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Top-level
Tim Chambers
The 3rd argument for defederation: ➡️ To defend against being Embraced, Extended, and Extinguished. This is a real risk, and others point to Google and Facebook and XMPP, or Google and RSS Google reader. Where a big entity takes over, then rug pulls or extends an open standard slowly into an non-standard, non-interoperable functionally siloed service. This is a real risk. But you don't - and can't - defend against this by defederation. I'll explain why next. #EEEE 🧵 3 of N 4 comments
Eric McCorkle
Heading into the 2010s, Google started aggregating everything together into "Google services", an all-in-one account encompassing email, chat, other things, and what was supposed to be their social media site, G+ Initially, this was interoperable through various protocols, notably XMPP and RSS. What happened is they acquired enough of a user base, and then started breaking these protocols one by one. XMPP stopped working some time in 2013, I believe.
Eric McCorkle
I know less about RSS, but I know they decommissioned Google Reader, and I believe they took it off their blogs. They have also been slowly making life harder for private email servers, though they can't get away with breaking email entirely. Yes RSS and XMPP still exist, but Google effectively took their user-base off of them, and they aren't common anymore.
andre
@tchambers love the thread, really well put. O would argue that Google didn't ruin RSS though. Then leaving left a huge void that no one was able to fill. Their product was just that good. They didn't do anything to disrupt RSS, the others just didn't do enough to make RSS happen. As far as I remember, this was a long time ago. And I loved Google reader, and I did try looking for alternatives. |
Gregory's Server
@tchambers Can someone explain like I'm 5 what Google did to RSS? I've been using RSS feeds continuously for probably 20 years now. They still work great with most of the internet.
But there are so many people who vocally refuse to try any RSS tool other than Google Reader, or maybe think that Google Reader was the only RSS reader ever developed?
If you'd like to try another feed reader, here are two online that are nice:
https://newsblur.com/, https://readwise.io/read
@tchambers Can someone explain like I'm 5 what Google did to RSS? I've been using RSS feeds continuously for probably 20 years now. They still work great with most of the internet.
But there are so many people who vocally refuse to try any RSS tool other than Google Reader, or maybe think that Google Reader was the only RSS reader ever developed?