Basically the sequence of events as claimed by the author is that:

1. XMPP, niche, small circles
2. Google launches Talk that was XMPP compatible
3. Millions joined Talk that could coop XMPP in theory
4. The coop worked only sparingly and was unidirectional, i.e. Talk to XMPP ✅ but XMPP to Talk ❌
5. Talk sucked up existing XMPP users as it was obviously a better option (bandwagon effect + unidirectional “compatibility” with XMPP)
6. Talk defederated

This demonstrated exactly the importance of reciprocity. If they play dirty, kick them out asap.

The X in Xmpp is for extensible. I find issue that a protocol that is supposed to be extensible was killed by being extended.

I’m gonna throw this out there:

If Meta is going to join the fediverse (or implement something with activitypub) there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop them.

It’s an open protocol. They can use it.

The only thing we can do is force them to follow the AGPL and/or fork the code if they get crazy with change requests.

Aye great read and very illuminating. We gotta protect the fediverse from corporate insidious destruction. This quote stood out to me:

And because there were far more Google talk users than “true XMPP” users, there was little room for “not caring about Google talk users”. Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.

In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. And started a long quest to create a messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I lost count after that).