here who are asking for 'adoption' without knowing the trade-off of instance centralization and continue to blindly accept companies like Meta as a win for 'adoption'; unbeknownst to them signing up and bound to NDAs and getting themselves extinguished as Threads will add more features unavailable on many instances and then it becomes the biggest ActivityPub-compatible network that the users will use.
The warning from this article is totally accurate and Meta is already winning before many techies here have started to realize this.
Many words written and little mention of the big problem with decentralization: without an economic model you can’t afford the incredible amount of effort required to make software usable for non-techies.
Computers are by default very hard to use. Techies don’t notice this because they know how to use computers well.
As a result techies think software is done when they can use it. It’s nowhere near done. Not even close.
Getting software working is often like 5% of the effort. The other 95% is polishing, and polishing, and going through 50 design iterations, and polishing more, and supporting a bunch of platforms with all their quirks, and polishing…
All companies have to do is create an easier to use alternative and a migration path. Then when enough people migrate, close the path. Done.
It’s all about UX.
I like the fediverse and use it, but if I didn’t understand how it worked I’d find it very confusing. Understanding how it works is easy when you have a network protocol background but without that the way users and instances and federation work is not obvious at all. That alone is “full stop” for the vast majority of people.
“I made an account… why can’t I log in?” “You aren’t on the right instance.” “Huh? What’s an instance?” “It’s a server that networks with other mastodon servers…” “So I need an instance?” “No you just need to go to the right one.” “How do I find it?” “It’s the one you made an account on.” “But I made my account on Mastodon…”
The article is not decent because the premise "niche protocol is still niche after big player dumped using it" it's blatantly obvious. It's just another trite "X is dead, netcraft confirms it" juxtaposition of maybes and what ifs.
> "niche protocol is still niche after big player dumped using it"
I'm pretty sure it's more: "growing niche protocol collapsed to near invisibility after big player reimplemented it, extended it, then broke compatibility"
If we're making up quotes, they might as well reflect the article.
The article is about how XMPP is a foreshadowing for what's going to happen to the Fediverse after Meta will enter the space.
What I'm saying is that hobbyists (like me) that develop fediverse software will probably be there _after_ meta gets bored and finds reasons to drop out, which is pretty much what happened to XMPP. And that it does not mean the death of anything.
You miss the possibility that when all the compatibility problems start to happen, a possible organic adoption (by other than hobbyists) would be hampered.
At the same time, hobbyists that could be joining the network because of their initial ethos, would also refrain from joining given the blur and dilution of its values.
> And because there were far more Google talk users than "true XMPP" users, there was little room for "not caring about Google talk users".
Sounds like it was already centralized even before Google stopped supporting XMPP.
The truth is that users do t really care about decentralization, they care about features, ease of use, and quality of implementation.
Once a majority of the uses move single implementation of the protocol, the single implementation protocol itself becomes more important than the standard.
But most of all, users care about talking to their friends. You could have all the features and amazing UX but if their friends are using tin cans and wet wire, that's what they will turn to. Network effect trumps all. Features and UX are marketing, which at most can help you bootstrap to the point where network effect kicks in.
I don't get this. People are saying Meta will do the same thing when Threads or whatever they call it comes online.
Looking at the networks themselves, there are massive differences in user numbers. Nobody but a few geeks used XMPP. Nobody but a few geeks use Mastodon, Mastodon could never even handle all Twitter users moving over. Then there's a huge influx of normal people into the network because a big company experiments with being friendly with open standards. A system used by tend of thousands is joined by millions.
When those millions move away, the old protocol isn't killed. We're still in the situation that nobody but a bunch of geeks use XMPP. Some of those geeks don't care enough and stick with what works (though I doubt they've landed on Google Chat).
Those millions brought in by Google and Facebook didn't care about the federated nature of an extensible messaging protocol, they wanted to talk to their friends. Some of their friends had weird usernames that didn't end in gmail.com or facebook.com, that's the normal user experience.
XMPP sucked as a messaging tool and even today it still sucks because there are only a few clients out there that actually support basic group chat that everyone expects these days. Mastodon sucks because of usability problems (try following a user from a linked thread, the weird popup system is user hostile at the very least).
