So? Is your alternative free of mistakes and bias?

I don’t need opposing views on subjects, I need the most accurate one that’s the best researched and sourced.

Besides still needing to establish that a) wikipedia is bad today (as opposed to just flawed), you also need to establish b) what about this would entice people over from wikipedia and c) if it did succeed, then why wouldn’t whoever got into positions of power with wikipedia get into the same positions of power on the biggest instances?

Extend ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse with a very-usable app that provides additional functionality (initially the ability to follow everybody you’re following on Instagram, and to communicate with all Threads users) that isn’t available to the rest of the fediverse

That’s already available to Threads users regardless of whether or not they federate.

as well over time providing additional services and introducing incompatibilities and non-standard improvements to the protocol

kk, then defederate from them when that happens.

Exploit ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse by utilizing them for profit – and also using them selfishly for Meta’s own ends

This is a nonsense sentence that says nothing and makes no actual tangible point.

This is nothing but more hysteria.

You are arguing retroactively. Back then was a vastly different situation, and you really seem to be too young to understand that.

Stop being a gatekeeping asshat, you have no idea how old I was, and it’s patronizing and dumb as shit to claim that someone is young just cause they experienced a time period differently from you. Your memory and perception is not an infallible perfect record of major corporate and consumer trends.

You are arguing retroactively.

YES. Because we are not talking about what is going to happen with Lemmy. We’re talking about what DID happen with XMPP and Google Talk. We have the benefit of hindsight, and seeing that Jabber did not matter one iota compared to Gmail. If it did, you would be able to ask any person old enough to remember Jabber what they thought of it. You know what you’ll get? Blank stares.

Gmail and Google Talk had millions of users, XMPP only had millions of users when Google Talk decided to keep it alive by supporting it.

That Google Talk would have taken all those users and become the dominant chat platform over XMPP based ones, regardless of whether or not they used XMPP to start with. Google Talk was always going to outcompete Jabber / AOL / MSN messenger because those platforms stopped investing in user facing features.

You yourself said that the vast majority of users did not care about what protocol they used. They cared about using the chat app with the most user friendly interface, which was Google Talk.

XMPP is an implementation protocol, not a user facing feature.

Reading comprehension isn’t your strong suit is it?

Them also being a software developer doesn’t change the fact that their reasoning is based on a metaphor and not a technical detail.

No, it just takes having worked at meta and seen what they actually do. Your fear is boosting them into Gods that they are not.

Reality is not subjective. One of those things actually happened.

If you read both arguments and think that an obscure open source protocol had a chance in hell of taking on Google Talk when Google was in its heyday of public love, that’s fine, but that takes a lot more faith than believing that Google Char’s millions of users wanted to use Google chat, and weren’t using it because of the server communication protocol it implemented behind the scenes.

HOW is this blog post still being posted??? It’s debunked literally every single time someone posts this trash.

Google Talk did not kill XMPP. Google Talk had millions of users who wanted to use Google Talk and when Google switched the protocol away from XMPP, it became suddenly apparent that XMPP didn’t actually have many users and that felt like XMPP dying, when in reality Google Talk bringing in their millions of users was the only thing that had kept XMPP alive that long.

Yeah, and some of us are software engineers and IT admins who understand the technical working of what’s happening and can make informed and reasoned posts (like the one linked), instead of making decisions based off of inaccurate metaphors.

None of what you wrote argues against what I wrote. I didn’t say that open source projects can’t be successful, I pointed out that they do not have the same structural incentives to continue or to keep changing to suit their users.

There also haven’t been many open source consumer facing applications that have seen the success that backend and low level systems have. Largely because stuff like Linux / BSD / Bash / etc are built to serve specific functions with clear technical criteria that can be specified, met, and checked off a procurement list. Social networks and consumer facing applications on the other hand have to delight their users and keep them opening them up rather than any competitive distractions. That’s not a clear technical problem that an engineer can crank away at and implement, that’s an ongoing fuzzier problem that requires more stuff along the lines of continuous market research and product development.

And while yes, in some cases it’s just purely popularity and passion that drive open source projects, in many many many ongoing open source projects it’s in reality, corporations funding their development (directly or through employee eng time) because they’ve built some of their infrastructure on it and it’s cheaper to pool infrastructure resources than try to build their own version.

It’s a nice narrative that Reddit became Reddit just because it was this greatly built platform that served as the perfect forum for everything, but the reality is that during Reddit’s growth face they did a ton of stuff to juice usage, like create fake comments and manipulate upvote downvote counts to make it seem like more people were engaging with your stuff, etc. And Reddit still exists as a competitor that is actively trying to take Lemmy’s user base back. Don’t get me wrong, I’m here because I prefer a transparent, non-engagement driven algorithm and am doing my part to contribute here and not on Reddit, but I’m also not blind to the structural headwinds that Lemmy / the wider fediverse will have to overcome.

You know like 50% of new businesses fail within 5 years, right?

Yes, that is a remarkably low failure rate. 99.9% of open source projects sit unused and abandoned after 5 years.

those are more likely to fail because they’re run by one person who loses interest than because they don’t have a profit motive.

They’re run by one person because they don’t have a profit motive, so they don’t need to hire QA, market research etc. etc. All the parts of a software company that help to keep continuously developing their software and make sure users are happy.

Controversial and probably unpopular opinion:

• the biggest hurdle the fediverse faces is that it’s not run by a business with monetary incentives to make it more popular and doesn’t have any marketing / market research / product managers focused on gaining users.

I’m someone who hates advertising with a burning and seething passion, and I’m no lover of capitalism, but from a systemic standpoint there’s a reason most open source projects burn out and go nowhere, and for-profit businesses have a higher chance of survival, because there’s direct incentives (you know money/food) to keep making commercial software and increasing it’s user base, but there isn’t for hobbyist and open source software. Especially in the case of a social network that is only as valuable as the content and users on it, this might be a long term systemic issue.