@ummjackson @mmasnick Am I wrong? People used Facebook Messenger, people used Google Talk, but very few people outside of tech knew about ejabberd or Prosody. I say this as one of those people.
@Gargron @ummjackson @mmasnick I straight up had a colleague say he wasn't chatting with anyone that wasn't using Skype when XMPP got brought up in a group conversation a decade+ ago. He uses signal now, though.
The problem is a lot of the configuration was not user friendly, combined with more expensive hosting. I would say that something like Synapse is much more complex (potentially) but the configuration is much more straight forward. The maintenance, though, is not.
@Gargron @ummjackson @mmasnick I think you underestimate what an embrace-extend-extinguish scenario looks like. I don't think it follows that at the end we are left with the same network we have now.
@sharp I think what it comes down to is: Mastodon is not affected as a software. The communities can choose if they federate or not. You will not see ads. If their accounts become very popular you can choose if you would like to see them or not. @Gargron @ummjackson @mmasnick