Fuck it, my mentions are going to be garbage anyway. For everyone decrying what Gmail did to email, let me remind you that no major free webmail service supported IMAP before Gmail did in 2007. The reason we all get to enjoy push email on our phones and don't have to pay BlackBerry to get it is b/c of IMAP IDLE, which Google forced everyone else to adopt. EEE often leads to better software for everyone and also usually backfires on the company trying to do the EEE.
Like literally, maybe email would be better for everyone if some of the features Google had to graft-on to in weird ways had actually been adopted by standards bodies. But whatever.
@film_girl It too me a minute to realize EEE meant embrace, extend, extinguish, and I pictured Microsoft trying to do an EEE as Microsoft standing on a stool afraid of a mouse going "eee!"
@film_girl I think the problem is that you’re arguing from the point of view that things happened and we can learn from them, and other people are concerned with “but what if it had happened differently” and “I have a rich fantasy life.” How do we find common ground with them?? 🙃
@film_girl Them: Hey look how Gmail became so big that you can’t really run your own small email server anymore.
Me: Yeah, we shouldn’t let that happen with ActivityPub too. We should make sure the big and small players continue to work together.
Then: We’re going to stop working with IG preemptively.
Me: So, you think 10M users will win out over 2B?
Them: crickets
@film_girl also as somebody that was a senior engineer at EarthLink at the time running email and web mail systems, what gmail did was revolutionary in terms of size of inbox 1GB! (I think we were at 10MB at the time, certainly not more than 100MB), integrated search, and general usability. It put us and everyone else to shame.
@davidgarywood@film_girl Threre’s a rich ecosystem ecosystem of RSS services with API support (sometimes literally the Google RSS API). Before Google I can’t remember having any options like that.
@davidgarywood@film_girl I don’t think RSS fell because of that. It was always a niche geek thing and never managed to break out of that. Eventually websites noticed that almost nobody used it and didn’t bother anymore.
RSS lost on it’s own merits as far as mainstream usage is concerned.
There’s probably some important lessons for ActivityPub in here (if we want it to become more than a niche geek thing).
@torb@davidgarywood I do think Google Reader dying hurt it, but you’re right that they started doing things like removing the RSS button from web browsers before that happened.
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