Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Google to drop XMPP entirely

[Sergio Durigan Junior]

On Tuesday, May 28 2013, David Loyall wrote:

> Google knows what percentage of Talk traffic came from external XMPP and
> what percentage came from gmail.  Surely they also know that their recent
> action will cause at least a small surge in global XMPP usage and a
> corresponding (small) drop in G Talk usage.

Or maybe they are counting that, inside the small group of people who
use XMPP/Jabber, there will be a large percentage who will "migrate" to
the Hangouts thingy.  But my point is: they don't care about that.

> I compare this Google XMPP situation with the situation that caused the
> founder of identi.ca to say at LibrePlanet 2013 that he wishes more people
> were using federated StatusNet services, rather than all piling on the
> reference implementation.

Unfortunately I couldn't attend LibrePlanet 2013.

I know federated services are good not only for the web but also for the
people (taking privacy into account, among other things), but IMO the
reason people use the "reference implementation" is because (a) they
were taught that their computers are clients and there must be servers
(which are *not* their computers!), and (b) setting up a federated
service frequently is not as trivial as one might wish.  (yes, pump.io,
I'm looking at you too).

IOW, what Evan says is fine, but it is unfortunately very far from the
reality.  Take StatusNet and his recent new project called pump.io, for
example.  What he actually did was to set up several "Try it!" servers
which will ultimately be used by whoever wants to use the service.  He
is providing the federation along with the service, maybe just because
he wants to be able to say later that pump.io is different from
StatusNet...

Sorry about drifting away from the subject, but I couldn't help myself.
This is an important topic and I think it should be discussed more.

> Google could regain some trust from the community by releasing their XMPP
> stuff as free software.  (If they're not using it, why not, right?)  It
> wouldn't surprise me if that goal is already on their to-do list, as a
> low-priority.  (If they are anything like other organizations, they won't
> ever do any low priority task unless it gets promoted to medium priority,
> for example, due to user pressure.)

Hm, I didn't know there are Google's XMPP stuff not released.  Do you
happen to have an example?

Cheers,

-- 
Sergio