Mastodawn

Evan Prodromou Jul 9, 2023

I am not open to your ahistorical take on Google Chat and XMPP.

Google didn't do anything wrong by using an open standard.

They didn't do anything wrong by building a good interface that people liked to use.

And they didn't do anything wrong by disconnecting from the network when the spam and harassment outweighed the benefit to their users.

We, the XMPP community, failed to capitalize on success by diversifying the network. It's our own fault not enough nodes were there.

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Evan Prodromou Jul 9, 2023

If you'd like to draw some conclusions about ActivityPub from this, it should not be that a network should disallow supernodes, but that we have to counterbalance them with a wide diversity of other nodes of different sizes with different value propositions.

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Chris Jul 10, 2023

@evan If this is the conclusion we should draw, is there any case of an open protocol where it has played out this way? Where a flourishing ecosystem of small nodes successfully counter-balanced the big ones and everyone is still free to spin up new nodes and enter the ecosystem? Genuinely curious, because I haven't found a auch a case, but I'm not around that long.

@marcelweiss

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wakest likes your bugs ⁂Jul 10, 2023

@cmw @evan @marcelweiss I would say the best case for this is the word wide web itself.

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Chris

@liaizon @evan @marcelweiss that's a good point. It is a collection of protocols rather than one and a number of them have in turn been somewhat oligopolized, but as long as you play by the rules of the established players, you can participate.