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by fro0116 2656 days ago
I can absolutely imagine why existing tech companies would be interested if the protocol became so popular that they'd be stupid to ignore it and start from scratch with their own protocol, like XMPP was at one point.

I'd be more interested in seeing how they plan on preventing the whole Embrace, Extend, Extinguish thing pretty much every company pulled with their initially XMPP based chat apps that gained market share, turning them into back into closed silos.
1 comments
Arathorn 2656 days ago
Preventing the embrace, extend, extinguish manoeuvre that WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Talk, even Apple Push Notifications did with XMPP is indeed a tough one.

The best solutions we have right now are:

* Ensure there's enough value in the wider network (e.g. available services, integrations, bridges, public chatrooms) that you'd be taking a massive step backwards not to federate.

* Try to build the protocol to be capable enough that vendors don't feel that they have to fork and close it in order to make it do what they want.

I think it's mainly the first one that will make the difference. If there hadn't been such great content out there on the public internet, we might still be on AOL & Compuserve today.

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ge0rg 2656 days ago
The second point will only address the vendors that are actually interested in federation, not the ones that want to close down their silo. XMPP fifteen years ago is a prime example.

Regarding the first point, I'm not sure it will be ever possible to pull this off. The proprietary IM silos are many orders of magnitude larger than IRC, XMPP and Matrix taken together. You are doing a good job with promoting Matrix to nerds, and there will be _some_ value in being able to directly contact the French government (provided that they will allow federation from the public network, which I have a hard time imagining).

I think the only viable route today is to push for legislation (e.g. in the EU, in the context of ePrivacy / GDPR) that will force silo providers to open up their silos and to offer interop by means of standardized protocols. But even in this improbable case they will probably rather create their own rubber-stamped standards (remember Office Open XML) than follow what is already out there.

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