I was quite involved in XMPP, not from the very start, but quite early. At first its biggest strength were ‘transports’ – gateways to other, proprietary, instant messengers. Having a Jabber (that what it was called there) account allowed one to talk to ICQ and AIM users. This is what pulled first users and allowed the network to grow. The protocol being open and network being federated appealed to various nerds, for whom it became the IM network of choice. Especially when they could use it to talk to friends and family on other networks.

I wrote a Jabber transport for the most popular instant messaging platform in my country. It become a ‘must have’ component of any Jabber/XMPP server here. And some major local commercial internet services would start their own XMPP services – finally they had some means to compete with the monopolist. For me it was my ‘5 minutes of pride’ – my little piece of open source software would be used by thousands of users, though most unaware of that. I have also wrote a Python library and a text client for XMPP.

Then Google joined and Facebook started considering it. It seemed like XMPP will become ‘the SMTP of instant messaging’ – the real standard which will end closed proprietary communicators. But things didn’t go well. Google would often ignore the agreed protocol, change it a bit, while still declaring full support. XMPP development would slow down, as everybody wanted the protocol to be agreed with Google, but Google just made some small improvements on their side without sharing details or participating in building XMPP specifications.

Federation with Google would become more and more unreliable. Sometimes it would work, sometimes not. Google Talk, GMail Chat, Hangouts seemed to be the same thing and not the same thing at the same time it was a mess. Then Google pulled the plug. Then every smaller commercial providers did the same – there was no point in keeping the service when more than half of the contacts disappeared.

I felt betrayed by Google (it really felt like a ‘non-evil’ corporation back then). But that was not what killed XMPP for me.

I would have less and less people to talk to via XMPP, not just because of Google. Other networks my Jabber server was linked to become more and more irrelevant (anybody using ICQ, AIM or GG now?). Nerds that used XMPP left it because of loosing contacts in other networks, or just moved on to Discord (yeah… nobody seems to notice it is proprietary too). I would still use XMPP for family communication, but there was the spam…

Oh… the spam. I would get over hundred of messages (or contact requests), mostly in Russian, offering me bitcoins or cracked software. They would come from many different accounts and domains. Often from ‘legitimate’ XMPP servers. And there were no means to reliably block it. The XMPP protocol had no proper means to handle illegitimate traffic. XMPP servers and clients had little spam-fighting measures. The spam made XMPP unusable for me, so I shut down my server too. I guess that could also be a major reasons for some commercial services to de-federate. I think USENET was killed by spam and no effective moderation too back in the day.

Then my wife convinced me to bring it back. XMPP is again and still my primary communication platform for family chat. A private server with four accounts. Practically blocked from outside. We use it because it proven to be the most reliable thing and independent from the big corporations. Even Signal was inferior to that (no proper desktop/web clients, sometimes messages would be delayed even by hours, then it even stopped being convenient when they dropped SMS support).

XMPP was better known as Jabber back in the day, and most of us used Pidgin to connect to it. I used it for about 10 years or so.

I used it a lot, not through Google’s gchat stuff, I ran my own XMPP server. It worked really well, I used the OTR encryption plugin in pidgeon. My work also used to use xmpp for internal chat within the company, however they switched to matrix like 5-6 years ago. Something I’ve since done personally too.

I like XMPP a lot, it worked well, including it being federated.

Google tried to add support for it in their product

Is like saying that google tried to add support for HTTP to their products. Google Talk was initially a XMPP chat server hosted at talk.google.com, source here.

Anyone that used Google Talk (me included) used XMPP, if they knew it or not.

Besides this, it’s only a story of how an eager corporation adopting a protocol and selling how they support that protocol, only to abandon it because corporate interests got in the way (as they always do). It doesn’t have to be malicious to be effective in fragmenting a community, because the immense power those corporations wield to steer users in a direction they want once they abandon the product exists.

