The Stack Overflow rugpull is another data point in my head which discourages me from contributing any content to a hoard owned by a corporation.
I’m hoping that ActivityPub will one day enable SO-style knowledge bases in which the individual nuggets of content are owned by independent servers and cannot be purchased by anyone.
It's not just Google, of course. When you trust your data to ANY #cloud service, you can get rugpulled at any moment without warning. Remember, they have the de-facto control over the data, and you don't.
The rest of history. The #XMPP protocol at the time has some glaring inadequacies in some areas, so it had to be extended to cover those use cases. Instead of working with the community at large to converge towards common extensions for logging, device switching, audio/video and conference calls, #Facebook and #Google went with the classic #rugPull, first by defederating their servers (lock users in) and then by switching out of the protocol altogether.
Prediction, part 2: a couple of years in, with over 90% of the #Fediverse on #Facebook servers, the company goes for the #rugPull, either on bogus technical claims on the protocol, or on the basis that “everybody is here anyway”. They defederate from everything. The Fediverse idea loses momentum, participation falls back to diaspora* levels. Tankies explain to us that this was due to #ActivityPub not being good enough and not due to Facebook killing it because it was a real threat.