this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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Anyone remember the short-lived Great War of the Messenger Apps? For a few months back around... '98? '99? MSN tried really hard to shoehorn its way into working with AIM. About every day there would be an update from MSM Messenger to allow it to work with AIM. Then AOL would fuck with their own protocol to ice out MSN users again.
I think these shenanigans also impacted the Trillium Messenger app too, which up until then had been flying under the radar of messenger interoperability.
I might be getting some of these details wrong.
And then Jabber came to fix it by introducing an open protocol, and Google started supporting it, and all was well. But when everybody was using Google Chat they severed the Jabber compatibility, locking everyone in to their platform. Now we're back wading around in enshittified shit and Jabber is dead.
People blame Google for the death of jabber because of one blog post from a disgruntled contributor but the truth is jabber was never popular and Google chat died as well.
Jabber was a mess, most of the clients were barely compatible with Each other and it was a wild west of feature support. Some clients were well featured with the ability to send richer messages, but typically only worked with a specific server and the same clients. Jabber did a crap job at making sure clients and servers interacted properly with each other and didn't push the standards quickly enough, forcing clients to do their own thing.
Which is all Google did, they went their own way because nobody used jabber and the interoperability was causing more harm than good. It didn't work, Google talk died and many years later clients like WhatsApp took over instead.
facebook, google talk, etc. all relied on the XMPP protocol. you could add your facebook messenger friends to google talk or any of the open source clients like pidgin. it was the holy era of instant messaging. federated. solution. no bullshit lockdown to a specific system like in the days of ICQ, Skype, etc.
then both facebook and google talk locked down their XMPP server and i lost 80% of my friendlist on XMPP. and that was that. i had to get facebook. i had to get google mail. especially relevant when microsoft bought skype and it turned to shit.
guess what. today we're split on even more clients than we used to be. need signal, whatsapp, facebook messenger, telegram, discord, band, matrix, threema, session, irc, slack, and steam chat installed on my fucking device. and all because meta and google pulled the rug to isolate their systems and force user conversion.
no, thanks. open source federation is the only solution to unshitification and that's never going to happen as long as people do shit like leaving x for bluesky instead of mastodon etc. leaving facebook for band instead of literally any other fediverse platform (because facebook has devolved to ads and facebook groups - everything else is irrelevant or dead on there). etc etc.