When some big company joins your network, you'll have to find a way to keep up with it or it'll leave again. Threads will join Mastodon, probably stir up some drama, and then defederate. Mastodon will then quickly go back to its natural state, a slightly smaller network of servers like it is now.
If your users jump ship because the competition made a better version, that's not killing your protocol. That's highlighting the problems with your current protocol, and your dependence on someone else's customer base to keep your project popular.
7 million 'created' accounts throughout its entire existence in 8 years is hardly interesting or early days. The point of the OP still stands that "Nobody but a few geeks use Mastodon, Mastodon could never even handle all Twitter users moving over."
Even when Meta connects Threads to ActivityPub, it is a magnificent win for centralization and a complete nightmare for Mastodon and 'federation' and there is nothing they can do to stop it other than just de-federate and stay irrelevant.
This post exactly highlights the same thing on what happened to XMPP, but worse. Especially even when admins of other large Mastodon instances can be corrupted by larger companies like Meta with money, NDAs and contracts to allow these instances to federate with Meta. This is the typical 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish' strategy all over again.
As I said before: "Instagram's success on ActivityPub is also Mastodon's nightmare and it tends to more centralization." [0] A paradox that is unavoidable for Mastodon without accounting for its UX failures and risking more centralization to the point where Meta is already winning after when other companies can still 'buy' out admins of very large instances. [1]
Interesting is a matter of perspective, but I've noticed over weeks and months that your HN account "rvz" has been constantly commenting about Mastodon, so you appear to be very interested, despite your claim to the contrary. ;-)
> early days
logicprog didn't say it was early days.
> Nobody but a few geeks use Mastodon
The issue is with "few". Millions of people aren't a few. Perhaps Mastodon users are all or mostly "geeks", i.e., technically sophisticated, but let's not pretend there aren't millions of users. Yes, the number is small in comparison to Twitter and Instagram, but it's large in absolute terms.
> Mastodon could never even handle all Twitter users moving over.
This is true.
Some Twitter migrants to Mastodon want to bring everyone along. Others, such as myself, are happy to leave all of the celebrities, politicians, and trolls behind. My community, Apple developers, for whom I originally joined Twitter back in the day, have almost all migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, and my Mastodon feed is as active as my Twitter feed ever was, while my Twitter feed is now largely dead.
> let's not pretend there aren't millions of users.
Is there evidence that there are over a million regular users? I'd actually bet there aren't. I'd bet it wasn't even close until the twitter media panic.
> Another fan and avid reader of my comment history, deciding to comment directly to me about it.
No, we both just happen to read and comment on a lot of Mastodon stories here, myself because I'm a Mastodon user, and you because... well, I don't understand your obsession with Mastodon. Anyway, I have a pretty good memory, and I remember discussing/arguing with you before in the comments of Mastodon stories.
> The graph omits the entire history of Mastodon users before Oct. 2022, and it has been around since 2016. Not 2022. Thus, It is not early days and my point still stands.
Again, nobody here said it was early days, so your point has no point.
> That's the problem with that figure and it is still unimpressive in 8 years.
"unimpressive" is a matter of opinion and perspective. I'm impressed that most of my community has migrated. This didn't happen with app.net back in the 2010s, unfortunately, which I'm still sad about and consider a missed opportunity, because app.net was superior to Mastodon in a number of ways.
I never wanted 220M people to migrate to Mastodon. You can cackle to yourself that Mastodon didn't become the "New Twitter", and perhaps some people out there in the world believed it would be, but I'm not one of them, and nobody here appears to be one, so you're just inserting irrelevant dunks against your perceived foes into this discussion.
Mastodon is not a failure for not having become the New Twitter, with hundreds of millions of users. I see no indication that Eugen Rochko ever had that goal in mind. Mastodon is a thriving community. It's a much smaller community than Twitter, which is fine and good. Mastodon is certainly not perfect, and it could use some improvements, but IMO attracting hundreds of millions of users would wreck everything that's good about it.
> I'm not the one cheerleading over any mass Twitter migrations to Mastodon with normal users
Again you keep rambling, obsessed about this thing that's irrelevant to the linked article and the comments here.
> as much as your are or using anecdotes and fantasies which can be easily dismissed.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
> we both know that logicprog didn't show the whole timeline since 2016.
