Cautionary tale about letting big companies on federated communication protocols

This is a risk with federated protocols regardless of who operates them. OP’s suggestion of personally knowing all of the operators you interact with doesn’t scale. As I’ve said in other discussions: scaling isn’t required. You can intentionally choose to keep your community small, but you have to admit that’s exclusionary. You’re looking for a solution for your in group (since everyone is assumed to know their operator), and that’s never going to scale to a large international audience.<p>What Google has done with chat and a hundred other products is atrocious, but when it involves federation it’s something any negligent, malicious, or just opinionated operator could do at any time. Mastodon is pretty full of instance blocking drama already.<p>I hope a federated protocol can survive in a world of asymmetric operators. Email has done … ok. Jabber less so. Here’s hoping mastodon becomes a gold standard.

I had an experience similar to that. Many of my friends signed up for Google Chat back in the early aughts, so I got myself an account and added it to my IM client.<p>For a couple years, everything was great... but then, over the course of a few months, I got a weird, uncomfortable feeling like some of my friends might be shunning or excluding me. I&#x27;d hear about events having happened which nobody had bothered inviting me to, or I&#x27;d email people I thought I was close to and they wouldn&#x27;t respond at all. Just odd.<p>Eventually someone asked me why <i>I</i> wasn&#x27;t responding to <i>their</i> emails, which I had never received, and we worked out the mystery. Google, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to integrate Google Chat into GMail. As part of this process, they integrated the account databases (this was years before the unified Google Account came along), and as part of <i>that</i> process, they created a new GMail account for every Google Chat user who didn&#x27;t already have one.<p>In a forehead-slapping bit of hubris, they then inserted this new &lt;my-gtalk-handle@gmail.com&gt; address into all of my GMail-using friends&#x27; address books, where it would pop up in place of my <i>actual</i> email address whenever someone typed my name in the &quot;To&quot; line, and voila: <i>months of messages</i> were silently diverted into a spurious account I didn&#x27;t know about and never wanted.<p>I have never used GMail, ever, but that zombie Google Talk address haunts my friends&#x27; address books to this day. Just a couple of weeks ago, a friend wondered why I hadn&#x27;t responded to his holiday party invitation... sure enough, @gmail.com had swiped the message, and I&#x27;d never seen it.

This exact discussion was already exhausted the previous time Threads was announced.<p>I&#x27;m going to repeat now what I was saying three months ago: XMPP is fine now, as it was before Google Talk was a thing. It was a niche protocol for niche people, it remained a niche protocol for niche people.<p>Assuming that it expired just because Google Talk ceased to exist is just a fallacy.

Quite a few mastodon instances have done this in reverse already -- this is hardly a pathology specific to big companies (however odious I found Google&#x27;s action to be).

Somehow, even with the embarrassment of (fragmented) IM riches, status as a service eludes us. I miss finger and ytalk.

Is this description accurate? I remember when Google Talk did XMPP, and know that stopped. Was it a gradual&#x2F;unexplainable change?

The people who move to Threads are those who are being deceived, not the people who remain in federation networks. Yet, you can&#x27;t expect Threads to commit resources to limiting its own growth. It&#x27;s naive to think that it would.

Oh, I thought that was going to be about Google&#x27;s takeover of USENET.