FastMail: Shutting down our XMPP chat service
While the FastMail shutting down XMPP is about low usage, the real cause is that Federated Chat failed to work.<p>Federation is something that is rarely promoted in modern ecosystems. Before Twitter/Facebook, we had RSS/Atom, but these have all failed as companies pour massives investments into "winner take all" approaches to their products.   In the short term, it is easy to see why: Why compromise on iteration of features and UX by allowing a competitor to interoperate?  Why wait for a new field to be standardized in Atom?<p>We see it all the time in the consumer space, federation has died, but even look in the infrastructure space, something like Docker:  Yes, Docker Hub, is "kinda" open, I mean, anyone can create an account, but it's not a federated scheme where everyone can host their own Images easily.  But we use it anyways, because its a better user experience, and its subsidized by a company not directly making revenue on it yet, but wanting to control the user experience.<p>So we drop support for any federated user experience pretty quickly.  And now we are all on Slack, on Facebook, on Twitter....  And it is mostly great.  Or we wouldn't still be there.<p>But I still wish for a federated future, but I doubt it will happen.