Oh, I read it when it came out back in June. Many times, as it kept being shared as an explanation of the first Threads backlash.

It’s full of incorrect assessments and false equivalences.

Threads doesn’t really have the volume (yet) to subsume ActivityPub. The process it describes for standards drifting towards the corporate actor doesn’t apply to ActivityPub, which is engineered from the ground up to support multiple apps with differnent functionality (hence me writing this in Kbin and others reading it in Lemmy and being able to link it and follow it from Mastodon), the article only acknowledges that XMPP survived and kept on going at the very end as a throwaway and doesn’t justify how it “never recovered” and, like I said, it doesn’t acknowledge the real reasons Talk and every Google successor to Talk struggled and collapsed.

So yes, I read it. Past the headline and everything. I just didn’t take it at face value. This piece keeps getting shared because XMPP wasn’t ever that big to begin with, so this sounds erudite and informed while the similar arguments being made at the time about SMTP and RSS were more obviously identifiable as being wrong for the same reasons.

I mean I think it will be if they really to end up federating. Why sign up for an ad-ridden data-hoarding service when you can use services that don’t have that nonsense but still allows you to do all the things you want to do on social media?

They do? I mean, a few times I did have to point out that Meta has multiple products breaking 2 billion active users, so the “fediverse” is a drop in the ocean, but not many people seem to stick with that argument after a quick bout of googling.

Hah. Alright, it’s not deader than it would have been had Google not stepped in and then stepped out. We’re grading “dead” late 2000s instant messaging apps on a bit of a curve here.