Comment by mxmilkiib
for me, when both Facebook and Google rejected Jabber/XMPP federation :(
but yeah, in general, what happened to the dream of true Data Portability?
for me, when both Facebook and Google rejected Jabber/XMPP federation :(
but yeah, in general, what happened to the dream of true Data Portability?
> what happened to the dream of true Data Portability?
It got muddled into the privacy/security debate and then we all got distracted.
As other posters have said - capitalism.
But also privacy - it would be amazing to just be able to connect to any app or service you want, interact and react to stuff that's happening _over there_.
However, do you want any old app or service connecting to _your_ data, siphoning it and selling it on (and, at best, burying their use of your data in a huge terms of service document that no-one reads, at worst, lying about what they do with that information)? So you have to add access controls that are either intrusive and/or complex, or, more likely, just ignored. Then the provider gets sued for leaking data and we're in a situation where no-one dares open up.
> for me, when both Facebook and Google rejected Jabber/XMPP federation :(
I agree with you in principle, but this is only half-true. You're right that Facebook's XMPP was always just a gateway into their proprietary messaging system, but Google did support XMPP federation. What Google did not support was server-to-server TLS, and thus it was “us” who killed Google XMPP federation.
In late 2013 there was an XMPP community manifesto calling for mandatory TLS (even STARTTLS) for XMPP server-to-server communication by a drop-dead date in mid 2014: https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto/blob/master/manifesto.t...
"The schedule we agree to is:
- January 4, 2014: first test day requiring encryption
- February 22, 2014: second test day
- March 22, 2014: third test day
- April 19, 2014: fourth test day
- May 19, 2014: permanent upgrade to encrypted network, coinciding with Open Discussion Day <http://opendiscussionday.org/>"
Well-intentioned for sure, but the one XMPP provider with an actual critical mass of users (Google Talk) remained non-TLS-only, all Google Talk users dropped off the federated XMPP network after May 2014, and so XMPP effectively ceased to matter. I'm sure Google were very happy to let us do this.