This is a core problem of distributed systems though. Signal even cites this as their reason to not federate with anyone.

Once you get decentralization going you need everyone to stay kind of up to date or stuff will just not work.

It is not. Discord’s protocol has been tailormade to suit Discord and the developers will not give a single thought about keeping it stable because only the Discord server&client are meant to use it.

An XMPP developer would likely have been delusional about the protocol he himself developed. But at the time I can assure you XMPP was completely irrelevant. AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo! and maybe IRC were the tools of the day back then.

Because of actual competition (which XMPP had absolutely no part in) multi protocol messengers had their golden age then.

No.

• I want to send messages to people who are not currently online (having a server stay online for you is a desparate hack and not a solution)
• I want to send media other than text
• I want my messages to be e2ee
• I want presence - e.g. know if someone is available, busy, away
• I want voice/video calls

and many more…

None of these were solved by IRC but by the others you mentioned.

Also Matrix can bridge to XMPP, of course you wouldn’t because nobody uses XMPP.

No. There was nothing to extend and extinguish with XMPP. It was a dead on arrival protocol that nobody ever used seriously. I’ve been to the internet at that time and what people actually used was: AIM, ICQ, MSN and possibly even Yahoo!. (IRC for the nerds and Counter-Strike)

It was exactly the other way around. Nobody ever used XMPP, then Google opened federation on their first chat and suddenly someone was actually reachable via XMPP which was a cool thing for some nerds that were into XML then, but when Google noticed that it only imports problems with nothing to gain from the XMPP network they just shut it off.

At the time nobody cared because the people accidentally using XMPP didn’t give a shit about it because they used Google not XMPP in the first place.

That’s not even true, I run my own mailserver for private and a business and it works like expected.

Yet people claim it writes all their programming code…

The analogy is that you buy a car (because if it breaks, the car and your entertainment stuff, you will buy a new one to replace it, you will also carry all maintenance) but suddenly you can’t drive backwards anymore because the manufacturer decided retroactively that you should pay extra for that (possibly in a subscription).

I would say it is your good right then to make your car drive backwards regardless of what it may take.

The load distributes across more shoulders automatically.

If you only host a server for yourself and 10 friends it costs next to nothing, if you have a big operation it can get just as expensive, it depends on what you are willing to do.

With centralized systems there is no choice but for the one centralized host to host everything.

That is exactly what it doesn’t. There is no “understanding” and that is exactly the problem. It generates some output that is similar to what it has already seen from the dataset it’s been fed with that might correlate to your input.

Funny you would think that using the fediverse. Discord has exactly the same problems Reddit and Twitter had where at any moment someone for whatever reason could alter the deal significantly.

Your point is that copyright law is easier to enforce than trademark law? I doubt it. I personally don’t care that the lawyers you will definitely need for this and for long do exactly.

If you take over a project of this scale you need to make this your job and thus get paid. There’s a good reason Louis hasn’t just pushed this out as his hobby project but hired developers.

If you can’t it won’t happen. My point is more: If it was possible to take over, would it really happen? Extremely unlikely.

You really don’t know the history of Microsoft, do you?

The interface gets a little better and that’s it basically? (Alternatively: They try to spin a social medium around it and fail somewhat and succeed somewhat?)

Do you not see the contradiction in this statement? Where do you find the line of what is stealing and “working as intented”?

If you redistribute someone else’s open source code as open source but change nothing why would I get it from you and not the original developer? There is no incentive and no reward to “steal”.

If you make enough changes to create additional value I might and then it is “working as intended”

Exactly and the model of make changes and remove trademark has worked very well for them. Why not introduce arbitrary other limitations when they are clearly not neccessary?

The developer can yank the software from under you, he can change the monetisation model, or he can drop support for the software. With Free or Open Source software you could just take over the responsibility of maintainership or outsource it some other developer you can trust instead.

Sure, good point but in the real world this will never happen.

If Mozilla suddenly decides to implode you won’t just casually take over Firefox or hire another maintainer to develop it for you.

In theory this sounds nice but for any software that is of any real complexity (and thus use) it is pretty much irrelevant.

Same thing with centralised services only that you have no options to choose from