this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Both are open protocols for communication over the Internet. Both have been adopted by a large corporate interest.
Now, how are they different?
I asked how the circumstances are similar, not vague descriptions that suit your existing views. But sure.
XMPP was dogshit back in 2004. A good idea, but nowhere NEAR what it needed to be to actually get mainstream acceptance. ActivityPub is light years ahead.
There were very very few XMPP users in 2004. There are millions of ActivityPub users. If meta was to pull the plug on federation it wouldn’t kill ActivityPub, there would still be millions of us here. We joined Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon because we don’t want to live in a centrally controlled/owned social platform. That won’t change just because we can suddenly interact with Threads users. In fact, if anything, once Threads users hear that we get the same shit they do without the ads, they might decide to join us instead.
Google killing off XMPP integration didn’t kill XMPP. It did that all on its own.
It's not about pulling the plug. It's about introducing proprietary features that break communication, forcing people off of an independent server and onto Threads.
If most of your IRL friends are on Threads and your experience with them has gotten janky due to Meta fucking with the protocol, it's going to be very difficult to not switch over to Threads.
Oh, and good luck trying to get your friends to switch over to some indie server they've never heard of. If you can do that, then you should run for president.
We are all here because we don’t want to be a part of a corporate controlled social platform. Threads theoretically making it more difficult to communicate with their users - something we can’t do at all today - is not going to suddenly change our minds.
If your friends are on Threads now and you’re on Activity Pub then that problem already exists. If they start seeing all sorts of cool content - without any ads - coming from “that Lemmy thing” then yes absolutely a good number will switch. Not all, because some people are lazy, or don’t care, or fearful of different technology, but that’s not going to change just because Threads is federated.