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Aurynn Shaw

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 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.

@dznz @aurynn The PM who pulled that off is still inordinately proud of that.

@dznz @aurynn yes, both Facebook and Google helped

@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.

@aurynn
@owen

there are already "secure email" services that do nothing more than email the new user a link to some proprietary vendor web service

big in health care, is where I've seen it

@idlestate @aurynn @owen

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.

@jwsgeek

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.)

@aurynn

@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...

@wonka @idlestate @aurynn @owen I used to live there. Then there was this vote. Enforcement wasn't exactly serious even before we left.

@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...

@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...

@owen @aurynn
I see that with my Yahoo account, it insist that I should "stop using the legacy insecure connection" aka SMTP.

@owen @aurynn oh, maybe we are noticing now :)

@owen @aurynn
To a large extent this has already happened

@owen @aurynn
I already have difficulties sending emails to gmail addresses from my address tied to my family domain name.

@owen @aurynn

pretty sure this has already happened; Gmail's occasional disappearing/delaying of SMTP messages is a documented thing

it's just not yet reached the "extend SMTP" stage (except perhaps internally to the 'plex)

@owen @aurynn and yet, email will still work...bc it's an open W3C approved standard, just like ActivityPub.

Sony tried to make CDs that weren't CDs too...didn't work out well for them.

@owen @jwz @aurynn if there's one thing that Google is good at, it's killing things. Facebook is only good at killing things if they're an oppressed minority.

@owen @aurynn More likely google will just get bored of email and drop the product with less than 30 days notice.

@aurynn Embrace & extinguish

@aurynn Isn't it as easy as blocking the instance and that's it? I'm genuinely asking.

@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.

@aurynn No, of course if I decide by my own to do it, no. If a significant number of instances do, it just seems pointless for Facebook to try to join.

I can't see any technical reason to reasonably not letting them join, then I guess is up for the Fediverse to decide.

If the Big Tech starts stepping in, I know what I need to do what my instance and it is not just banning.

@NiLace I see you did not live through XMPP getting destroyed by Google

@aurynn As matter of fact, I did. XMPP is still out there to be used, the way I see it we are just not choosing it (me at least).

@NiLace And why aren't we choosing it?

@aurynn In my particular case, I moved from XMPP to Matrix a couple of years ago. But to be honest, the amount of people that were on XMPP before Google decided that they were going to steal open-source job and create their own thing (that later abandoned) was not that significant.

At that time, the clients for XMPP left to be desired, the user community was quite scarce and the general awareness of what it was, was somewhat limited.

I hope it is not the same scenario with the Fediverse.

However, my point was that when you release open source technology there is no way of prohibiting corporations to take advantage of it so, at least in my opinion, all boils down to the ethos and choices of the current users.

If Meta, FaceBook or any other big tech company lands on the fediverse and its user deal with it and accept it... well that's it. Not much to do about it. Doesn't matter how much specific individuals don't like it, has happened before and will happen again.

For me it is always the community what gives a chance.

The community in the Fediverse seems to have grown solid. Enough for that kind of step? No idea, to be honest.

What I can tell you is that I don't degoogle my phone and use every technical resource I know and have at hand to share any space with the Big Tech companies. If they land, I will simply shut down my instance.
@aurynn

Open source job? My English is funny sometimes (not my mother tongue language sorry). I, of course, mean work and am very aware they did not *steal* anything.

@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.

@aurynn

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 @aurynn the Digital Markets Act may help here

@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