Personally I think it's more an "embrace, extend, and exploit" approach; a decentralized model could work well for Meta, for example if they do revenue-sharing on ads hosted by other instances (think Disney or LA Lakers).
In my personal (subjective) opinion, XMPP died because of entirely different primary reason: it, by design, had trouble working on mobile devices. Keeping the connection was either battery-expensive or outright impossible, and using OS native push notifications had significant barriers. At the very least, that's why I stopped.
It's not like Google had "extinguished" anything, it's more like the "largest server went uncooperative and removed themselves". Sucked for people who were able to chat before and got separated, but I disagree with painting this as some sort of fatal blow.
I don't think there's some statistics on reasons why people stopped using XMPP, but I don't believe Google is the reason for it. I'd speculate that it just coincided with the beginning of the smartphone era and this whole "Google killed XMPP" is a convenient myth.
Agreed that these other issues were a problem for XMPP. Christina Warren made this exact point on Mastodon a few hours ago -- in response to a post from Evan Prodromou that talked about the role that spam and harassment played and how he and others in the XMPP community didn't diversify the network. So, there are multiple factors. That said, I still think the post I linked to is very much worth reading.
It is a valid opinion, and the events described there took place, I just - personally - don't believe the outcomes were caused by the events described, they feel more like coincidences to me. Although Google dropped XMPP at least partially for the same reasons it died - trouble with architecture that made it problematic mobile.
And the comparison is not fair. XMPP was meant to be extended, so complaining about the second "E" in "EEE" is IMHO questionable. Google left a bunch of useful XEPs and even a Free Software codebase (libjingle) that others still use to the day, and I don't see anything wrong with this (and I'm surely no fond of Google, but that's not something I'd bash them for). This is feels very different from what may possibly happen in the whole Meta/Threads/Fediverse/ActivityPub situation - I mean, it's not likely Meta starts contributing to Mastodon project or something. In my understanding, EEE is more applicable to Microsoft and IE (where it surely happened, and a lot) than to Google and XMPP.
IMHO the article is a good read to at the very least be familiar with the events and understand the argument - but personally I find myself disagreeing with the presented arguments, thinking it's quite a stretch. Of course, that's my own, purely subjective opinion.
Yeah when there are multiple causes it's hard to know how much each contributed.
AcitivityPub's also meant to be extended, there are FEPs, and it's likely that the working group will come up with a new version as well. That said there certainly are differences between XMPP and ActivityPub, most people say the ActivityPub ecosystem is significantly farther along than XMPP was.
I could imagine Meta doing an open-source AP server (and with a fresh start it would be cleaner base than Mastodon). I also wouldn't be surprised if the release a app building toolkit / framework / whatever ... there isn't a good one now, they do that stuff well, and as they introduce proprietary AP extensions then they toolkit is a good way to get people to adopt them. But it's very hard to know at this point, it's also possible it's just PR spin and they won't really invest in it. We shall see.
It's more that there is more to a complicated story than that, but that Google dropped it when it did surely was important at the time. To put it the other way around, had Google continued to run a federated chat, Android would have had first class support in no time. The fact that third party real time messaging never worked well in Android, and really bad in GApps, is related to this decision.
It's not like Google had "extinguished" anything, it's more like the "largest server went uncooperative and removed themselves". Sucked for people who were able to chat before and got separated, but I disagree with painting this as some sort of fatal blow.
I don't think there's some statistics on reasons why people stopped using XMPP, but I don't believe Google is the reason for it. I'd speculate that it just coincided with the beginning of the smartphone era and this whole "Google killed XMPP" is a convenient myth.