people who are opining that Facebook joining the fedi is okay didn't live through Google killing XMPP. Or anything Microsoft ever did.
@aurynn Didn't facebook help kill xmpp too?
@PetraOleum @aurynn To a much lesser extent.
@PetraOleum @aurynn they both helped kill both XMPP and RSS. The XMPP case is particularly cogent because the rhetoric used at the time was exactly the same used now for AP
@aurynn
Oh thank you!
I'm getting tired of people saying that it's great that big corporations are coming.
@aurynn killing XMPP was a group effort, wasn't it? Embrace and extinguish.
@aurynn I maintain that the _millisecond_ that some product manager at google believes that federation is no longer necessary for the gmail business, smtp interoperability will be replaced by some kind of (probably initially SMTP-shaped) "submit mail to gmail" interface that they can then extend arbitrarily.
@owen yuuuup
Secure inbox web pages are a matter of security for things like HIPAA compliance. Medical info on an open channel like SMTP being collected would be really bad.
Yes, if PGP had caught on more it would have helped mitigate, but instead this is the way to keep such data always secure in transit.
feeling a little mansplained by all that.
as they say: "I am aware"
my point is that they specifically call it "email" sometimes, so that the scenario @owen describes is already playing out now beyond Google
(I was less explicit about it earlier so I'll say it now: It has almost nothing to do with the protocols we've used now for several decades to which we usually attach the term.)
@idlestate @owen @aurynn It was not my intent. This public thread has multiple members and quite a few posts that have boosted. I was writing more for the 'general audience', even if mastodon considers it a direct reply to you personally.
I apologize that it came out that way.
@idlestate @aurynn @owen Also comes with a license that requires patients to sign away liability before you can read it...
@flippac @idlestate
That's certainly illegal in the EU.
@wonka @idlestate @aurynn @owen I used to live there. Then there was this vote. Enforcement wasn't exactly serious even before we left.
@flippac @idlestate @aurynn @owen Maybe because no one sued?
@wonka @idlestate @aurynn @owen Maybe because there's a step before that involving an underfunded regulatory body that has a habit of hiring people who were in public sector compliance roles first.
One of us lives here...
@flippac Well, I live in Lübeck, Germany...
@idlestate @aurynn @owen
@wonka @idlestate @aurynn @owen And I live in Scotland. The K in UK stands for Korruption, unfortunately.
(Also: plenty of medical service providers serve populations that can't afford to sue, here and elsewhere... I've made successful use of data protection law, but this is one of those things that currently exist to risk pool against people in general doing something about it)
@idlestate@toot.cat @aurynn@cloudisland.nz @owen@mastodon.transneptune.net Yup, and they don't understand (or pretend not to) when I complained that it is, actually, secure...
@aurynn Embrace & extinguish
@NiLace Facebook coming in will be aiming to harvest all the interaction data they can, since they're an advertising company and they want to be able to sell that.
You blocking their instance personally doesn't stop that.
@NiLace I see you did not live through XMPP getting destroyed by Google
@NiLace And why aren't we choosing it?
@NiLace @aurynn my luke-warm take is that XMPP was interesting. I used and stayed with it for ages, running Prosody and Conversations on Android. With a few things like OMEMO, Carbons and MAM, it's more or less functionally equivalent to Matrix. But there were only 3 other people who actively used it, and the Foundation missed the boat spending years doing pretty much nothing, especially about approving the XEPs needed to drag it into the 21st Century, much less creating a decent client.
@NiLace @aurynn Yeah, the key differences I can see between what happened to XMPP and what could happen to ActivityPub are:
1. There is a much larger, growing userbase that utilizes services built on ActivityPub right now. It may still be fairly insignificant compared to the kinds of numbers the likes of Meta could be able to bring though.
2. There seem to be more than one large social media company interested in federation
3. Fediblock is a thing
I don't know if this will make a difference?
@NiLace @aurynn That said, I didn't like it at all when Google turned off federation with Jabber/XMPP and it did show that they had no commitment to the open internet anymore. I'm not sure Google really did anything to kill Jabber though? My recollection is that people using anything other than Google Talk was always a tiny group and the only reason Google's chat stuff really took off was Android.
@aurynn @NiLace I did not see the XMPP being killed by Google stuff, but for me the reasons I don't use it are
1. all the clients I've tried suck
2. it uses IRC-style formatting where wrapping in "*" makes the text bold and "_" makes it italic rathee than markdown-formatting where "*" makes it italic and "**" makes it bold.
3. maybe more reasons, but never got to use it enough to come up with more.
4. Matrix exist and is being actively developed and has devs on-board and decent clients.
@aurynn now i know next years april fools joke.
@aurynn Nobody remember the Halloween Memo.
@drwho History doomed to be repeated etc
@aurynn so annoying when that was still happening: Google used established XMPP standards for plain text messages and nothing else, but they managed to convince everyone it was all the other implementations that were broken.
@aurynn Google is also in the process of killing email, but nobody seems to have noticed yet.
@jonathanharker @aurynn why should set their goals so low, why not destroy all SMTP
@jonathanharker @aurynn Microsoft with their outlook.com & hotmail.com blocking legit email from those that don't send enough email seems to be ahead of Google in terms of destroying it.
Ah yes
Additional Microsoft IIS HTTP status codes 400.7 or 401.502 or Exchange’s SMTP 550 5.2.0 to make the existing codes much more difficult to interpret.
@acyberexpert can't tell if you're being serious or sarcastic here?
@aurynn
Those additional status codes to extend existing RFC standards were a nightmare.
I don’t think they’ll be any better this time.
@aurynn I like to think that if the EU can force Apple to use USB-C, they could have the resources & commitment to force commercial soc. media platforms to use open protocols
OTOH, Google Facebook Microsoft
@ajft USB C is a shitty idea on so many levels… There's much more better solution…
No thanks, I'd rather not have facecrap and twitter come and pollute ActivityPub, with their non-standard proprietary crap, intrusive data collection and marketing spam. Let alone the toxic way their "publication" systems work…
@aurynn Microsoft lost.