Graphical interfaces are documentation with buttons.
The web is the documentation layer of the internet. Hyperlinking makes it documentation with buttons. So the web is also the native graphical interface of the net.
Webmail made email the first social layer of the web.
The fediverse adds another social layer to the web. As does the matrix network.
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The jabber network seemed like a logical realtime social layer for the web. It almost was, when Goggle integrated open federation over XMPP with GMail's web chat, and experimented with extensions to add features like voice calls (Jingle) and collaboration (Wave).
But standards-friendly engineers like @rabble say Titter tried to federate over XMPP and couldn't stretch it to fit. Could Wave have worked?
XMPP social apps do exist, like Movim and Libervia. Could 2026 be the Year of Jabber?
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Correct.
There was no technical reason for this to not continue to work. Wave's federation was built on XMPP PubSub, but although much hyped, the federation bit was just one person working on it part-time, and not really following standards either.
I built a federation of about ~60 social networking sites at @mediamatic using XMPP PubSub, including ActivityStreams quite successfully.
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@ralphm
> I built a federation of about ~60 social networking sites at @mediamatic using XMPP PubSub
Intriguing. Did you know this @rabble? What were the obstacles you hit with XMPP at Titter? I was wondering as long ago as 2017 why @evan didn't build StatusNet on XMPP.
Did/ does this MediaMatic infrastructure interop with Movim and Libervia stuff? What's the UX of that like?
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@ralphm
> Wave's federation was built on XMPP PubSub, but although much hyped, the federation bit was just one person working on it part-time
I got the impression this was one of many 20% time projects at Goggle that died along with the company's engineer-driven culture when the bean counters took over. It moved to the Apache Foundation, but outside of a handful of exceptions, that seems to mostly be an elephant's graveyard where doomed projects go to die (OpenOffice).
The company I worked for (Mediamatic _Lab_, not the sister foundation that's still around) became defunct some time after I left in 2011, and transferred assets to another company. The federation unfortunately ceased functioning after. Movim and Libervia are younger.
@strypey @ralphm @evan @rabble wasn't at Twitter and wasn't involved in the xmpp implementation. After I left (in May 2008), my understanding is that the ops team made a half-hearted attempt to keep the xmpp service going, but didn't have the capacity to devote time to it, so abandoned it. Unfortunately, their messaging on it was "xmpp doesn't scale" which was patently false, but it poisoned the water.
The complexity of the XMPP standards didn't help matters, of course.
@blaine
> wasn't at Twitter and wasn't involved in the xmpp implementation
You were part of Odeo/ Obvious Corp though, yes?
> my understanding is that the ops team made a half-hearted attempt to keep the xmpp service going ... their messaging on it was "xmpp doesn't scale" which was patently false
IIRR @rabble has said they were involved in that XMPP implementation and that it didn't scale (don't remember if any reasons were given). Am I misremembering @Rabble?
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Ah! I just realised I misread @blaine's post. Which meant that @rabble ...
> wasn't at Twitter and wasn't involved in the xmpp
My apologies.
On their podcast @rabble said;
"... there was ... this experiment to build the API that supported Jabber (XMPP), with the idea that you could run your own nodes [as part of Twitter] ... and the tech just didn't work."
https://revolution.social/episodes/jack-dorsey-on-selling-twitter-leaving-bluesky-wha/
This, along with other media I've come across, gave me the impression they did.
@rabble
> I talk about it a lot. But it was not my work
Understood. Might be worth contacting all the outlets who've headlined your interviews with things like "first employee at Twitter" to correct the record. Especially news media like AlJazeera;
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/rebel-geeks/2015/11/11/rebel-geeks-steal-from-the-capitalists
Whose pronouncements are treated as gospel truth by many Wikipedia editors. Leading to them being treated as gospel truth by the many people who uncritically believe whatever they read on WP : )
@blaine @ralphm @kellan
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Ever since Rabble came back on my radar post-Indymedia with their talk at the Open Source//Open Society conference;
https://web.archive.org/web/20161103121634/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6A6bnVWzLY
... they've been talking about playing a founding role in Titter, in TedX talks;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh0GFyzL8Wk
... podcast interviews;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1Ryl6JXmSw
... and dozens of other interviews;
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/rebel-geeks/2015/11/11/rebel-geeks-steal-from-the-capitalists
So I hope my confusion is at least understandable given the info available.
