TIL. I've been making the same mistake and had to look it up as a result of this comment.
From personal experience, Hydrox tasted terrible compared to Oreos. My parents switched to Hydrox when I was little because Oreos were being made with lard at the time, and they were barely worth eating. The chocolate cookie part was too hard and chalky.
The most sticky subreddits have been ones that are niche and not tech-related. The most likely users to make their way over to Lemmy have been technically inclined ones who were using third-party apps.
If you use protobuf/gRPC anywhere in your application, text format protobuf. Writes like JSON, but with a clear schema, a parser that already exists in most languages, and has comments.
Pony tail or folded bun, but I also have an undercut so I don't have to worry about gathering the hair from the sides/back of my head.
I think it's more that AIM was the only other decent sized player in chat that actually played along with federation. With nobody else playing ball and everyone building their own walled gardens, it didn't make sense for Google to continue to invest.
As someone who has written XMPP code, the protocol is also not pleasant to work with as it's all XML. IIRC, features like presence and read receipts weren't initially part of the protocol. That said, I still think extended an existing popular protocol is better than making a new one.