So, I completely switched to FOSS federated social networks toward the middle of 2020. I love the Fediverse, but nobody I know IRL seems to care at all about it in any capacity, so I’m basically just screaming into a void full of other FOSSheads. How do I reconcile this? How do we get our IRL peeps on the Fediverse?
I’ve been wishing for a long time that “popular amongst the masses” sites had to be federated as that way anyone would be able to stay where they are and still follow you. But seeing FB, Google, and others shut down their XMPP that’s not going to happen unless legilstated I guess.
Maybe this is only my problem but my IRL are not FOSSheads or even really passionate about tech like I am, so I realised I could not rely on them following me in the Fediverse, and I’ve built up new followers and online frioends wuith those who share interests similar to mine. Certainly Mastodon has been my most successful with my follower count soon over takling my Twitter follower count, and I get way more engagement on Mastodon. Obviously follower count groiwes also with me engaging with others.
I have seen a few of my IRL coming across this last month but it seems that was due to privacy issues more than FOSS and tech. So it may be worth promoting to IRL the no ads, privacy, etc advantages.
Where a few more IRL went to is MeWe, which is not federated at all, although is privacy respecting. Because it has a centralised interest based group directory it is easy to be found, and I have a bit over 40,000 followers in one of my groups there. It’s not the ideal but it has pulled quite a few people away from Facebook itself.
Going on XMPP it is quite an interesting way to look at it. After all I like to contrast it to email. There must be a massive part of worldwide e-mail accounts on Gmail alone (and then when taking into account Hotmail, yahoo etc) and yet can I ever consider them defedering email?
The crux is to never let an overwhelming majority of users on one instance, nor have this majority communicate within that same instance. I remember when I used to use GTalk I never communicated with anyone that didn’t have a GTalk account. Whereas email? Just looking at my university classes emails I can see that we have adresses in several of the big companies but not a clear over 50% in any. On top of that the University has their own email server. That’s probably a good reason why PeerTube’s vision is to get as many companies and organisations host their own instance for their videos. It’s better in the long term.
XMPP was just never really that federated in practice.
XMPP does not really federate in the traditional sense of public posts to say Mastodon, as far as it’s chat standard goes. You connect with someone and then chat, and it pushes/pulls more like e-mail? It’s pub standard is again something others must subscribe to, to ever see the posts. And chatrooms work differently again. So maybe the thing is XMPP is not a single service, but many different standards depending on what type of service is being used. Different XMPP client apps all decide which standards they are complying with.
I can e-mail anyone if I know their e-mail address, but XMPP requires the other party to accept an invite to connect first. The similarity does come in how the addresses are formatted though. And just like e-mail, there is no central directory to find someone’s e-mail address, that person has to let you know what it is. Of course more people publish/share their e-mail addrses on business cards than an XMPP address (yes many don’t have). Another similarity they both have, is they are open standards, maybe though with XMPP evolving more than e-mail does as a stanadrd.