That being said, if Google Talk wasn’t popular why did they try to axe the product based on XMPP and replace it with something proprietary (aka Hangouts)? If chat wasn’t popular among their users, this wouldn’t of been needed. This could of been for internal reasons, it could of been to fragment the user base knowing they had the most users and would force convergence, we really can’t be sure. The only thing we can be sure of is we shouldn’t trust corporations to have the best interest of their users, they only have the best interest of their shareholders in the end.

I used Jabber with the Pidgin client, my impression was also it was mostly developers and open source enthusiasts. Most people I knew who were not of those circles used commercial things like ICQ, MSN Messenger, AIM, etc. Frequently Jabber/XMPP enthusiasts had to use clients that supported it as well as some form of gateway to the other clients. Trillian was a popular multi-protocol client.

I used it during Google’s embrace via Talk. I work as a web dev and it was awesome to have a chat protocol on my desktops and phones which just worked on any platform, just download the XMPP app and sign in. SMS bridging also allowed me to keep my phone in my pocket for simple messages. I saw outside the walled garden concept, and it was wonderful. It felt like the future, but Google killed it. I have never forgiven them.

I’ve got my own XMPP server running on a raspberry pi so that I can have a safe chat app with my kids. I didn’t want to expose them to the wider world at their age, but it’s great to have a chat / video calling app that’s all routed through my private kit. So now when they’re ignoring my messages I know that they 100% safe online 🤣

I did like 15 years ago. Now everyone wants to use discord. It wasn’t up to me. Social factors are a bitch

I LOVE XMPP!

I’m still upset that it didn’t take off like email did. It is/was the best federated instant messaging platform ever.

However with things like discord and to a lesser extent matrix, I don’t see it ever making a comeback and being widely used. I think google dropping it and going full hangouts was the final nail in its coffin 😞

I used it. Had a few accounts on different servers, used XMPP between Facebook and Gmail, and ended with my own server but all of that is gone.

Back in the day, like many people then, I had a couple of different accounts across multiple messaging platforms. 2 domestic ones, couple of international ones. It was a fun mess but people were tired of running multiple apps and so loads of multi-protocol apps were developed.

Usually messaging protocols were simply reverse engineered and some apps also used plug-ins so that niche protocols could be added by community. Some also did gateways that translated proprietary protocols to XMPP.

By the end of that era many platforms opened themselves up with XMPP. It was nice because most of those multi-protocol apps didn’t have to support as many different platforms explicitly.

But that’s about it. I had a Google Talk account too and found it cute that I can use it to add my friends on other platforms. I was a nerdbut barely knew any other people that were utilizing it. Realistically it didn’t make any difference because you still had to use multi-protocol app for the ones that didn’t open.

Soon platforms that were never on or barely on XMPP started to take over. Messenger was the biggest in my country and it was always a PITA on third party apps.

Google Talk doing a rug pull on XMPP didn’t to anything meaningful to XMPP itself. It was never that big and simply remains a niche to this day.

I too get an impression that a single article on XMPP Gtalk drama made round on Fediverse that many made their opinion solely on it.

The first time I ever heard my wife’s voice was on XMPP (GTalk, I know, but I was using Jabber prior to). So yes, I absolutely used XMPP and watched it get obliterated.

I still use it almost daily. Mostly for work. Sometimes I need to exchanhe sensitive information with my colleague, so I set up an xmpp server for us. It’s not federated with the rest of the network, and we use omemo for E2E encryption. Not every client supports it, and even those that do, suck in terms of UX. But, we consider it to be reasonably secure for our purposes.

As for my personal account, I’m logged in, but can’t remember the last time I used it.

I had a five digit ICQ account back in the day. Also used pidgin and MSN Messenger. A lot of us nerds used XMPP clients. Hell, ICQ had tens of millions of users at its peak.

I used pidgin back in the late 00s. Had to sign up with Jabber/XMPP to round out all the account options! Then it became my main way of talking with people who used gchat for years. Will admit it was never as popular as IAM/MSN was before or Skype was after