With all the current discussion about the threat that Instagram Threads has on the Fediverse and that article about how Google Embrace Extend Extinguished XMPP, I was left very confused, since that was the first time I’ve heard that Gchat supported XMPP or what XMPP actually is, and I’ve had my personal Gmail since beta (no, don’t ask for it), and before then, everybody was using AOL/MSN Messenger to talk with each other online. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a single person who started using Gchat as an XMPP client.
Instead of a plot where Google took over XMPP userbase via EEE, it just seem to me more like XMPP was a niche protocol that very few hardcore enthusiasts used, and then Google tried to add support for it in their product, but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the development effort to support a feature that very few of their users actually used and abandoned it in typical Google fashion.
So, to prove my point, how many people have used XMPP here, and how many people here haven’t?
XMPP was sitting there in the background like any well behaved protocol. Anyone who used the original iChat or Google Talk, for example, used XMPP. And of course anyone who used Jabber.
For that matter, iChat communicated with AIM via XMPP IIRC. It’s not something you actively attempted to use, just like people don’t tend to talk about using HTTP or SMTP.
But when Google moved to a proprietary standard, that was the major client for XMPP. It broke my integration allowing me to communicate with all the other messaging systems, and the result was really that I stopped using all of them and switched to e2ee systems only, and Skype when I needed to.
But I still use Pidgin to connect to a private XMPP server from time to time; I just don’t leave it running 24/7 anymore. I’ve got iMessages and Signal and Matrix for that.