A real transition will happen in bursts. I’d love to see stats by interest categories, because I suspect what happens is enough prominent people in some community move at to bring the rest with them, but until that happens there’s no budge.

What do you use now?

I mean google’s whims as in they’re making decisions on their own and everyone else just has to go with it. I’d rather these problems were solved collectively.

I think it’s a little silly to define extinguish as literally destroyed. I think of it as a permanent wound. With XMPP, the belief by people that both networks would inter-operate and the subsequent change left a permanent wound on XMPP adoption. I’m not sure how things would’ve gone otherwise, and I’m equally skeptical of the people holding onto that as the sole reason for XMPP’s failures, but it certainly was an inflection point for them.

To the email point, it’s actually much more difficult to set up your own email than it used to be, exactly because google servers will not accept email from unknown providers that don’t meet their own standards. It didn’t extinguish email, true, but it did help centralize it around a handful of providers that can keep up to date with google’s whims to get reliable deliverability.

They’ll make a bespoke federated service, collect all the data of their users (and all the people on other networks their users interact with), make it all shiny and fancy and add a ton of improvements most networks don’t have yet. And if they can reach a critical mass of users, they can track a huge cross section of federated activity, and force networks to play by their rules or lose access to their entire userbase. It’s the same thing google did to email.

You’re talking about real privacy, the critiques above are all about exposure reduction (incorrectly framed as privacy). Good retention policies are still important for situations like trying to delete something that you regret posting.

An example I could think of from the other site is the very common occurrence of posting some relationship questions and then deleting them later so that the person they’re about can’t stumble onto them. In that case you want finding the thing you deleted to be nontrivial enough that it can’t accidentally be found. Someone with both the skills and knowledge about what they’re looking for may still find it, because it was once public, but that’s a different threat.