the short version was that it was an up-and-coming federated protocol, with people working on clients and stuff, and trying to attract users. then everyone got really excited when Google decided to start using XMPP in their Google Talk product, because it would mean instant adoption by a ton of people! except now everyone just used Google Talk as their client, because it was ahead of the existing XMPP clients in terms of usability/UX, and UX work on other clients kinda died. but over time, Google being Google, they got distracted and started neglecting Google Talk, failing to enable TLS support while the rest of the XMPP ecosystem started making it mandatory, essentially cutting off all Google Talk users from the rest of the XMPP network. so now you had a Google Talk network that everyone was using with a decent-ish client, and an XMPP network that a bunch of people were using with clients that sucked, and they couldn’t talk, and all the momentum in developing a strong stand-alone network was lost due to people letting Google control the whole thing
Over the years, open-source has kinda turned from “let’s build a public commons” into “let’s do free work for big corporations” and it’s… not a good change, to say the least
@meloo google. did not kill xmpp… they use it intensively till now…
i would say, xmpp is the most used protocoll over all chat protocolls…
google use xmpp for communication from playstore to every fucking google-play-app on every android-phone with google.
google uses xmpp for cloud-printing
whatsapp is still xmpp, but with proprietary xeps and without federation.
facebook-chat is maybe still xmpp - also with proprietary xeps and without federation.
google hangout is still xmpp with proprietary xep and without federation
maybe something turned in the last years… but i’m sure… all this services are still xmpp…
so xmpp is NOT dead… it’s alive and most frequently used on earth…
deleted by creator
@poVoq That’s right…
XMPP slept, while smartphones grow up… there was a lack of good clients. and they grow this days… but good clients are not developed in 1 year, when the whole system slept for 12 years…
conversations is ok.
gajim gets a big relaunch
some web-clients are forcefully developed (jsxc, movim,…)
it takes time… it’s late… and matrix is a big concurrent…
XMPP with all the XEPs can be intimidating, but at least I can easily construct a server by following spec. Matrix OTOH is very confusing and I get stuck on MegaOLM and the consistency algorithm (which changes every 5 months anyway).