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?
I run a small server for my family on a cheap VPS. We’ve been using it for about 5 years now and it’s chugging along. It’s simpler and lighter than Matrix (at least from the server’s point of view) but the user facing side could use some polish. It’s perfectly fine for one to one chat. I wish it was more popular for group chatting.
Here’s a list of good servers if you want to try it out. You will also need a client. Check one with E2E suppo ort (called OMEMO in XMPP).