But inherently, I’m missing the majority of users by only being able to post to one. I.E., I posted to AskLemmy@lemmy.ml (which had 3k users)
3k from your instance
The whole article is good. I was about to quote this part.
What Google did to XMPP was not new. In fact, in 1998, Microsoft engineer Vinod Vallopllil explicitly wrote a text titled “Blunting OSS attacks” where he suggested to “de-commoditize protocols & applications […]. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS project’s entry into the market.”
Microsoft put that theory in practice with the release of Windows 2000 which offered support for the Kerberos security protocol. But that protocol was extended. The specifications of those extensions could be freely downloaded but required to accept a license which forbid you to implement those extensions. As soon as you clicked “OK”, you could not work on any open source version of Kerberos. The goal was explicitly to kill any competing networking project such as Samba.
We will need to be very vigilent with how things proceed here.
It was even open source at one point.