An Objection to ‘The ecosystem is moving’

In May 2016 Moxie Marlinspike published an article on his company’s blog entitled ‘Reflections: The ecosystem is moving’ where he claims that federated systems are ‘stuck in time’. Since then his blog post has been passed around primarily to support the argument that federated, XMPP based, instant messaging is not working and won’t ever provide a decent user experience. On the other hand his blog post is rarely used as an argument on how bad the World Wide Web is and on how we should all give up on using the Web, even though HTTP is one of the protocols Moxie claims to be stuck in time. In fact Moxie picks his examples very carefully and only talks about HTTP as being stuck in time. He ignores the fact, that on top of HTTP there is another standard called HTML, which is everything but stuck in time. HTML and related technologies like CSS and JavaScript have massively evolved in the last 20 years. Interestingly the Web is something where federation has improved. It’s not too long ago that the Microsoft Internet Explorer had a market share of well over 90%. The web was filled with websites, relying on non-standard extensions like Java Applets and Flash. Now those extensions are gone. The market is more or less equally divided between at least three major vendors. The decision on what webbrowser one uses is purely made on factors like speed, available plugins and is no longer dependent on what websites they are able to display.