On Fri, Nov 09, 2018 at 07:54:09AM +0000, Dave Cridland wrote: > > Finally, I dispute that XMPP has failed. The major providers have avoided > federation, despite some early attempts by Google, due to the damage it > would do to their business models based on lock-in. Federation has failed > across the board, as non-federation and a lot of luck yields much better > results - look at Github, which is based around a fully-decentralised > version control system, yet has built a single silo'd platform. I'd disagree on the first point. For players who are don't dominate the messaging space (e.g., !Facebook Messenger && !Apple Messages), Federation makes an awful lot of sense from a business perspective. The main problem was that there wasn't anyone to really federate with, and the primary, most enthusiastic users of federation were spammers trying to inject SPAM into the messaging systems. >From the perspective of a major provider, if the costs to a major provider outweigh the benefits of Federation, it's not really surprising that they would give up on it. E-mail is a good example where due to the early success of federation that the costs of SPAM are large, but not nearly large enough compared to the benefits of keeping a federated e-mail system. And perhaps another good example of this is mailing lists and DMARC. DMARC was an attempt to deal with a certain class of spam, and it had a horrendous effect on mailing lists. But there was enough federated mailing lists that were of high value that just telling people, "so sorry, you can't use mailing lists if you are using Yahoo mail; you should use are walled-garden web forums instead" wasn't going to fly. And so at great expense, the major providers agreed to work on ARC. But make no mistake, if there weren't sufficient high-value mailing lists that the major providers cared about losing as "collateral damage, oh well", it's pretty clear they wouldn't lift a finger. In fact, they tried that strategy at first. And while it had everything to do with business, I really don't think it was due to a malicious attempt to promote walled-garden web fora. - Ted