Yes, logicprog gave the link https://mastodon-analytics.com/ that has stats from Oct 22 to June 23, which is not the full history of Mastodon. But so what? logicprog didn't make any historical claims. I'm guessing that logicprog perhaps just googled for that link, and it came up in the search results. I have no insight into the design of that website.
> You just don't like the fact that what I said is true.
I don't even understand what I'm supposed to not like? I've already stated clearly, several times that I like the fact that Mastodon is much smaller than Twitter.
> Mastodon users (and its die hards) know that it has been there for 7 - 8 years.
Yes, this is an indisputable empirical fact. So what?
> Then 'finally' other users took a look at it in November 2022, left and didn't look back hence the 'slump' in users.
I personally joined in late 2022 and stayed.
> It is still unimpressive. In comparison, Nostr has 3M total signed up in less than a year. [0]
I don't quite understand how nostr defines "users", but in any case, from your own link:
Users: 318,981
Trusted users: 82,323
Daily active users: between 7000 and 9000
Weekly active users: between 18,000 and 20,000
And the retention of users, 30 days after signup is pretty close to 0%. So I'm at a total loss about what you're celebrating.
> Now when tested in November 2022, normal users tried it, weren't impressed and left
It's not clear that "normal" users even tried it. Mastodon never had 200 million accounts at any time, or anywhere close to that number.
By the way, lots of people also try Twitter and abandon it. That's par for the course on any social network.
> In principle, it is a failure. Even Eugen knows this paradox. Following the UX failure of being unable to onboard normal users from Twitter to Mastodon, they chose a 'default instance' to sign up in the official mobile app.
I wouldn't say that's an in principle failure. It's an issue, to be sure, and as I said, Mastodon "could use some improvements". But the goal was never to migrate and onboard every Twitter user, so the onboarding difficulties don't make the project a failure. It's a thriving community nonetheless.
> The problem is however, whilst everyone was too focused on Twitter's death which didn't happen last year
> You seems to be a bit frustrated yourself by the fact that there was little to no such adoption in the first place after showing those links right in front of you.
How many times do I have to say that I'm happy with the current size of Mastodon?
> I thought you said you had a 'good memory'?
This has nothing to do with memory. You made vague, almost nonsensical accusations.
> We all know that the vast majority of normal users (not techies, developers, etc) have tried it, aired their frustrations and left and didn't stick around.
Absurdly false. There's no evidence whatsoever that hundreds of millions of people have tried Mastodon. That's such a bizarre claim, especially since you continue to talk about how you think the total number of Mastodon accounts ever created is low.
> But clearly you refuse to acknowledge that and continue to ignore the centralization and corruption risks with Meta's backroom NDAs with instance admins.
This may be the first relevant thing you've said. Except I'm 100% opposed to Facebook's P92 project.
> Yet the majority of the normal users (220M+) on Twitter took a look at Mastodon, tried it, left and never looked back again.
Whether they "looked" at Mastodon, I couldn't say (and neither can you), but I can say that the majority of Twitter users didn't try it.
Do 200M people even have the motivation to try Mastodon?
> But for perspective of that figure, it seems that Nostr reached that 'total number' quicker than Mastodon did in less than 7 years.
There's an obvious reason for that, the elephant in the room. The Mastodon and Nostr signups both mostly occurred after Elon Musk acquired Twitter.
> Is that why you haven't replied to this comment [1] who is asking whether if there is even evidence of 'over a million regular users?' (non-techies) using it?
Why do you take "regular" from the other commenter to mean "non-techie" as opposed to "frequent"?
According to https://joinmastodon.org/about there are 1.2M monthly active users. There are no demographic surveys of Mastodon, so I have no idea how many are "techie" or "non-techie", nor do I care.
> Mastodon was meant to challenge that during the so-called #TwitterMigration outrage as that alternative for normal users.
What do you mean Mastodon was "meant" for that? As you continue to say, Mastodon was created in 2016. The so-called #TwitterMigration was a result of Elon Musk acquiring Twitter in 2022. Unless you're claiming that Eugen Rochko magically predicted this acquisition 6 years prior, Mastodon was not meant for that.
The simple fact is that after Musk acquired Twitter, a significant number of people including myself were looking for an alternative to Twitter, and they found it with Mastodon. You seem overly concerned about what happened with Mastodon from 2016-2021, but I don't really care about that. Yes, Mastodon had relatively low adoption before the Musk acquisition. So what?
