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).
Strypey
Evan Prodromou
Ralph Meijer