When technology becomes core infrastructure to our lives, the way its built and who owns it has a huge effect on how it gets used and how it fits into our li...
@evan
> it was a great talk!
I presume we're talking about the 2008 talk summarised here;
https://archive.nytimes.com/open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/oscon-2008-day-01-sessions/
... which links to the slides here;
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/beyond-rest-building-data-services-with-xmpp-pubsub/525883
I note that this talk was given right around the time Identi.ca was launched. So again, I'm wondering what technical reasons @evan had for developing OStatus for StatusNet, and would the same decisions be made if they knew then what they know now about the state of XMPP at the time?
@strypey @rabble @blaine @ralphm @kellan
I'd been working on XMPP for years. I was well aware of XMPP.
StatusNet, now GNU Social, ran on commodity web hosting: PHP, MySQL. Like WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, SugarCRM.
I wanted our federation to work on the Web, with RESTful APIs. XMPP was complicated, and required separate hosting.
@strypey @rabble @blaine @ralphm @kellan
You seem to be confused about the state of XMPP at Twitter.
There was an experiment federating text using PubSub between Jaiku and Twitter at FOO Camp in 2008. I wasn't there; I only heard about it later. It never went to production.
Twitter *did* have a chat interface to Twitter over XMPP, similar to the way it used SMS. You could receive updates over XMPP, you could post, and you could reply. Identi.ca had a very similar system.
@evan
> federated social networks on top of XMPP. I can think of Movim and Buddycloud for now. I don't know if any of them are still active
#BuddyCloud appears to be a dead parrot. But @movim is very much still active;
https://mov.im/community/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim/bye-bye-discord-hello-movim-FunzTy
There's also Libervia, whose devs even built AP support;
https://libervia.org/news?search=activitypub
No recent news posts, but that's not unusual for @Goffi, and there are other recent signs of life;
No, this was Social Graph FooCamp. This photo was taken on February 2. This is my presentation from XTech 2008 in May: https://ralphm.net/publications/xtech_2008/. By July we had a full federation of social networking sites over at Mediamatic Lab. My blog has some words: https://ralphm.net/blog/2008/07
The document discusses social software for robots, noting that social software involves people interacting with computers that then interact with other people. It introduces Kellan Elliott-McCrea who works for Flickr and Blaine Cook who works for Twitter. Social software is defined as being made up of people, with some direct interaction between people but usually indirect interaction through computers. - Download as a PDF or view online for free
@evan
> You seem to be confused about the state of XMPP at Twitter
Very much so. I appreciate the clarification from all of you.
> There was an experiment federating text using PubSub between Jaiku and Twitter at FOO Camp in 2008
> Twitter ... could receive updates over XMPP, you could post, and you could reply. Identi.ca had a very similar system
I vaguely remember getting very excited about being able to post to my identi.ca account from my XMPP app : )
@evan
> I think it's an interesting way to connect to social networks
Absolutely! I'd love to be able to;
* post on a Movim instance using my XMPP account, and have it auto-posted on my Mastodon account
* post to my Mastodon account using my Matrix account and a room dedicated to that purpose (all messages sent to room become fediverse posts)
* use my Mastodon account to join in (low-traffic) XMPP/Matrix group chats, by @mentioning a group actor (a la Lemmy)
@evan @strypey @rabble @blaine @ralphm @kellan interested in this slack extension, we built https://chatterbridge.app/ to bridge slack thread to WhatsApp group, very satisfying.
Also way back at built an icq/MSN transport for the gizmo project xmpp, and and sms notification relay for mxit (also xmpp).
I like this interworlds space for content as well as identity and presence.
Strypey
Evan Prodromou
Ralph Meijer
blaine
rabble
Goffi
:David Campey