> given that you're were part of the Twitter collapse nonsense on HN last year. But you knew that already.
You: Yet the majority of the normal users (220M+) on Twitter took a look at Mastodon, tried it, left and never looked back again.
Me: Absurdly false.
You: Exactly.
This is truly an insane "discussion".
> I already said that in my first comment, but perhaps you finally decided to read what the actual problem is.
> You can be opposed to it, but that won't stop the further centralization and Instagram's dominance in the 'Fediverse', already being compromised in the process especially when they are already winning.
I already read this in the linked article: "if Meta joins the Fediverse, Meta will be the only one winning. In fact, reactions show that they are already winning". You've added absolutely nothing new or enlightening.
> Seems to me that this other commenter is interested in how many users are regular, i.e 'non-technical' and also signed up to Mastodon.
You have no idea either way.
> For 'normal users', it is seen as the 'alternative' to Twitter. During the #TwitterMigration of 2022 and even before Elon acquired the company.
I suspect that most weren't even aware of its existence.
> 'Significant' is 1.2 million MAU
Yes.
> when compared to 450M MAUs still sitting on Twitter?
I don't feel the need to compare.
> especially when you are still unable to show verifiable data around Mastodon daily active users.
I don't know whether that data is even collected. I'm not responsible for Mastodon data collection.
> Henceforth, the majority of Twitter's users don't care
I don't care.
> I do not need to cite, since you already know you were part of the 'everyone' camp who was talking about Twitter's collapse on HN.
I don't know any such thing, because it's false. I do know that your accusation against me here is in gross violation of the HN guidelines, and I also know that this discussion is becoming extremely tedious and futile, so let's just end it now.
One more thing though: Nobody is trapped on Twitter. They don't need Mastodon or any Twitter alternative to "rescue" them. Mastodon didn't "fail" them. If they want to leave, they can simply stop using Twitter and spend their free time in another way. I'm old enough that the majority of my life predated the existence of Twitter, and it was fine.
I was referring to the XMPP users before Google started federating. Twitter's slow descent into online hell has made Mastodon significantly more popular.
However, there may be 7 million users, but about 2 million still use the platform at all. Two million people is a lot of people, but compared to Twitter's 240 million user accounts and Instagram's 2350 million user accounts the Fediverse is a spec of dust.
Lucky for most of us who enjoy those platforms, two million people is plenty. Like all the bumper stickers in my town say, "BEND SUCKS. DON'T MOVE HERE."
> Those millions brought in by Google and Facebook didn't care about the federated nature of an extensible messaging protocol, they wanted to talk to their friends.
Yes, and instead of using "true XMPP" to talk to their friends and contribute to its growth, Google diverted that flow of new users into its own product. Sure the growth would have been far slower without Google, but this way Google managed to steal a few users that would have joined XMPP even without Google, on the false promise of compatibility.
Instead of slow, healthy growth, what happened was fast, parasitic growth, and on top of it all it added a maintenance burden for XMPP developers trying to maintain compatibility with Google.
You say XMPP was small - that's the point! To kill competitors before they become a threat.
If Google knew how to kill a competitor's messaging platform they wouldn't be starting two new chat apps every year. I don't believe that Google decided to pick XMPP because it formed an actual threat; rather, XMPP was open source, freely available, and had a whole bunch of code all ready to go. Why invent your own if there's a free, documented protocol already out there?
WhatsApp picked XMPP as a basis for their messaging infrastructure when it started out. It never even bothered to federate with XMPP, but the technology still worked. XMPP's miserable state isn't some evil Google plot, it's a lack of user interest and a failure to effectively market the protocol. Unlike previous attempts, WhatsApp actually took off, easily overtaking Google's own fledgling messaging service, because it knew what people wanted: "chat without SMS charges". This left some space in other countries where SMS was essentially free, but nobody managed to capture interest in XMPP there either.
I know one XMPP client that everyone agrees is somewhat usable, Conversations, and it looks like development and design stopped somewhere around 2014. Absolutely nothing stood in the way of XMPP taking the place that Line, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, and all the others, but there was simply no interest in making a good product out of a federated service.
Matrix is trying again, with big companies using it instead of IRC, and it's struggling to survive in a world where Discord looks better and works better.
