How many people here have actually used XMPP?
How many people here have actually used XMPP?
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?
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Still using XMPP to this day and my current client is Gajim. Discord is still "better" overall than it. If XMPP could cleanly and neatly intergate voice chat (like Mumble) and support images and things smoothly then it would be great, but it does not. This is a big part of the reason "nobody" uses it beyond what happen with Google/Facebook.
Google was quite 'involved' in adding voice chat integration to XMPP. They seemed to be pushing their solution as an 'industry standard' (which would be great), but they have never even provided proper specification and were breaking things that were already agreed on. This actually slowed down the process and ended with a few unofficial incompatible extensions for voice chats.
Also the very foundation of XMPP protocol ('XML streams') was quite unfortunate choice making implementations difficult and inefficient. I know that, because I have implemented three different client implementations, each time fighting XML parsers to do what XMPP expects (which is not what XML was designed for). And each extension to the protocol made things more complicated and more verbose, which didn't made adding features like voice chat any easier.