I don’t really see an argument for “extinguish” on that article. It looks like just “embrace, expand, unembrace.” I can think of a few reasons how meta could degrade the quality of the metaverse, but the example of xmpp doesn’t quite smell right - activitupub is mature (even if I disagree with lot of the core specs), and the fediverse is much more about “eventual consistency” instead of real-time chats where both side have to be online at the same time.

I don’t really see an argument where Google drew people away from xmpp - the author themself said that nobody cared about the few xmpp users, so it’s not like Google was drawing long-time xmpp users away.

I’d love to hear other opinions on that article.