Yes, yes I know this is an unpopular opinion but let me give you guys an example that relates to this. You guys know email? Well if you had made an email instance and then Google made Gmail, would you guys block it? No. Just because it’s made by a big company does not mean you should block it. What if you wanted to talk to people on threads? What if you wanted more content because there is more users on there? Please don’t defederate from threads people.
I’m sorry but these arguments don’t hang together for me. The point of email is that you need to be able to communicate with everyone. That’s why blacklisting of self hosted services is forcing everyone into the big guys. But the people using the fediverse are already happy only being able to communicate with other fediverse members, so being excluded harms absolutely nothing. The fediverse was created at a point where monolithic social networks already existed, by people who wanted to get away from those things. We excluded ourselves right at the start.
The same goes for XMPP. If it was already viable as a communication platform, it would have been fine. It died off because it was always going to die off. Better alternatives existed. Google briefly interfacing with XMPP didn’t kill it, it put it on life support.