Don't forget the biggest corporate takeover of them all: HTML, which is now effectively owned by Apple, Google, and Microsoft via WHATWG and their web browser dominance.<p>See also <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854114">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854114</a> and <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36862494">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36862494</a>
Google didn't kill RSS. If RSS was so great, there were plenty of readers available that people could have jumped to. RSS died because it became yet another channel for ad delivery and shitty content.<p>XMPP wasn't killed by Facebook either. XMPP never really caught on in the first place. Not in the way RSS did. IIRC, XMPP started because people were using 20 different chatting apps which were basically the same app under a different banner (icq, msn, yahoo, etc.). And it was a pain. People used aggregators to connect to all these different networks at once. And so, the Jabber guy thought it could be good to have a protocol so that people can use the app they wanted to connect to a single network. But that never happened in practice. Facebook may have built a bridge to implement XMPP, just in case it lifted off. But once it was clear that XMPP wasn't going anywhere, it made sense to dump it. And then whatsapp came along, and it was a vastly superior chat app, and people used that and that was it.<p>Meta's Thread may be different. Because this time, they probably know a little better. Thread connecting to Mastodon is a clear way for them to fill their feeds with desillusioned ex-Twitter users' content. So I am all for the blocking of Thread.
A federated protocol on its own is not stable. As a matter of hardening these protocols against EEE attacks, federated protocol designs probably need to bake in a mechanism which provides incentives for people to run their own servers. I'm not sure exactly how you'd do this in a way which avoids Sybil attacks and doesn't require cooking the planet. Ideally you'd want something like granting network privileges to a server proportional to the log of its user base?
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