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?
@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.
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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
Strypey
Evan Prodromou
Ralph Meijer
blaine
rabble