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?

  • @blambi
    2•1 year ago

    Hosted a ejabberd for years. So yeah it and irc where the primary was to chat with friends.

    But transports where so and so fun to host. So for a time I connected with bitlbee to jabber and some other protocols.

    But grew tired of both keeping a irc bouncer, bitlbee and the jabber stuff running. And a disk crash while I was a cash strapped student was the final drop.

    So went irc/email only for a while.

    But now years later I’m running a matrix server with several bridges. And that’s far easier especially since it’s not lxc based hosting I setup but docker.