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Today in class, I taught my students about decentralized networks, I told them about the XMPP/Google story (see link) and ended with a demonstration of the #fediverse with Mastodon and Peertube.
They are Computer Grad students. They never heard about Mastodon.
I hope some of them will be curious enough to join and that you will warmly welcome them!
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
@ploum Google did a similar thing to Usenet. They ostensibly created Google Groups to be the world's most complete Usenet archive. Then they bolted on their own proprietary discussion group system, so it wasn't clear which groups were part of Usenet and which were just part of Google. Search degraded, with functionality going missing and some articles apparently becoming entirely impossible to access. At some point they stopped adding newly-created Usenet groups to their archive...
@ploum ...meaning that those groups might as well not have existed to GG users. Spammers ran wild, flooding other people's Usenet servers with spam from throwaway Google accounts, until there were serious proposals for a coordinated block of any posts originating from Google. Finally, in Feb 2024, Google Groups announced they were depeering from Usenet: no new Usenet posts would be archived, and nobody would be able to post to Usenet from GG.
@ploum With *astonishing* chutzpah, one reason they gave for this was that Usenet had too much spam.
It's hard to interpret this sequence of events as anything but an "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy, or at the very least an appalling disregard for the very concept of being a competently-run, responsible part of the global Internet.
If Google turns up on the Fediverse, their past form shows that it would be very unwise to believe they're participating in good faith.
@raynerlucas : I didn’t know it was done for Usenet but, as you describe it, this is exactly the same story all over again.