I’m reading that Google chose XMPP to their Google Talk product, then later decided to drop the support of Google Talk in favor of Google Hangouts that wasn’t using XMPP. This affected Google Talk users who were using 3rd party clients to use Google Talk as they were forced to start using bloated Google Hangouts. But how did all this affect people using XMPP protocol for other than Google Talk?
I’m also seeing potential for growth here for services using activitypub, mainly for the microblogging service Mastodon, as that’s apparently a similar platform to Threads, or the other new player BlueSky, which also is going to use activitypub protocol.
I’m not a microblogger, but I’m seeing and clicking links to interesting tweets on chatrooms and websites I visit, and if they are going to be appearing through threads or bluesky in the future, and I am able to view them without having to access a bloated threads or bluesky app/website I see it as a good thing. If they one day defederate from mastodon instances for example and I can’t view them from the outside anymore, it sounds like it’s what happened with Google, then it’s just back to where it was before they came along, unless the whole show managed to draw people from mastodon (mostly) to threads/bluesky which I doubt.
Thanks for explaining!
About the Threads telemetry. I wonder how does the telemetry they gather from the users of their app (“The Threads app can collect data related to your health, financial information, contact information, browsing history, location and purchases, among other things.”) affect users who interact from other instances (for example some mastodon instance) with thread users posts/replies.
I learned from #mastodon irc channel that in Mastodon for example, the instance owner/maintainer has the following extra information on users of their instance: “IP addresses, email, when they connect, what toots they browse and when”. So this information is not available to Meta, if you are interacting with threads user for example from a mastodon instance that is federating with the threads instance. I’m not seeing how they are getting extra information on you as they can collect all the metadata and your mastodon behaviour already by just creating another anonymous mastodon instance that gets federated with other mastodon instances and then collect the data that can be gathered across the instances. Or maybe you can even scrape the data from mastodon without running an instance even? I’m just trying to learn as I go and my information may be wrong. Please anyone correct/fix if there are mistakes here and inform me more thanks :)